Beginning the research and planning for our documentary was difficult. All we knew is that we wanted our documentary to invoke meaning and have a good purpose. It seemed like such little time to come up with this extremely large project, so we immediately went to work.
Our initial idea was to create a documentary based on the importance of musical theatre in people's lives. It would have contained elements of theatre and tons of b-roll that included the stage, big lights, etc. Then we met with Stoklosa, she told us that our idea seemed to repetitive and it needed work. She was 100% right. So many documentaries today tend to stick to that same theme and my group did not want to be like the rest, we wanted to add a little twist! I'm so glad she gave us that tough criticism because it steered us into the right direction. Additionally, we still wanted to keep the same concept just adapt and tweak how it would delivered and conveyed.
We went straight back to the drawing board, then we started questioning each other about certain shows and what was the main purpose of them. One of us quoted "What shows have you guys done recently and how is it different from the other shows you have done?". Audrey replied " Well, we just recently did a show called Fiddler on the Roof. She told us that Fiddler on the Roof was about a character who attempts to maintain his family dynamics and find his true self through his jewish identification. The play explores themes of love, communication and family. We collectively agreed that this is a perfect production to delve deep into and we knew that we would get quality interviews because of the diversity. Diversity meaning all ages. For example, ages 8-75.
To elaborate, our group would consider this show a "intergenerational activity". I have absolutely no idea where this name came from, but it just fits perfectly. We defined intergenerational activities as groups of people who come together of all ages to create or participant in something like Fiddler on the Roof. Furthermore, Fiddler on the Roof highlights a village of people coming together. We wanted to reciprocate that same feeling. So it was final. " Let's do a documentary interviewing people from this production and highlight the effects that this specific intergenerational activities has on it's actors.
Our planning sheet was fairly easy to come up with since we already had a solid idea about what we were going to do. We knew that we were not going to use every single shot, angle or composition movement because of time constraints, but we still wanted to put everything on the table and not completely weigh out our options. However, one thing that was challenging to plan was who we would interview and the purpose of interviewing them. We originally, had about 9 people that we had in mind or wanted to interview. I know!! It sounded crazy. But we then realized that we do not need so many people to interviews when you could only have couple and it be quality interview over the quantity. Brandon Jerry and Lito Berccera were our guys. We also created specific interview questions for each subject.
Our final step, which was to finalized how we wanted to order and do our documentary. I think this part was probably the most straight forward. We structured how we wanted the interviews to play out. We would first introduce the topic by asking the interviewees a very general question such as " What does intergenerational activities mean to you?". The question would lead into the specific questions and b-roll incorporated in between each interview. We had a hard time putting a close to the documentary. To solve this, we decided to show b-roll of people all together to symbolize a community.
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