Doc 1

My partner Martina and I began with completely different ideas.  We were planning on doing our documentary on imaginary friends, a topic neither of us really cared for, but thought could be interesting. After thinking about it, and talking to Ms. Stoklosa, we realized how little passion we both- very passionate people- held for this topic. Hence we changed our idea to fit us better. 

We had the luck on working on this together. Martina and I are best friends- we basically live with each other- so we thought we should use that for our advantage. Additionally, we are both artists of different mediums- Martina paints, and I make films. We wanted to make our documentary about that, but we thought of an interesting angle we could take. We would separate the doc into two distinct parts. The first part would be completely produced by me, and the second by Martina. Our subjects? Each other. We wanted to see how our art forms differed from each other, not only objectively, but personally. We both had an idea that the toll that our art took on us was different, and we wanted to explore on that. 

Filming was easy- yet exhausting. For about two weeks, I practically lived at Martina's house, and she in mine. Not only was I recording her interview and b-roll, but just her creating in general. I wanted as much candid footage as I could get in order to give the documentary a more personal feel. I was not sure until after I filmed, how I wanted to use my interviews- direct, indirect. But during editing, I saw that the indirect interviews added the person making the documentary into the story. 

To be frank, the process of filming and interviewing was not very tedious. It felt as though my friend and I were having deep conversations about each other and with each other, and the camera was just recording, hence why it felt so special. The original interview with Martina is so much longer, because we just kept conversing about art, and going deeper. We really bonded during this time. 

For b-roll, I knew I wanted to take advantage of Martina's beautiful art. I decided I wanted to make a "gallery" of sorts. Pin up her work(in her bathroom) and take diverse shots of just the art, and Martina interacting with it. It felt scripted, but it was my full intention. I also just took shots of her painting, not even speaking to her. I would just let her do her thing for a couple of hours and record it, that is where I got my best footage from. 

I edited my part of the documentary on premiere. I also put Martina and my part together, which was stressful because I had to take two disconnected pieces and make them linear. However, Martina's part, although different than mine, fit well with what I had. We both had very similar visions, as we had discussed before how we were putting this together.