Making a Documentary: Planning and Research

 As my group began to brainstorm what exactly we wanted the topic to be, we took a different approach of working backwards to determine what kind of interviews and interviewees we would be able to get in the time that we had as two members would be going on trips during the Thanksgiving break and would not have much time to film and edit. We were able to pin down that we wanted to interview teachers as we felt that this would be the most simply and would give us well though out answers.

Having decided whom we would be interviewing, we starting thinking of possible topics that are facing teachers today and would yield good answers. We originally decided on the topic of teacher salaries; however, we determined that this topic may be too personal and may not yield the best answers that we were looking for in order to create our 7 minute documentary. We also decided against this topic as we could not think of any engaging b-roll that would connect with what we were going to be talking about. 

All and all, we ended up on the topic of book bans. Knowing what exactly we were going to be discussing we began brainstorming the perspectives that we may want to have throughout our documentary. We knew that it would be necessary to have the point of view of an english teacher so we compiled a list of possible teachers, including some that, while not english teachers, would provide interesting insight into the topic we wanted to discuss.

This list gave us an idea of what we were going to be working around so that we could begin creating our questions for the interviews that we would filming later on. Additionally, we found it necessary to create an outline that would allow us to understand the structure of what we would be creating. This outline was very helpful especially when we got our footage as it gave us an idea of what we originally wanted our documentary to look like and it held us accountable to getting the necessary materials to accomplish it.

The final piece to the puzzle was writing up the script for the voiceover that we wanted to have in order to connect all of the parts of our documentary. We wanted to include the different elements of our research into the voiceover so that we were able to introduce the topic in a way that made it easily understandable for those who may not be familiar. This also worked to introduce the different interview topics that were to come.