In our society today there is still this idea that woman can’t do what men do, especially in sports. In our documentary we wanted to break those standards and stereotypes put into place. Our documentary is about a high school’s hockey team with only two girls on the team, mainly focusing on the girls and how they feel being the only girls on the team. The idea behind this documentary is to inspire girls and motivate them to break those stereotypes to keep society changing.
While planning for our documentary we had to review some other productions that would help us develop our overall idea of ours. Some of those productions include “Bend it like Beckham”, “she’s the man” and “Battle of the sexes”. Every production we reviewed broke the stereotype that we are trying to address in our documentary piece. The movie “She’s the man” is all about how a girl had to dress like a man to play soccer because they didn’t believe that she could be so good being a girl. In our documentary we strive to make it known that a girl doesn’t need to hide her talents for a certain sport just because it is a sport mostly ran by men. The documentary conventions we decided to do was filming most of it handheld to keep the realism in our piece which really worked for us, the shots taken created a more realistic look and it kept the audience engaged, giving them the realistic look of how exactly the hockey team interact with the only girls on the team. From what we filmed you can see how the boys on the team accept the girls and treat them equally. Apart from that documentary convention we also used a voice over narration to progress the story, however, where we placed the voice over was not in the right place. What I mean by that is that it would have been better if the voice over narration would have been in the beginning instead of in the middle, almost in the end. Lastly, we used a montage convention to end the documentary, the montage was of Sasha, which is the main character of our piece, getting dressed for her game and that is the way the documentary ends. Nonetheless, once again we could have used this montage to start the documentary because it would have been a really nice way to start it off.
Moreover, the target audience for our production is teenagers between the ages of 13-19, especially girls. We picked this to be our target audience because first, our documentary talks about the stereotypes of girls in sports which is why it is especially for girls so they could motivate themselves by watching our production to go out there and play those sports that people say are only for boys. The documentary is targeted at boys too because not only do the girls have to be the change but also the boys as well, and the age is pretty many teenagers because it is where the change should happen and since we didn’t make it for a higher audience. The comedy added to the production made it so that teenagers could enjoy the piece and understand the whole purpose of it. I think one of our strengths was the way we made the documentary fit our target audience. The funny bits we added and the way we made it lighthearted, and fun made it enjoyable for the specific target audience.
Our production is a representation of woman in sports and how much they are misrepresented in the media and sport world. The whole documentary is an example of women in sports and how they are treated since the whole purpose and theme of the documentary was to show representation of woman in sports. To grow awareness that as woman we still can participate in sports meditated by men and still be treated equally. In our piece we show how the boys hockey team interact with the only two girls on the team and they’re accepting, welcoming, and protecting towards these two girls. The whole purpose of our documentary was to show an example of how women should be treated in sports media, these two girls don’t let their talent hide because they're the only two on the team, instead, their team builds them up despite their different gender.
To finish this reflection, I thought in our documentary there were many things done right such as the type of shots we did and the b-roll added, the quality of the shots was impeccable. However, we could have done a better job with the organization of the video, putting the ending of when Sasha is getting dressed at the beginning instead of at the end. Lastly, the audio needs to be fixed, unfortunately, we did everything we could to fix it, yet we couldn't. In the end, I'm proud of these pieces and I hope in makes a change in those who watch it.
