The Planning Behind My Documentary: Recovery

Hello again! As promised in my previous post, here I am, ready to recount the process of making my own documentary for my AICE Media Studies A course. This was a journey for me: starting with several days of deliberation and research with my group members, Manny and Joey, a hastily put together plan for a documentary involving trinkets, and finally, an interview that would change everything we had planned for. 

The first few days proved to be challenging: the first real group project of the year promised endless possibilities with few limitations. I was working together with my good friends Manny & Joey, and we were given free rein to produce a documentary on anything we could think of- as long as it was done within a few weeks. What was seemingly a dream project quickly proved itself to be a challenge, since due to the lack of guidelines and rules, there wasn't a lot to start with.

Our Brainstorming Bullet List

Our initial thoughts were vague and boring- a product of a mind without much guidance. We listed any ideas that came to mind, ranging from a documentary on student filmmakers that we knew of in our class, to a piece covering the decline in quality for school-provided services since the COVID-19 pandemic. None of these ideas really struck a chord with us, and were mostly just ideas for the sake of ideas- a safety net until we could find something worth doing. 

Luckily, we finally settled on an idea: Trinkets. We wanted to explore the concept of how people dedicate meaning to useless little objects with no express purpose, like a pair of fuzzy dice, or a broken ring gifted from a friend. We decided to have the documentary revolve around different interviews from people recounting their history with their own trinket, and what it means to them. It was a cute little idea- but if I'm being honest, I wasn't all too into it any more than I was talking about school services. But regardless of my own feelings, we went with this idea because of the time crunch soon approaching.

Wade's proposed list of trinkets

To gather interviews, each group member went about seeking interviews in their own manner. I opted to make an ad post on my Instagram story to try to reach as many people as I could (with my feeble following of 350 people). Within 24 hours, I had received a little over two dozen replies to the advertisement, and I started off the list by messaging my close friend and AICE Media classmate, Alex 'Wade' Duque.

Wade had offered a few potential trinkets I could interview him on, and it turned out that we had a free timeslot for an interview in a few days, so it was a promising idea. Additionally, one of the trinkets he mentioned, a corrupted SD card he kept after three years, had piqued my interest, which provided an interesting angle on trinkets, being an object that used to have purpose/function, but no longer has one. With this in mind, we made plans to meet up after school for a few hours to record the interview.

Having written a rudimentary script for interview questions I would ask him, and a short, simple list of shots I wanted to get for b-roll, I felt decently prepared for the interview, especially after hearing that my other group member, Joey, had already recorded an interview with another classmate. However, it would turn out that no amount of planning would have prepared me for what happened during the interview.