Pre-Production of the Documentary

  I had the idea to do a documentary on “unconventional art” for a long time. Back last year, I had heard from my friend in A level media that there was a documentary project. With my excitement for this project, I started to come up with ideas so far ahead. I first talked with my classmate Nadia, and we decided we were going to work together. I also discussed with my mom what would make a good documentary, and she came up with the idea to interview artists who work in a field where their art is seen as “trashy” to society. I loved that idea, as it would give me the opportunity to shine a light on an artist(s) who is put in the dark, so I held onto the idea until the following year. 

When the documentary project was mentioned, I knew that I was going to do it on an artist, but I wasn’t sure what type of art. Originally, I was just going to do a tattoo artist because it was an easy connection; my childhood best friends brother is a tattoo artist. After watching the Banksy documentary, I thought it would be really cool to interview a street artist, and I knew someone in my school interested in it. 

    We decided to take the approach to interview both a tattoo artist and a street artist. We wanted to focus on how they found a community in this hobby/profession that is socially unacceptable, and started to plan it out. 

    After speaking with our teacher, we decided to take a different approach. She pointed out the idea that our idea for the documentary was not too much about the artist, but more the art form. This would be a fine approach to take, but both of our artist have such amazing stories that we wanted to have a big part in our documentary. We came to the conclusion that we should make a series type on the two of them, and make two documentaries being more about themself. 

Me being very excited to create this, made questions months in advance. I made A LOT of questions to say the least.

I wasn’t sure completely how I wanted to approach the documentary’s structure, so I wrote down ever single question I could think of… This made it easier because I basically just chose from this bank when picking questions to ask going in.

We were supposed to make it a series of two short documentaries, but, things fell apart with our second interviewee. We waited till last minute, because I missed the first couple days of the project due to being sick. We were rushing and just didn’t have enough time to work something our between both of our schedules. 

With this said, we just elaborated on our first documentary, making it contain more information about the artist and the art form. 

We decided to film two days, one for b-roll, one for the interview. I wanted to incorporate him going through his sketchbooks for B-Roll, so we planed as that to serve as our b-roll, along with pictures found online.