"Great Change" Documentary Process

My planning for my documentary began with brainstorming. Since we only had a few days to brainstorm before submitting our pre-documentary planning, I tried to think of subjects who I could ask to be in the project as soon as possible. I eventually decided on Diego and Javier, my uncle and my cousin, to be the subjects of my documentary,

I had planned to film the interviews that next week, so that weekend I planned out some questions that I'd like to ask them.

These questions often changed as I reworded or restructured the order of them, and even on the day of shooting, I altered the questions to get better answers from the interviewees based on what they had already said in response to other questions.

That next week, there was a hurricane which meant that I wasn't able to film the interviews on the preplanned date and I had to reschedule. I ended up filming the week after that on Thursday.

On the day of filming was when I realized that I wouldn't be able to get as much B-roll as I thought I was going to be able to get. This became a problem as once I started editing, there were long sections of the video with no b-roll and just a still camera shot.

Despite that setback, in the interviews, I got lots of good answers from the interviewees and I felt like had a lot of material I could use from them. I felt like they both had similar yet different perspectives on almost every question so seeing the contrast while editing was interesting.

Speaking of editing, I spent the weekend after filming editing the video. Editing is something I really enjoy doing so I took my time with it, but looking back I see that I missed a lot of important elements that were needed to make my video an actual documentary.