Documentary Production

    In the last post, I said that disaster struck, and it had. Basically, the worst possible thing that could've happened, happened. Let me explain. We were set to begin filming on Thursday in the auditorium and we were going to record Sam and Isabel's interviews as well as the majority of our b-roll. Our issue began when the weather became really bad. It was pouring rain for two days straight and the floods in parts of our area meant the busses couldn't run, so school was canceled on Thursday. We couldn't film on Friday because a middle school theatre festival was taking place all day and the next week was Thanksgiving break. The documentary was due the Monday we returned. We were texting back and forth, trying to come up with ideas. We were thinking of getting Sam's interview but he's doing sound for the theatre festival in the auditorium and he was going away for a break the next day and Isabel wasn't available. The only people we could record were Andrea and Natalia. Once we evaluated our options for this project, we thought of having to switch our topic entirely. We didn't want to but we didn't have much of a choice. We thought of doing the immigrant story and we would use two different subjects, Ale's mom and stepmom, to tell two different stories. We ultimately decided however to not do anything until we talked to Mrs. Stoklosa on Friday and just wait it out until then. 

Our group text messages about school being canceled and what our options are.

    When we got to class on Friday, we immediately went to our teacher and explained our entire situation. She gave us two options. We could change our topic, start from scratch, and it would be due on the same day or, we could keep our topic and she'd give us a week's extension. After some deliberation, albeit not much, we decided to keep our topic and take the week extension. With that, we restructured and got back to work. We scheduled Andrea's interview for that Saturday and moved Natalia's interview to Sunday. After a very chaotic and stressful few days, we were finally able to begin filming and make more progress on our documentary. 

    We all met up at a park next to our local library to film our interview with Andrea. We used a tripod that I brought and we bought wireless microphones to be able to capture better audio from the interviews. Both pieces of equipment proved to be extremely useful in our filming process. The tripod helped us frame our shots correctly and keep them stable while the microphones picked up audio very well and ensured the only thing that could be heard were the subjects. The filming process for that interview went really smoothly and Andrea provided us with fantastic answers to the questions we were asking her. As we were filming we checked the footage to ensure it all sounded right and that we got all the answers we wanted and we were done pretty quickly. 

The microphone we used to capture audio in the interviews

A clip from Andrea's interview

    The next day, we were all supposed to meet to film Natalia's interview but neither Ale nor Ace had rides so I filmed it by myself. I used the same equipment and asked the questions, and although it took a bit longer to set up, it was worth it. Like Andrea's interview, it went very well. They provided great answers and a great perspective on a "Techies" role to an actor. Once those two main interviews were done, we gathered up all the footage we had, looked it over, and tried to decide what we were going to use, even though it was difficult due to not having any other footage to work off of. We tried to find a day to meet up and edit what we have but due to complications out of our control and as mentioned, a lack of footage, we were unable to. 

A clip from Natalia's interview

    Looking back, we all handled our situation pretty well. We thought over all of our options logically and made the best conclusions we could with what we were given. Although the situation wasn't ideal, we made the best of it. Everything after that went pretty smoothly but I'll go more in-depth about the rest of our process in the next post. We learned a lot of lessons along the way and became stronger in the end because of it. Everything will work out in the end, no matter how hard or difficult it may seem.