9 days

After watching various amazing examples and being inspired by the choices of each director and creator, my head was filled with grandiose ideas (an early idea was to follow the lives of 3 students conquering a personal fear through training and practice); however, with our deadline insanely imminent, we had to come up with an idea that was more plausible to come to fruition. 

Originally, my groupmates M and J had agreed with me to center our documentary on our fellow teenage poets to share their stories and experiences competing in a poetry competition. We thought this uncommon event would be a great one to share with the world and as very special and unique to our friends. One idea we had was to make it a behind-the-scenes look at the 2023 Lightning Poets LTAB team in detail and how their synergy led to their success.

The original description for our documentary.

Screenshot of our planning document.

However, in planning this approach and wanting to cover the stories of each person on the team (originally planning to interview over 8 different people), we realized the project was overambitious for the amount of time we had. Another issue would be filming, as two of the subjects no longer live near us (have gone off to college) and currently there was no poetry competition or team meetings to go to film broll for. 

Eventually, after some redirection from our teacher, we realized a more effective approach would be to cut down on the quantity of subjects and focus on the quality. We needed to ask ourselves what the largest message we wanted to convey was, what questions we wanted this documentary to answer, and how to enact the best approach to bring that vision to fruition. 

Our core guiding questions for the documentary.

In the end, we decided on 3 subjects: a current poet in her senior year (Lola), a graduated poet now in college (Ghost), and the poetry club's advisor (Mrs.H). In this case, having personal connection to our subjects helped a ton through production because they were happy to oblige to the filming times we needed. We secured interviews with Ghost and Lola immediately while Mrs. H had a trickier schedule to work around (this changes things later on). 

Deeper questions written for Ghost.

In the meantime, we split up duties with writing questions, mainly with M writing the base questions and me polishing them by developing them to yield deeper responses (all about how you phrase the questions!!).

Meanwhile, J began to plan how these responses would fit into the documentary structure-wise as well as coming up with some b-roll ideas. As inspired by Abstract: The Art of Design, we knew we needed to get staged b-roll, so I went ahead and contacted our interviewees. Lola's interview would be held at her house, so luckily all her materials would already there and she was perfectly okay with showing them off. Ghost on the other hand we would be interviewing at M's house, so I texted them to ask if they could bring personal items to the filming location. We knew we needed a variety of shots with writing in them as the documentary focus was on poetry, so it was essential that we made sure that we could get writing shots and footage of written works (or Lola's case, typed works on a laptop).

Asking Ghost to bring their "poetry stuff."

Mostly, my role in the planning came to coming up with our master schedule to ensure we had enough time to record everything in time. Personally, I was already busy with work and other extracurriculars over the weekend, so ironically, while most of my peers were celebrating because of the upcoming long-weekend due to Veteran's Day, I was dreading my weekend, blocked out morning and afternoon with a different activity.

As you can see, I was stressed.

Ultimately, I'm glad my partners were up to the grind and willing to put in time to make this project great. And we came out with a result we were proud of. Stay tuned.