When we realized we wanted to do a documentary on the prescreen process, a lot of the research came from experience. Since the process was something that Isabel and I have endured for the past 5-6 months, a lot of it was just about knowing what to include and what to exclude, to ensure the story was told authentically while keeping the parts that are most important to communicating the message. However in order to effectively tell the story, keeping in mind that it's very personal and very vulnerable, there had to be research involved on how to navigate the storytelling.
The American Promise is a documentary we viewed in Stoklosa's class, and it made me reflect a lot on the prescreen process; prescreens held that same type of intensity and emotion, although the moral of both stories are completely unrelated. I admired how The American Promise strived to tell the story authentically, although the directors weren't exactly outside of the situation, and were subjects actively a part of the story themselves.
To understand how to achieve this effectively, I watched a few documentaries and I also looked up videos and articles for tips. That's when I found Mark Bone's channel, and he brought up some really great points about storytelling.
The main thing that got me was the primary question: "Is your film based on a topic or a story?"
If it's based on a story, it should have conflict, the main character of the film wants something; how does it resolve? That has pretty much been the anchor point of what birthed the structure of our documentary. We chose the story route; our documentary was treated as an introspective film; much more reflective of the process than "telling" of the process.
Usually when it comes to filmmaking or creating, these kind of choices just felt right to me, even if I couldn't explain why. After choosing "story", I dug deeper into some research and I found an article that made me feel extra great about our decision to treat the documentary as a story.
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