Welcome back!
Where do I begin? Well, when I got assigned this project I'm not going to lie I was a bit nervous. Why? Well, it was the first big project of the year, it's not that I felt unprepared but I felt as if I forgot everything I learned prior to this. I actually didn't, it was just the intimidation I felt. Ideas came rushing into my head. I forgot that feeling. The feeling of having the freedom to do what I want with my project. I decided to ask my friend Sami if he'd be interested in working with me and he said yes.
That's when we began thinking about what our doc could be about. So many ideas but we had to narrow it down to only one. He asked me to share my ideas and so I told him. My idea was to make a doc focused on the lives of animals in shelters and the shelter owners as well. Since our school already works and helps out with a shelter I already had connections that would help me gather enough information about them. But then Sami shared his idea which really captured my attention.
He began telling me about this guy who works out at his gym and who is a veteran. He explained to me how they talk a lot and how he has learned a lot about the veteran. I liked Sami's idea a bit more mostly because he had more direct connections to the filming location and the person. Also, the topic he wanted to focus on was very unique and something a hasn't seen much of. So after discussing which topic we choose we went with Sami's topic, it had more of a wells structured path and we had the connections we needed for the interviews, filming locations, and such. My idea, I might save my for later since it's more of a personal topic that correlates with my passion.
You must be wondering what the idea was about. Well, we wanted to focus on veterans who suffer from PTSD and how they cope with it. I've never seen a lot of media covering this specific topic and the effects it has on these veterans, so we thought focusing on new topics would be good for our doc.
And the process begins. We started off by making a pre-doc planning sheet. In this sheet, we wrote down our ideas, questions, and a basic draft of the doc and what it will have (this includes the shots as well). But before we filled this doc out we decided to watch a few documentaries to get some inspiration on some focus points. I also did some research on articles and interviews with military vets and gathered my questions and built up from there. This one article really helped me gather some questions I think would have targeted our purpose well https://storycorps.org/discover/military-voices/great-questions-for-veterans-service-members-and-military-families/. As I was doing research mostly based on articles, Sami watched a few docs. By the end, we combined our ideas and formed our questions based on what we found. Later came the time when we had to decide what shots we were going to do.
It was tricky when it came to the shots. We obviously had to use specific shots that could help show the purpose of the doc. That would be shots that focus on him working out. That would be because the gym is supposed to be what helps out interviewee cope with PTSD. So we focused on shots of him working out. Here is a list of shots we had in our doc. Before I didn't really notice how useful this information can be when it's written down in this format. Last year I kind of just did a list and went with that but making a chart like this helped the film process go by quicker and simpler. 
A day or two before filming Sami sent the interviewee Justin the list of questions which I will include right below. Justin had asked to read the questions prior to the interview just so he has an idea of what to say especially if we are going to be delving deep into a topic he doesn't usually conversate about. Some people might argue that it would've been best if he read them the day of but there were some things he had to have been prepared to say, it is a personal topic to discuss so it's best to be prepared. Also, if he didn't want to answer some questions he could have told us, and then we would have replaced them with other ones he would approve of.
Now comes filming day. It went by smoothly, at least we thought it did. We filmed and finished after about 2 hours and we thought we had everything good. The shots were filmed nicely and we had to just edit the video and the project would've been done. But there was a big obstacle ahead of us, something we didn't think of till we were filming at that very moment. All the noise going on at the gym. We thought we could have gotten away with it since we were in a corner but you could still hear the bangs of the weights dropping to the floor, the music, and the conversations. It wasn't very good. We didn't really think through it and we didn't notice until Sami started editing.
This is where the bumps come in. When it came to editing we tried to make some tweaks in the audio to hide the loud and abrupt noises but nothing seemed to work. Everything would make the quality of the voice weaker. So we decided to refilm the interview only. It was a hard decision to make because we had little time left and we had to work around everyone's schedule. So Sami called Justin and told him our situation and he agreed to refilm the interview. This time around we tried to find a room where we can film in, inside the gym. So we decided to film in the office. This time around it was so much better. It was a great relief.
Sami decided to edit the film since one of his software can handle all the editing apps and mine can't really and he volunteered to do it because he had a specific vision for the doc that he wanted to match. While he was editing I would help him by suggesting different ways to fix problems he ran into and help fix tweaks in the doc.
Before I go here are a few shots from the doc!
By the end of the process of this doc, I was proud of the outcome. We worked around our dilemmas quickly and in a good manner. Can't wait for the next doc!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment