Planning the Documentary

Hi blog! In class, we were assigned to create a 5–7-minute documentary on any topic we wanted. I got the privilege of being able to work with Vicky who is a great friend of mine and has a lot of strengths with all her TV experience.  

On November 5, Vicky and I decided to work together, which we chose just the two of us so that there weren’t too many cooks in the kitchen. We began planning overall some ideas and, came up with the topic of winter guard, since we both had done it before and it would be easy to schedule since I am the Captain and we know all the potential interviewees personally we also came up with who exactly to interview. This day was really helpful when it came to beginning the plan for the documentary. 

On November 7, Vicky and I finished planning, wrote all questions for interviews, which we decided to split into newbie (Vivi), vet (Yadrien/Julia), sergeant (Maria), and tech (Erick), giving each group a unique set of  questions based on who it made the most sense to ask. We did this so that we would be able to maximize the time that we spent interviewing each person, since we didn’t need the same information from everyone. For example, we asked Maria to explain how the entire season goes, since she is in leadership and has been doing guard for a long period, completing multiple seasons. I included some of the questions that we had designated.

Vicky and I also made a clear list of what shots we wanted to take and decided who would get each shot since we had to take turns filming in some cases. Here is our planning sheet that describes our topic and our shot list.

We made a schedule for filming and editing as well as distinguished the rolls for me and Vicky. My roles were assistant editor, producer and co-director. Vicky’s roles were Cinematographer, editor, and co-director. It was useful to be able to play to our strengths, since I knew a lot about guard and knew what questions/who to ask and what exact shots to get while Vicky had a clear idea of how to make it happen. It also helped a lot to designate these roles ahead of time so that when we would make credits later on, we knew what we needed. 

Planning went really smoothly, and we were glad that we worked together well and had a clear shared vision of what we wanted to happen for the final production.