Documentary Pre-Production

Hi blog! 

So after viewing different documentaries and studying them, we were given given the task of creating our own!! I was nervous because I feel like creating a documentary is more challenging than creating a film. But I was excited nonetheless because we get to work in groups, so I worked with my friend Kenna :) 

We got to brainstorming straight away. And I cannot brainstorm without creating a shared document, so we made one and created a list of possible ideas: 

We came up with four possible documentary ideas! Yay! Now the hard part was deciding which one to do. We ultimately decided on creating a documentary on the winter guard sport, and I can assure you are thinking "wait what is that?", and that is the whole reason why we picked it!! Winter guard is the winter season for the color guard sport (colorguard is the people with flags that perform alongside the band at a football game halftime). It is a competitive indoor activity combining dance, equipment (flags, sabers, rifles), and artistic expression (basically dance), performed to a music track on a gym floor with a themed floor tarp.

Kenna has done guard for four years, and is actually our schools guard captain. I participated in 3 seasons until I decided to retire last year (we originally became friends because we performed together). 

Click here if you would like to see our schools 2024 winter guard show!

Now back to the documentary, basically no one knows what winter guard is, and it is a sport where you have to be very dedicated. It takes a lot of disciple and after school hour rehearsals put a show together. It is often frustrating to put so much time into something you like just for people to be extremely confused on what exactly you do. So we went with that idea!! We didn't really need to research as we both know and understand what guard is. The task at hand was explaining what it was to others. 

We were superrr excited. We created an outline (structure), and in our shared doc we created a list of possible interviewees and questions. We then discussed our outline with our teacher. She gave us useful critiques, and we started tweaking our outline. We ended up splitting the questions up depending on the person we are interviewing. After, we started scheduling the shoot. We decided to film the following Monday in school, Monday afterschool, and Wednesday after school. Finally, we chose what equipment we were going to use and how we were going to split it.                          If you would like to view our full outline click here!