CMS 4410 Shooting Documentary Footage

Preproduction Meeting 1

The crews will meet as groups on Sept. 29 from 11 a.m. - 1:50 p.m. During the meeting, each crew will complete the following tasks.

  1. Decide on a working title for the production;
  2. Revise the "hypothesis" paragraph from the original proposal. As presented on page 63 in our textbook, the hypothesis paragraph
    • Opens with an overall statement about the theme;
    • Offers a more specific statement about how the producer plans to visualize the story through characters and sequences;
    • Ends with an optimistic assessment of the effect this documentary may have on audiences.
  3. Identify the specific people who will be interviewed for the project.
  4. Rank these interviews based on their importance to the project.
  5. Assign a crew member to conduct a preliminary (untaped) interview with each subject. Everyone must do at least one interview.
  6. Decide on 5-7 questions that each interviewer will ask each subject during the preliminary interview.
  7. Develop a list of needed b-roll footage and "beauty shots" (Hewitt and Vasquez 33-34).
  8. Organize a preliminary shooting calendar for the dates Oct. 6 through Nov. 3. All shooting must be complete by Nov. 3.

By noon on Friday, Oct. 1

Each crew should send a single MS Word document the summarizes the detailed results of its meeting to me at sspence [at] clayton [dot] edu.

By class time on Wednesday, Oct. 6