My Documentary

At Occidental, senior year tends to center around “comps,” which, I imagine, stands for “comprehensive project.” Every senior has to do a project within their major that is essentially more work than the rest of their four years combined.

My major is Diplomacy and World Affairs. It’s a fairly new major, and it’s also one of the more flexible paths you can take through the school, since it covers just about everything in some tangential way or another. That is, everything from the moral philosophy surrounding wartime actions to the religious principles behind conflict in southern Asia falls pretty solidly under the umbrella.

In the same way, our comps projects are fairly flexible. There are some pretty cool options — some people are opting to take internships at governmental agencies (or NGOs, I guess), while others are working on 40-50 page research papers. I’m going to make a documentary.

I have to have a reasonably solid proposal put together for department approval by early November, but at the moment all I have are general ideas. I’m pretty sure I want to cover an issue dealing with sovereignty and human rights in the modern world (and therefore, tangentially, citizenship). But I want to make it good subject matter for a film, not a paper.

So at the moment, my only idea is to get in contact with NGOs that might be doing work in Darfur, etc, and see if there’s something I can draw out of their stories.

I guess what I’m having trouble doing is taking my conceptual subject, and making the leap to the right visual style and subject matter. How do I make my ideas work on screen?