We teach the non-narrative because really it's a really powerful tool for people themselves
to tell their own stories.
This is their capstone project.
They get to put it all together in this documentary piece and we find this is a very effective
way to kind of see what the students have learned.
First you know you have to find your subject.
Okay cool.
Do you have like your email address and I could show you our information in the contact
that way?
Thank you so much.
I look forward to hanging out with you on Monday.
Bye-bye.
Yeah.
Touchdown.
Okay.
Well we have a very tight shooting window so it might not work out if that's the case.
That's the kind of timing that we're looking at but alright thank you.
Take care.
Bye.
Oh.
Well everything's has to be approved by a manager or there's a PR person or they're
closed.
I mean it's all myriad of things but you know it's just normal life stuff.
Stuff that anybody would run into when they're trying to figure out a story idea.
We found two places really closed.
And then of course there's having to make sure that you can coordinate it with a willing
participant.
That's like the first thing we're checking now.
Yeah are they open?
First criteria.
It is all about being flexible and it's not always about doing the stories that you want
to do necessarily.
For us you know the first story that we tried to get and book it just worked out that way.
Hi how are you?
I'm Andrew and I'm an instructor at the defense.
But we didn't plan on that.
We had a backup and another backup and a backup to that backup.
So it's all about making sure you're prepared.
Nobody's picking up.
Sorry.
If you know a lot about the subject it makes it obviously a lot easier but if you don't
know much about martial arts or Tai Chi or Kung Fu then you really need to go in depth
and research the subject.
Wikipedia, various articles, their Facebook page, YouTube just to kind of to learn more
about it.
So right now we have figured out a location for our doc.
Now we're just kind of you know trying to hone in on to what we want to focus on for
the story.
Planning is super important.
When you go forward with a plan you just have a better idea of what your focus should
be, what your shooting focus should be, what your questioning focus should be, everything
is going to be centered around what you and your teammates decide what that focus is going
to be.
And when you're all on the same page it just makes it a lot easier to put together.
Even before we spoke with anybody on the phone, any pre-interviews, we had an idea of what
our focus was going to be, health and wellness.
As we're interviewing and we learn more about the characters that are involved in the story
we know that there's something that's always going to tie it back together and ultimately
that's what the story ended up becoming.
So like in my mind I have like a mental checklist.
You know opening shot, closing shot, cutaways, a working interview, different camera angles.
Do we have the sequences that can help tell and move the story along.
And so in my mind I have these kind of you know mental checklist of all the things that
I want to incorporate.
It's important to kind of have an idea of who's doing what because you don't want people
duplicating the same efforts.
When we got in there we assigned okay who are the shooters, you know who's asking the
questions, who's shooting what, are you shooting the cutaways, are you shooting the interviews.
So we all had an idea and we were all on the same page and it just made it a lot easier.
That way it was less confusion and there was also just an idea of what we needed and we
could check those things off the list as we got them.
The interview is super important.
There's no script, you can't write it.
They're the ones that are telling the story.
It's not only important to have you know questions at the ready but also for you to pay attention
and to listen.
As you're asking these questions you may hit a nerve.
That point where they get a little bit more emotional, they start really reflecting and
thinking about things.
Then you can get some more real genuine feedback from them and then you finally find oh you
know what there's a little nugget in there, there's a little human side in there that
maybe I should go look and search and dig deeper and try to reveal.
You know it is really daunting kind of looking at everything that you did that day, all your
audio, all your video but you want to make sure that you plan out what you want to say
and you want to have a really dynamic opening and you want something at the end that really
kind of ties in all together what it is that you want to say and then everything else in
the middle you know it's fairly flexible.
All the audio that I picked had to do with the theme of health and wellness but you know
ultimately you want a strong beginning and you want that end to kind of just like tie
it all together.
For me I started listening and trying to find the parts that I find most interesting, things
that he said that really can strike a chord with you know not only me but with a lot of
other people and then I also try to find a good sound bite at the very beginning, a
strong sound bite at the beginning that grabs people's attention and then let me find another
sound bite here that you know just really ties up everything that we want to say, everything
else in the middle can tie into what's said in the beginning and what's said at the end
but you know what it always wants to tie back into the main theme, what we decided we want
a story to be about.
For me what a good documentary contains is when I can kind of feel it, when I get engrossed,
when I get really engaged and I kind of almost forget that I'm watching a story, we're humans
right and what we want is we want that human connection, the docks or emotions that I connect
with most are the ones that I know and I acknowledge that I felt myself.
So you want to try to get that kind of feeling out of your subject matter experts or the
people that are involved in the story.
When people see that and hear that and feel it, they connect with it.
You know when students think about a product, sometimes they are so worried about the grade
sheet, what's on the grade sheet, but you know ultimately when they leave the school
house your audience doesn't have a grade sheet, they're not looking for that, they're looking
for a connection to the story.
To get that connection you know you can't be afraid to just try something new, you've
got to try something different, you've got to be bold, you've got to be creative and
have fun.
Don't live by the grade sheet, you know try something new.
