Let the Production Begin!

 

Now that the planning and research is finally done, we can begin producing our very own documentary! My group consisted of three other people: Lauren, Maria, and Abby. We were all friends prior to this project, which helped us work together effectively. We knew going into this that the documentary would take a decent amount of time. And by "decent," I mean weeks. We had an idea to use Lauren's step dad as the subject for our doc, but that quickly evolved into using an additional subject, Maria's mom, after some helpful advice. 

We began the production part of the project on November 18th. We worked on the documentary through Thanksgiving break, some together and some individually. We WERE going to incorporate other subjects that are involved in the lives of our main subjects or those who are experts on our topic. This did not end up working out, aside from using Fernanda's (Maria's mom) husband. We were planning on interviewing my mom, who is a nurse and knows the ins and outs of various injuries.With us focusing on Joey's (Lauren's step dad) elbow and shoulder injuries, my mom was interviewed and talked about the surgeries that his injuries required. The other subject we were going to interview was Joey's mom. She was going to provide more context to the story, but both her and my mom's parts did not flow as well as they should have. For this reason, we did not end up using their interviews. When we were planning on using my mom's interview, Lauren and I filmed her using Lauren's iPhone 13 and the portable light that I am shown in the picture holding. We used a tripod and portable clip-on microphones Lauren had to maximize the visual and audio quality. Unfortunately we did not end up using her interview for the final documentary, but it was good practice for the other interviews and parts of the finished product. 

Joey Norrito (past career)

As I said in a previous post, Joey used to play in the MLB for the Los Angeles Dodgers before injuring his elbow, and later shoulder. He then transitioned careers into becoming a Fort Lauderdale police officer. An interesting subject to cover, right? We knew we wanted to focus on interviews throughout the documentary, but along with this we had to include b-roll. I personally really enjoyed the b-roll we got for Joey since it shows him playing baseball as a little kid all the way to when he was drafted. Lauren could easily get these videos and pictures from Joey's parents. I thought including these images allowed for the audience to truly imagine what it was like for the subject and it broke up the interviews in the doc to make it flow better. We did use a voiceover of his interview to match his voice to what was being described (I tried attaching a video clip of this below but it won't load).

We also wanted to make sure we had at least SOMETHING from when he was drafted by the Dodgers (which, by the way, is really cool, at least I thought so when I was told this). We found an old Dodgers jersey and utilized it in the doc just to add some natural b-roll instead of relying only on what we had from the past. I thought we did this well, but I wish we had more examples. It is actually okay that we didn't use more organic b-roll as this part of the story is about what happened in the past. 

We interviewed Joey (who was very excited to be a part of this) and he answered all of the questions well and in depth, BUTTTT there was one issue that nearly everyone pointed out. The audio. The audio on his interviews were way too loud and if we were to do it all again or submit it to a contest, we would definitely lower the volume on his footage. It did not mesh well with our other subject's interview because her audio was at a normal volume. We got feedback from our classmates and this was a reoccurring message about Joey's audio. Next time it will definitely be adjusted. 

Fernanda Zalfa (past career)

Maria's mom, Fernanda, also had a very interesting career path. She was a set designer for a Brazilian company called Global and would digitally create to sets used in soap operas. For her parts of the documentary I especially thought we did a great job incorporating both interviews and b-roll. We took footage of her flipping through her past architecture sketches, the renderings, and what it ended up looking like as the real product.

sketchesrenderingsreal product

I thought we did a great job portraying her past career through both interviews, voiceovers, and b-roll and it captured the entire essence of her work. Something I thought we could have taken out was the frequent fade to black. I realized by watching it later on that it felt sort of choppy and the critiques made by our classmates seemed to feel this way as well. Next time we would keep those to a minimum as it made the documentary slightly confusing. 

That's it for the first half of production! Check back soon for the second half and how my group wrapped up Shifting Success