Planning for my own documentary

 The first thing my group needed to do for the documentary project was to choose a topic. We came up with multiple possibilities in what we wanted to do but then we had to consider the fact we had a limited time to do it. We came up with an idea to do a documentary centered on poetry since poetry seems to play in a big role in our lives and we had a friend, Anenaa who became one of the main subjects, who was going to do a poetry competition exactly the weekend we had to film. After some talking of the topic we realized we wanted to talk specifically how poetry can help and affect people with dealing emotions and lives. So we had to plan when and where we wanted to film, We originally wanted multiple people in the documentary talking about how poetry affected them but we settled on two subjects one still in high school and the other in college who had poetry be big part of their lives. So we had to find a time date because the subject in college is out of town but luckily was back home for the weekend so we had to find a time they were free. The Highschool subject was easier to find a date since they were less occupied after their competition. 

Next we had to come up with questions to lead the interview to get responses that would be good to use and we came up with: 

• Talk about a piece

• Can you describe your experience performing at LTAB 2024 as a senior?

• 
  How did you get into LPS in the first place?

• Can you say that poetry helped you find yourself?

• How have you seen that poetry has helped you find a community?

• How has poetry continued to be relevant in your life after leaving LPS/graduating?

• Can you talk about some of the rewarding experiences that have happened because of poetry?

• How do you hope to take what you’ve learned through poetry in high school into your future?

These questions allowed the subjects a direction and they were open ended enough to get long response that end up very helpful when it came to having material cause we had a lot footage to work with and edit to make the documentary and we didn't need to refilm to find a way to make the interviews longer. 

Lastly we created an outline on how we wanted the order of the documentary to go and what we wanted to add as footage, which we decided to use archive footage, and how we were going to have the entire thing organized. 

The Planning made everything go extremely smooth and took a lot of stress off. I usually struggle to plan accordingly but the fact that i did in this project help me realize how necessary planning is to get a good outcome instead of scrambling to do everything on the go. 10/10 would recommend to plan everything even if you think you don't need it.