For this documentary, I decided to work with three other members: Miguel Cabrera, Natalia Szabo, and Yoav Dahan. I had worked with Miguel and Nati in the past in previous media projects. This was my first time working with Yoav, but I had known him before so I knew he was very creative and hard working. Once we came together as a group, Nati approached us with this idea to center a documentary around her grandmother, Susana Hernandez, who was an immigrant and apparently had this crazy long story. Nati explained to us how her grandmother had emigrated from Cuba, to Budapest, to finally the United States. She explained how her grandma loved telling her story to her and had always told her that she would love a way to tell it to others. Immediately I thought, we can be the way she shares her story, so let’s do it and help her achieve a dream of hers. Everyone agreed and we drive right into the pre-production stage.
We started by creating a pre-production sheet, that included potential interviews, possible b-roll shots, and a rough outline of our documentary. This helped us really develop our piece and visual everything. We then moved on to creating our interview questions.
Our Pre-ProductionWorksheet
After some discussion, we decided we wanted our piece to have indirect interviews, so the audio would be soley our subjects speaking and guiding the documentary. This meant we had to ask a lot more questions to make sure we had a lot responses to work with. We wanted Susana to be our main interview, but we also wanted to get an interview with her daughter and Nati’s mom, Diana Szabo. Nati told us that her mom at a point was on the journey with her grandmother, so we thought it would be a cool perspective to capture as well. It would add variation to our interview subjects in our piece. After finishing the worksheet, we spent 2 days creating all of our questions for Susana and Diana.
We definetly spent the most time in our pre-production stage, which really helped us in the long run as everything was already planned out and thought through.
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