Documentary Research

Researching for a project before starting it is a vital role in every piece you make. Proper research can not only help you gather more necessary information but can also offer newer perspectives and ideas. This documentary will be on my researching process for my actual documentary piece (after we learned about documentaries in general: in the last posting).

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

        Before anything else, my group and I had to come up with our idea or at least a series of ideas so we had a guideline as to what to focus on. We narrowed it down to a topic a little controversial relating to schools, so we could film the interviews during our class time. After researching a little more, we were in between two topics: how book banning's affect school and its curriculum, and student's attendance and how it can be influenced by external factors. 

        My group and I brainstormed each idea a little bit and then came to the conclusion that the attendance idea would be harder to portray adequately and filming B-roll for lack of attendance would be fairly difficult as well. So, we decided to stick to the book banning plan.

        Prior to researching anything, we wanted to have an idea and a plan as to what the idea is and how we would complete the project. This also included thinking of potential interviewee teachers. I thought my language arts teacher Ms. Herring was perfect for the role as she teaches several different classes and they all use books to convey the purpose and meaning of the lesson she's attempting to teach (I will talk more about a specific example later). 

        My group and I also decided to interview a government teacher, but that idea went down a hole after we all decided a less political approach would be better. Finally though, we found another language arts teacher willing to be an interviewee, and that officially solved our problem. Anyway, onto our research and planning.

        During this researching stage, we went through a lot of planning and building of our project in order to be prepared for filming. We first began researching overall information about our topic. One of the main topics we researched was the overall effect of book bans. Our plan for the documentary was not only to express to the viewer the idea of book banning but to explain how it has affected schools and teachers. Therefore, in this topic we talked about mainly the negatives but also the positives that book banning consist of. 

        While researching that aspect of our project, we also decided that having a voice-over would be extremely beneficial for us as it could help fill context and add extra information that the interviewees did not touch on or explain enough about. So, this researching section also included finding fitting information for the VO so we could write a script. I wont go into the making of the script in this blog because it was just a basic voice over on some background of book banning in order to give the documentary more context.

By this time we had also started writing our complete outline so we had a guideline as to where our piece would or should head next.

        Some other main topics we focused on researching were how book banning has increased, specific examples of book bans, and why books are being banned. As we were researching some specific books that were being banned or were banned at one point, I came across a book I had just read in my own language arts class (1984 by George Orwell) and I thought it was perfect. My group and I decided to use this book to our advantage and create a couple of interview questions surrounding the topic of this specific book.

Talking about interview questions, around this time was when we began creating them as we had planned to film the interviews the following week. Creating the interview questions were fairly easy to begin but hard to finalize. This was because thinking of the questions we wanted to ask was an easy task but figuring out how to state them was on the harder side.

        In order to combat this problem, we decided to just type out the best questions we could that hit every topic we wanted information from the interviewees on and then go from there. A couple of days later, it was my groups turn to partake in a personal progress check chat with my teacher. At this time, she helped us understand how to make all our questions more open ended and reach for deeper answers and meanings instead of a simple yes or no question we might have had before. 

Once we finished the interview questions, we knew we were ready to film them and so we made sure to set up interview times with each of the interviewees to make sure we were all on the same page. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

        Lastly, I did my own research (specifically cause I was the one doing most of the post-production), and I took it into my own hands to learn more about the filming of documentaries. I went back and rewatched the same Abstract episode on Netflix (the costume design one) because I was really fascinated with the way that episodic documentary was shot and I thought it matched the vibe I wanted to go for as well. Now that it was my second time watching the episode, I focused less on the content and instead more on how the shots, angles, and methods of filming impacted the context and the meaning it was trying to portray.

        I think rewatching this episode helped me realize and decide more on the type of B-roll necessary. That way, when I got to class the following day, my group and I could make a short list of locations and specific shots we wanted to film as B-roll to include in the final process. After doing this, we headed out that day and filmed a lot of footage all over the school (mainly in the library) in order to make sure we had enough for when we started editing and the post-production stage. However, we were only able to decipher what to film and how much to film because of our B-roll planning document were, like I said before, we planned many specific shots we knew we wanted to include.

-Dana