It is impossible to over-plan

Now that we have some inspiration under our belt, its time to lock in on some research and planning for starting our Group Project.

Being thrown into my first project in a while was a little overwhelming at first. With documentaries you have sooo much freedom, but... what do you decide to do with it. First came choosing groups, this came pretty easy as I choose my trusty AICE Media AS frequent partners Nyx and Manu. 

 Then, came a process that took some brainstorming, our topic. A few first eliminated topics were doing a documentary on the perspectives of new immigrants (as most of us are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants this topic was particularly enticing to us), or a documentary on urban planning of Florida cities, especially focused on the lack of walk-able infrastructure and public transportation. However, after consideration of logistics, we came to a topic we could have more access to, and that was still just as near and dear to us, Spoken Word Poetry!

As part of our extracurricular involvement, me and Nyx are highly involved in the spoken word poetry world, competing for our school's poetry team and attending outside of school events with local poetry organizations. We've felt that this activity has had a really deep and important impact in our lives. As a result, we thought it would be awesome to document a slice of a world, which many feel detached too, either seeing it as "woke" nonsense, or disliking it because of the distaste many (unfortunately) have for poetry. 

So we started planning... 

Our first few Roadblock 

Turns out... its kind of hard to boil down a really complicated and near and dear activity into a few minute documentary. As a result, our first planning error, was going wayyy too broad. At the beggining of our process we planned to interview the whole team (10 ish people), multiple ex-team members in college, AND advisors. After some discussion with Ms. Stoklosa and a discussion amongst ourselves, one thing was becoming evident, we needed to narrow it down. 

 

Our first list of potential Subjects. In the end, we narrowed it down to 3 and then 2 subjects. [A lesson in the importance of brevity (I say in an absurdly long caption lol)]

One of the important lessons we took from all of the documentaries we saw, especially exit through the gift shop, is that its essential to keep a narrow focus, and tackle a topic in search of depth not breadth. As we took a step back and re-analyzed, we began to chop up our interview list. One big realization we had, was that we could pick a few people to act as archetypes to represent a group of people in the team. This immediately allowed our interview list to go down quickly. We decided on interviewing one current team member, one college student, and one advisor* (kind of, I'll get to it in the production posts). 

 

Our first outline (would prove to be too focused on the competition side and not enough on the emotional)

 

In the same vain, we had to learn exactly what we should zero in to get the most impactful documentary. Originally we wanted to focus it more on LTAB (Louder Than a Bomb Florida) the annual competition we compete in (fun fact: its the largest spoken word poetry competition in Florida!). However, after some discussion, we realized that the main point of our documentary had nothing to do with LTAB and was more based on the relevance of poetry in the 21st century. As a result we took all of these changes into consideration and began planning again, with new perspective. In order to ensure that we didn't lose sight of what we really wanted to adress with our documentary, we created a few guiding questions/purposes. 

Guiding questions for the Documentary to find our focus

Planning it all out 

I have a new weapon of choice for idea-making and storyboarding, an Ipad and a stylus. This one was a game changer for me, I just feel as if i plan so much better with a stylus than typing it all out in a template or outline. Anyways this allowed me to play with my ideas for shots, and story beats in Microsoft One-Note before going out to film. This exercise was really useful later on in filming, and when planning out our interview questions as I came to a clear idea of what elements of our story were essential we tried to capture in our documentary. 

 

Storyboarding on my Ipad in Microsoft One Note

 

What we came to was essentially a basic (in only 7 minutes) 3 Act structure. 

1. What spoken word poetry and what is LPS? 

1. Address the basics, and make sure all audience members are on the same page. Introduce unfamiliar audiences to spoken word poetry and what the team at Cypress Bay the Lightning Poets Society (LPS) does. 

    

2. Experiences with Poetry: 

1. Poetry has resulted in the participation of interviewees in prizes, meetings, events, and activities.

    

3. Personal Impact of Poetry in their lives 

1. How being involved in poetry has impacted interviewees in their daily lives. More focused on the emotional side of the impacts of Spoken Word Poetry.  

   

   Structure plan sketched out on my Ipad
   

    

During this planning period we also created a potential shot list, to keep us focused during filming. This was really useful during filming as we decided to (in emulation of the Ruth Carter episode on Abstract: The Art of Design) use staged b-roll. As discussed in the previous blog post we really enjoyed the

 

 

Long shot of Anenaa performing her poem at organ event	11. Long Shot of Alexa, Juan, Anenaa, Shiro  (archived footage from LTAB)
Close up of the mic	12. Wide shot of people snapping at LPS
Medium shot of Anenaa performing her poem	13. Multiple close ups/ medium shots of the LTAB shirts
Over the Shoulder shot of Aneenaa practicing with a wall/mirror	14. Medium shot of archival  Lyrical Lounge b-roll (Juan performing) (archived footage)
Long shots of Anenaa in her house	15. MS of performances at CoffeeHouse (archived footage)
Medium shots of Ms. Herring speaking at LPS	16. LS of crowd at Organ Donor Event
Medium shots of poets participating at LPS	17. Over the Shoulder shot of writing Poetry
Low angle Close-up of Poet reciting poem at LPS	18. Close up of cursive poetry handwriting on a notebook
Close up shot of concentrated face of member while writing poetry	19. Medium shot of the judges looking at Anenaa while she performs
Close up of a writing journal	20.  Medium shot of poets writing at LPS

 

 Our Potential Shot List

 

 

Interview questions 

The last but definitely not least thing to plan were our interview questions. Keeping in mind our outline, we created questions that would elicit (narratively) strong responses from our guests. We understood this was gonna be very important in creating the piece we wanted to create, so we put a lot of focus in creating a variety of questions that carried most of the main aspects we had previously outlined, going from basic information, to experiences, to more personal emotional effects.

 

Interview questions for one of our interviewees

All this planning took a significant amount of time, but in the end, I really think it was worth it as it made everything much easier in production and post-production. Linked HERE is our full planning document. 

 

Thanks for reading see you all next blog!