Research and Planning

 Our groups are set. Ideas are flowing. What are we going to do.

My partner, Rafa, and I went back and forth with some ideas we had for our documentary. We wanted to pick something that would spark both of our interests which at first seemed impossible. He wanted to do athletic things, I wanted to do artistic things but quickly enough we came to a topic that we both enjoyed: Music. Specifically house and electronic music. 

So our planning began. We wanted to focus on the DJ aspect of the genre, especially in Miami since it is such a hotspot for the style of music. The first thing I thought of for inspiration was "Changing Bearings" a documentary from this class a few years ago. We reviewed it and thought of what aspects of it we would want to incorporate into our doc. The outline was the first thing we tackled. It was important for us to understand what we wanted to convey in the documentary before choosing the subjects and thinking of B-roll. Starting with this was probably the best choice we could have made because it organized our thoughts efficiently, since then, creating an outline is something I've been doing for all of my projects and it works every time. From there we moved on to who our subjects would be and when we would set up interviews.

Ideally, we would have loved to interview FISHER or Diplo but we had to be just a bit more realistic. We decided that in order to get the most perspectives on the topic, it would be good to get an actual DJ, a DJ teacher/instructor, and a young/aspiring DJ. The last subject might seem a bit out of place, but we had in mind that our audience was a younger generation of people who enjoy electronic music, therefore, we thought it would be more engaging to have a DJ that the audience could relate to and possibly be inspired by them. Then it was time to schedule interviews so we called DJ instruction businesses and texted maybe 7 different DJs that Rafa is friends with. Of course, it wasn't easy but we were able to set up interviews and could not wait for those days.

Commercial Break (not really)!! Over the summer I did an internship at a local station where students all over South Florida can check out equipment for free to use on their projects. We wanted the best quality for our documentary so we took a little visit to Shortcuts and got equipment. 

ShortcutsTV

There is a section in our outline which we titled "History of DJing" and at first this was going to be VO explaining various details of years and locations. For this, we did some research on the topic and wrote down a brief transcript of what would be said. Then came the questions, which we struggled a bit with but fixed after revising with our adviser. Of course, B-roll was a big thing I wanted to work on. Like I said in the previous post, I really enjoyed the stylistic and staged B-roll from the Abstract series, so in the planning, we had a lot of ideas. Colored lights, close-ups, low angles, profiles, we had a lot. With everything scheduled and ready to film, it was just a matter of counting down the days until the interview and hoping that nobody would flake.