Research, Burns, and Moore

I did A LOT of research on vaping. I have probably read more about vaping than any other topic I have studied in high school. Some of it was very interesting, but a lot of it was either confusing or boring. But I suppose that if you really want to learn a topic completely, you have to read everything you can find. I knew that I would have to boil it down to only the most useful information in order to keep an audience’s attention while still educating them. However, if I only scratched the surface in my research, I was likely to miss key points in the narrative or—even worse—get facts wrong. There is a lot of misinformation about vaping online, so at times I could find myself reading someone’s blog or watching a video that said the opposite of something else I had read. It was frustrating at times.

Since the film was my Eagle Scout Service Project, I had to report the number of hours I spent on various tasks as well as the hours spent by others who participated in the project. I did not keep a running log of the hours I spent researching, and I am sure that I underestimated how much time I spent online doing research.

Partly for inspiration and partly to motivate myself, I also watched a lot of documentary films during the period I was researching about vaping. My favorites were Ken Burns and Michael Moore, who have very different styles and topics. I love how they each tell a story, which is so compelling and entertaining while also so educational and enlightening. Neither seems to leave any stone unturned in their research, whether it is Ken Burns breathing new life into history or Michael Moore exploring and exposing hypocrisy and corruption. These filmmakers must come to work very prepared, and they inspired me to keep learning more about my topic until I felt that I knew more than enough to build my narrative. When I felt stuck or lost motivation, I would ask myself “what questions would Michael ask” or “what other images or vignettes would Ken look to unearth?”