In my mini-documentary, I had the pleasure of telling Paraskevi Koilia’s (a.k.a “Voula”) story of her journey coming from Athens, Greece to play collegiate basketball in the United States, and a comeback through an injury right when she came to the United States. I’ve known Voula since I came to Furman last year and was always fascinated with her point guard skills. However, no one has also covered what led up to the injury which I think is important to talk about. Many people have made videos about her specifically about her season-ending leg injury, but I wanted to add to the story of why she came to the United States and how the transition was for her. After interviewing her, I learned more about how she felt during that dark time freshman year suffering an injury where she was unable to walk.
Screenshot taken by Voula
When making this video, I learned a lot about making a documentary. I learned multiple editing techniques and how to make a good L-cut and J-cut and making sure the audio is balanced with the rest of the video. Along with making sure your audio is balanced throughout your whole video, I learned that b-roll shots are very important to keeping viewers entertained in the video. For me, I learned the value of having connections to the right people to make a story possible. Being very close to each athletic team, I was happy to receive some highlight clips from the women’s basketball coaches for viewers to see in my video.
With what I learned when making this documentary, I’ll be taking my newfound knowledge on editing and film production to my future videos. Moving forward into advanced film classes, this documentary gave me an insight into how to prepare ahead of time to get good b-roll and interviews done as well as make sure you have a good storyline.