2023 Gov. Awards (Process)
I was an English/Creative Writing major at Ball State University, so I approach everything through that lens. When I pitched for the 2023 Governor’s Arts Awards documentary, I developed the general theme, about the luxury of growing old with your art, through personal experiences. But I had to create a structure for the filmmaking and producing. My general duties included:
Directing
Producing
Scripting/Co-editing
First thing: My research into everyone was propelled by a pre-interview of the six subjects (five awardees and one award artist), allowing me to develop the questions for the real interview and a shot list for each day. This made it easier to direct my Director of Photography and Main Editor Zach Vessels. We would also improv off the shot list.
I write to themes so, based on their pre-interviews, I developed two themes for each subject, and dissected further what each word meant.
For example: One of Bryan Ballinger’s themes was LEVELS (see above). Bryan (aka Breadwig) is an illustrator, animator, animation teacher, toy designer, t-shirt designer, etc. He produces the same object multiple times but not always the same way every time. He has levels/rows/layers to him. So the LEVELS theme got echoed in the compositions, in the editing, and even in the title.
After the production day, and after the transcription, I separated the various sections of the interview into categories, based on topics and themes. I’ve been writing this way since college.
And from the topics and themes, I wrote the script…the order of things in the documentaries. Again, I approached the scripting the same way I write articles (I’m a journalist) and short stories. After the scripting phase, I'm basically trimming the fat…what do I really need to tell the story?
This also gave me a chance to drop in pics and video (b-roll) I wanted for each scene. Some of the scenes have shots already attached to them as the shot lists were derived from their interviews. But I left enough room for my editor to assert his point-of-view too. It wasn’t just me telling Zach, in every scene, use this shot or stick to my script. Multiple drafts later, we were finished.
