Documentary Planning

  From the beginning I wanted my documentary to stand out. When it came time to pick a subject, I realized that given the time frame of two weeks, I had to pick interviewees who were people I already knew and lived close by. I wanted to be efficient, I didn't want to waste time and energy making phone calls to people I've never met who may or may not be willing to be filmed or available when I needed them to be. My best bet was to center it around people from my summer theater program, as they're basically my inner circle who I feature in a lot of my projects, and they all have something interesting to talk about. Working backwards from there, I now needed to decide what these people would be interviewed about. 

 One of my first ideas was to make it about fans of obscure and independent music, which could've been interesting, but I knew there was something else I could think of that was more... I guess the one word I can think of is special. I thought about the demographics I was working with. I would be interviewing people who do theater, and a lot of them also work in other artistic mediums. That got me thinking about making it about those artistic pursuits, but that subject has been done numerous times and I knew that if I did, I would be one of multiple in the class. I needed a unique angle. 

 And then it came to me. So many documentaries are about young artists, focusing on the joys they take from their work. As a young artist myself, I know that joys don't come alone, they come alongside frustrations, especially when it comes to struggling to finish a passion project. That's what my documentary would be about: unfinished artistic projects.

 Now that I had my subject, I reached out through a group chat to get people who were interested. I got four people, which seemed like a good amount of interviewees, and I sent them a document for them to give a brief description of what they would be talking about, as I wanted each person to have a specific unfinished project that their interview would focus on. I also asked them to list their availability to be filmed so I could make a schedule

 While I waited on everyone to respond, I worked on making a shot list. My idea was to film at the house of each subject, and have them show of their work to the camera. I had only been to one of these people's houses before, so I didn't know what would be there to film. When I made my shot list, I listed a lot of generic things that would fit the theme of unfinished art projects, like shots of people typing on computers and sketching in notebooks, with the knowledge that once I got there I would film that in addition to b-roll I would come up with on the fly based on what I saw. This production would require a lot of staged b-roll, but I didn't want it to look staged. I planned to shoot using a handheld camera to make the footage seem more natural.

 Now it was time to make the questions. This part was pretty simple. I knew that I wanted to focus on what unfinished projects reveal about their creators and the personal reasons they go unfinished, so I made a series of questions that focused on that. After getting feedback on them from my teacher, I reworded them to be more conversational sounding (i.e. changing "what is" to "can you tell me about"), as that would lead to me getting better responses. I put these questions in the shared document with the subjects so they could read them and prepare ahead of time, and I made them aware that I intended to ask follow-ups.

 After making the questions, the final step was to make the outline for the film. This was pretty much the order of how I would present the information. I decided that I would rather structure the documentary based on ideas rather than the individual subjects. I would begin with an introduction to the artists, which would naturally progress to a general discussion of unfinished projects and then to their personal and emotional significance. I thought that the best way to end it would be with advice to artists, as they would be a target audience member of the film and I liked the idea of ending things on a hopeful note. I felt like it would make it more meaningful.