The Great Conversation Documentary Film

The Great Conversation Documentary Film

The Film

The Great Conversation tells the story of the historical Cloquet Middle School building and the people who walked its halls. I co-planned, interviewed, filmed, edited the feature-length film. The project received attention from local news outlets.

Optimized Film Analysis Application

My coworker and I developed a custom web application that allowed us to watch footage at increased speed and take brief, rigidly-formatted, time-stamped notes.

Analysis

We utilized a combination of tools to extract meaning from our notes: regular expressions to clean up the text, distributions of keywords, and word clouds.

Editing

Using the time-stamped notes to fill our timeline with relevant clips, we quickly pulled together a rough draft.

Conclusion

We premiered the finished documentary to positive reviews from community members. It’s currently available through the Cloquet Public Library system.