Group Research and Planning

Before deciding on what we were going to do as a group, there was a lot of contemplation on what we could do the documentary on. We thought of possibly doing an investigative documentary that centered around high school students because that is what we know and what we are familiar with, but we could not really find a direction in that area that would yield great results.

Thankfully, one of our group members had a great idea for what we could do. Natalia, who is in my group, has a grandmother who had a pretty interesting life leading up to her immigration to Florida. She started in Cuba and emigrated from Cuba to Budapest; from Budapest, she made her way to Florida. We thought that it was something from which we could get a lot of real content that would enhance our documentary even further.

From there, we began to plan out some of the questions that we would ask her to get the best answers. For a lot of them, we asked her how she felt about certain things, not just what happened, to get the most authentic answers. Additionally, we planned out some of the b-roll to have something that we for sure wanted to include in the final piece once we went to film. We also created a specific structure for the documentary that we wanted to stick to before beginning to film and edit. We had picked our subjects, Natalia's grandmother and her mom, and we planned out a time with them to film and ask them questions.