Continuing the Research

A lot of background went into this...

Documentary Research

Like I said in my last post, I thoroughly enjoy watching documentaries and the science behind them. More specifically, sports documentaries. One of my favorite documentary series is E:60. The ESPN program features endless topics around athletics, including those touching on career ending injuries. 

My group and I's documentary, Shifting Success, features two subject, Fernanda Zalfa and Giuseppe (Joey) Norrito. Norrito had a career in baseball prior to his current job as a police officer. It was cut short due to an elbow and shoulder injury he endured shortly after being drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers. Norrito underwent Tommy John surgery on his elbow, a common procedure Major League Baseball pitchers require. 

When we had come up with the idea to highlight Norrito for the documentary, it reminded me of an E:60 episode I had seen. "Project 11 - The Alex Smith Story." Alex Smith was a quarterback in the National Football League for 13 years up until he had a career ending leg injury in 2018. Smith was a number one overall pick in 2005 and was respected around the league for his character and athletic ability. He suffered a spiral and compound fracture to his tibia and fibula in his right leg. I know no one reading this is a doctor, so let me put it this way; it's a nasty injury. ESPN decided to cover the Alex Smith story with an E:60 episode showing his struggles with the injury and rehab process. So now that I covered the background on Smith, let me explain how contributed to Shifting Success.

                                                                                                Project 11 Trailer

Documentaries that cover injuries in athletics primarily focus on three things: the player before the injury, the injury itself, and the player after the injury. "Project 11" did this very well in that the directors spent a lot of time on explaining who Alex Smith was before the injury, providing context to the story. While Smith was obviously a much larger figure in the football world than Norrito was in baseball, I took what I could from the ESPN piece. "Project 11" relied heavily on interviews, but also used b-roll to show the surgery and rehab processes. I knew that I wanted to incorporate something similar into our documentary. 

                                                                              

Filming Research

Additional research went into the making of Shifting Success, some of which pertained to filming methods. My classmates that I worked with on the project did not have a camera to work with, so what was the next best thing? An iPhone. I have heard the endless benefits of the iPhone 15 from my mom who works at Apple, but that was also not accessible to us. I have an iPhone 14 and my groupmates Lauren and Maria have the 13 and 12, respectively. So no, we were not able to use the very best technology, but we knew it would get the job done. I researched different lighting techniques to use on iPhones as well as tripods to set up the phone when filming interviews. Lauren bought portable clip-on microphones on Amazon so that aspect was taken care of. 

I was slightly disappointed that we could not use an iPhone 15 for its incredible camera, BUTTTT with a little bit of research (asking my mom) I figured out that iPhones 13 all the way up to the 15 Pro has the one and only, cinematic mode. The insane camera feature that comes with iPhones takes filming to a whole other level. I watched numerous YouTube videos on how to use it to its best ability, even though we were not sure if we would be filming any high action content, it was still a great feature to have for the project. 

That's it for the research component of the documentary!! Stay tuned for my next post: producing the documentary.