Documentary Research and Planning

    Once the main research for the documentary was complete, the next step was to plan. 

    The first step was to choose a topic. We came up with a few ideas of possible topics. We thought of getting insight into a teacher's life and their job, an immigrant's story of their life in their native country and the shift of leaving home to come to America, and highlighting the musical theatre community and how it affects its members. We thought about these topics for a while and decided we wanted to talk about the theatre community. As we were discussing it and coming up with ideas on how to approach it, Ale remembered that a friend did the same topic for their documentary last year so we had to pick something else, but we still wanted to talk about theatre. As we were discussing other ideas, I thought of the people who work backstage on productions or, "Techies." I came up with talking about their work and how they are underappreciated in the theatre community. Ace and Ale liked the idea and that became our topic. 

    Once we had our idea, we started planning it. We first thought of how we would approach it and who we could ask to participate. Ale and I are enrolled in the theatre class at school and Ale does musical theatre at a private company outside of school, so we had a lot of resources at our disposal. We first asked our friend Sam who runs the sound design at our school and has worked on sound for other theatrical productions outside of school, to be an interviewee and give us access to the tech booth. He said yes to both. We then asked Andrea Chiquito, who runs technical theatre at Inside Out Theatre Company, as well as Isabel Cadena who runs lighting design at our school if they'd be able to sit for an interview and they both said yes. We also wanted a different perspective on technical theatrical work, so I asked my friend Natalia Rendon, who is also in the theatre class with me and Ale and has been doing theatre for over eight years, she was also available to film an interview. Now that we had subjects, we needed to figure out what else would go into our documentary. 

    We needed to think of the archival footage we would use, our b-roll, and an outline. We used a template that Mrs. Stoklosa provided for us, which gave us the space to create a goal and purpose for our documentary which was to highlight the technical side of live theater and the process that is used when putting on a production, which is often overlooked. It also gave us space to list our b-roll shots and how we would devise our roles on the project evenly. The document is linked here. We also created an outline as to how we would structure our documentary, which is linked here. This outline helped us organize our ideas and how our documentary would flow from each point we wanted to make. After the outline, we created the interview questions. We had different questions for different people. We had separate questions for the "Techies," directors, and actors. We wanted to ask the "Techies" what being a "Techie" means, what their job is, what it's like to be in the background of a theatrical production, what makes a production run smoothly, and what you do when it doesn't, and what their role is in the theatre community. It was as we were writing these questions that we received feedback from our teacher that we shouldn't focus on how they're underappreciated so we made the main focus about their work. We asked Andrea, a director, some of the same questions but also different ones such as, what it means to them to oversee an entire theatrical production and what it means to them. The actors, or actor in our case, was asked two completely different questions about how they view the work of "Techies," and how they affect their performance on stage. Once we were finished with the questions, we received feedback from Mrs. Stoklosa as to how we should reword the questions to get the best responses out of our subjects. The final document is linked here. Ale also looked through their phone for pictures and videos of some technical work for previous shows she's done. She mainly focused on the before and after of different songs or scenes and looked as if technical elements were being implemented. This would give more examples of the work, "Techies," do in a production, which is the purpose of our piece.

    Once the interview questions were written, we had to set them up. We talked with our subjects and decided we would do our interviews with Sam and Isabel the same day as we filmed our b-roll of the tech booth and the auditorium. We would then get our interviews with Andrea and Natalia that weekend. Everything was set in place and we were ready to film until disaster struck! Find out what happened in the next blog post.