Blog Post #52 - Struggles During Filming

     Now that my filming is all completed, I can create my final product. But before reaching that point, it is important to stop and talk about all of the struggles that follow this process. I have faced many difficulties that required on the spot thinking and major changes that had the potential to ruin my entire project. But in the end with significant effort, I made it all work and turn out better than previously anticipated. 

     The first major struggle I found was getting interviewees. My first ideas mentioned finding players, coaches, and parents to be interviewed for my documentary. I came to find out that many people are interested in sharing their lives on video. For players, it simply took a little bit of explaining what the project is and how it works to find people to interview and the selections made it easy to pick wonderful, extroverted girls who are not camera shy. With this, finding a coach was especially hard as no primary coaches were interested. From here, I decided to move on to our assistant coach, Mya Jones to be interviewed who agreed and did amazing. Especially as a woman, she created an interview with more relation to the girls and their lives. Lastly, I had to completely drop the idea of using parents as none wanted to be a part of this but thankfully, my other interviewees pulled through and provided me with plenty of content. 

    The second major struggle I wanted to talk about in this blog is the interview filming. As I had many ideas of how to manage the background and surroundings of the interviews so they would be optimal and easy for them, it was hard to predict the lighting and people in the background. So, I chose to lean into this effect, knowing I could later edit the clips and use the players in the background to create a deeper meaning, showing that volleyball is always on their mind. Along with this, my interviewees are not professionals, meaning they easily make mistakes and we have to restart. The best method to tackle this was to allow myself plenty of time for retakes and to laugh it off with them so no one felt embarrassed or hesitant in the next clip.

     My final major struggle was filming angles and shots. Since this is a documentary, it has to be based off of real things and events. Meaning, I could not easily set up scenes and shots that followed along with my ideas. It is not possible to be up close, getting perfect shots during a tough messy game without being in the way of the game. So, I ultimately decided to set up cameras at different angles, letting them film and giving me options on what content to pull out and use later on. With this, I also chose to prioritize the idea of the audience point of view by filming from the front row of the crowd to get good, clear view shots.