Planning Documentary

This was a little rough not gonna lie. My group and I, started the morning by thinking of some ideas we could do, at first we wanted to create a documentary about a girl at our school who has been a well known YouTuber since she was young. Our goal was to explore the internal struggles behind her life, interviewing her, her mom, and her close friends to give the story depth and emotion. As good as the idea was, we quickly realized the biggest issue: scheduling. Her availability is extremely limited, and combining her schedule with ours (since we all work and have different commitments) made the whole project feel almost impossible to do smoothly. After discussing it with Mrs. Stoklosa, she suggested we rethink our approach and consider something more manageable. That conversation actually helped us a lot, because it pushed us to come up with something even better you guys are not ready for.

We decided to shift our focus to Latinos in Action, a very know program at our school that was recently shut down “due to orders from the U.S. Department of Education, which claimed the courses may be discriminating based on race and violating federal civil rights law.” Since LIA has had such a big impact on students and the community, we felt this was an important story to tell. Immediately, we envisioned interviewing LIA students, the LIA teacher, and even parents of the children we’ve tutored. Once we talked it through as a group, we all genuinely loved the idea and felt motivated to get started.

We planned about 20 B-roll shots we want to capture, everything from classroom activities to tutoring moments, and organized our list of main interview subjects along with the shot types we want for each.

Some ideas we had:

1. Extreme long shot of LIA classroom

2. Close up shot of LIA students working together 

3. Long shots of meetings and events LIA hosts

Then came the scheduling challenge. Everyone in my group has a job, so matching our availability wasn’t easy. We decided the best place to start was with student interviews during our class period, since that would be the easiest time for all of us to be together. After that, we set up a plan to film LIA activities throughout the week whenever our schedules align. We logged everything in our production log: ideas, B-roll plans, interview notes, and filming dates, so we can stay organized throughout this process.

                                    

These were some questions we planned asking parents who's children got tutored by LIA students:

Overall, day two helped us solidify our concept and feel confident about the direction of our documentary. Even though it took some trial and error to get here, our group was excited and ready to continue.