I made a short documentary on the history of badminton and explored some of the legacies that it has today. One of the things I was most interested in was why badminton was seen as such an “Asian” sport today. It’s 2 minutes and 17 seconds long, with no music, but two voice overs and one interview. I watched Girl Rising, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, Right Footed, and several history documentaries for research. I mostly looked at the Internet Archive for this film.

I think the thing I’m most proud of with this documentary is that I actually filmed it. It was pretty stressful trying to find the time to track down and film my coach and find the resources and time to put it together. All in all, this was my 7th end of year project that I had during this time period and I wish I’d had more time to work on it. I think another thing I struggled with was iMovie, I’m not a huge fan of the application because in order to make an aesthetically pleasing film, you really have to have beautiful cinematography in the first place, and with a historical documentary, you’re really working with found footage. Despite that, I found a way to do side-by-side films and I think it’s a really useful aspect of the program that not a lot of people know about. (Photos also lost my interview footage at first so I spent a few hours stressing out about that and trying to figure out how to get it back.) I wish I also had more media of badminton in the 20th century and before but it hasn’t been a super popular sport until it became part of the olympics in 1992 and so there isn’t really a lot of footage/pictures/art about it online.

Here’s a link to it!