If You Fail to Plan, you Plan to Fail.

Hey everyone! I am back with another posting. This next post is going to focus on the research and planning I conducted for my group’s documentary project: Shifting Success. When I first thought about creating our project, I carefully reviewed documentaries I have watched, including the ones I mentioned in my last blog post, and how to create a similar format and production for our documentary. After discussing some topic ideas with the other group members, we decided to create a story about how the best-laid plans don't always work out.

Our original plan was to just focus on one subject, but after discussing the topic with our teacher, she suggested that we include another subject, so the story would be more interesting. Having two subjects would make it easier to show the similarities and differences between the kinds of redirection people can have in their lives. The two subjects of our documentary are: We decided to focus on two subjects: Giuseppe Norrito, the stepfather of one of our group members, and Fernanda Zalfa, one of our group member's mother.

The goal of our documentary is to share with our viewers how Giuseppe and Fernanda's lives changed from what they originally planned and how they dealt with these changes. Giuseppe was on his way to becoming a major league baseball player for the Los Angeles Dodgers team until he severely injured his elbow, ending his baseball career. After this injury, he was forced to a new career and became a police officer. Fernanda started as a set designer in Brazil, but when she moved to Florida, she had to find new work. She wasn't able to get work as a set designer so she she became a business owner and now sells Brazilian food.  With these two subjects in mind, we devised an outline to follow when filming our project.

As previously mentioned, the rough draft of the outline only had sections for Giuseppe, as the documentary was originally only supposed to focus on him. However, after our instructor advised us to add another subject to the documentary, we added Fernanda.

The biggest challenge we faced in making the documentary was the struggle to merge two stories while effectively conveying our message. Although we had a solid plan for the project, we worried about the execution. However, to make sure that our documentary's message was clear, I thought back to American Promise since this production also focused on the lives of two subjects. After rewatching that documentary, we drafted a series of questions and a list of shots for Joey and Fernanda. This was to ensure our interviews flowed well and to schedule time to capture extra footage. 

We carefully followed this outline and were able to get the interviews and shots necessary. My next post will focus on the production process. Talk to you then!