On Thursday of last week Carolina and I went to banks to reach out to people who could provide us for information about loans and some that were also interested on being interviewed for our documentary. We reached out to many people who gave us their contact number and email so we could tell them more about this project and the time used for this was actually very well spent... at least that's what we thought for a moment.
When we got to school an hour later we began brainstorming interview questions to send the bankers who wanted to know more about our project. So, we wrote down some questions about loans and interest rates that could somehow relate to the cause of inequality in our country. These were some of the questions:
Before sending these questions we wanted to review them with Mr. Topf just to be sure that these questions were relevant. This is when we realized that we needed a focused plan.
At that point a lot of questions came to my mind and I realized that we had to think this through once again and visualize what we want to see in our documentary.
What did we really want to focus on?
What are actually the reasons and causes of a shrinking inequality in Peru?
When we tried brainstorming on the white board I realized that maybe we weren’t ready to finalize the outline of the documentary because we didn’t know enough about the topic.
Were we doing enough research?
Do we have enough research already?
We had changed our topic so many times that I was really worried again because we didn’t have a clear idea—once again—of what we wanted to focus on for this unit.
Carolina and I went directly to the library were we could have a brainstorming session with no one else bothering us and after almost an entire hour of brainstorming we had it. We had three most important topics to include in the documentary that was causing the wealth gap in Peru. But, after a while we also realized that we weren’t seeing the ECONOMIC SIDE of the effect on the WEALTH GAP. We were planning on talking about education and living standards and health insurance, etc., but we weren’t including information such as GDP, taxes, interest rates, loans, and other essential information that was really the cause of this shrinking wealth gap.
What I learned from this is that you need a base to everything from where you can grow into something bigger, which in this case is our documentary.
At that point a lot of questions came to my mind and I realized that we had to think this through once again and visualize what we want to see in our documentary.
What did we really want to focus on?
What are actually the reasons and causes of a shrinking inequality in Peru?
When we tried brainstorming on the white board I realized that maybe we weren’t ready to finalize the outline of the documentary because we didn’t know enough about the topic.
Were we doing enough research?
Do we have enough research already?
We had changed our topic so many times that I was really worried again because we didn’t have a clear idea—once again—of what we wanted to focus on for this unit.
Carolina and I went directly to the library were we could have a brainstorming session with no one else bothering us and after almost an entire hour of brainstorming we had it. We had three most important topics to include in the documentary that was causing the wealth gap in Peru. But, after a while we also realized that we weren’t seeing the ECONOMIC SIDE of the effect on the WEALTH GAP. We were planning on talking about education and living standards and health insurance, etc., but we weren’t including information such as GDP, taxes, interest rates, loans, and other essential information that was really the cause of this shrinking wealth gap.
What I learned from this is that you need a base to everything from where you can grow into something bigger, which in this case is our documentary.
Research is ESSENTIAL
Being knowledgeable of your topic before doing anything else is doing research and actually knowing what you want your final result to be.