When my sister got engaged, I commited to doing a short documentary about the history of her relationship to John Thomas (JT) English the Third. I learned a lot about my sister and now-brother-in-law. And I learned a lot about filming. They met in a King Soopers grocery store in Colorado, but King Soopers staff wouldn’t let us film there. So we ran down to a gas station at midnight, and the clerk said, “yeah do whatever you want.” So we filmed in the candy isle of a gas station convenience store. I shot the entire thing in 10 minutes, with an average two takes per shot.
I had never done a re-enactment before, so this was a grand experiment, and a mistake actually. I was editing the piece, wondering what visuals (archive photos from their college albums, etc) I might have to use with the finished audio segment I had edited together. Then I got the hot idea to just have them say certain lines from the edited audio, and I would try and sync the movement of their mouths on top of their interview audio segments. So that was the starting point.
Then with the approach decided, I had to come up with a shot list. So I just listened to the audio segment play back, and just started linearly writing down in my head how it might play back. I often do this when listening to This American Life, a radio program that is one of the most visual forms of journalism out there, in my opinion. I digress. So I came up with a linear shot list, and some of the shots had a quote or two that I wanted them to say. I had, for instance, written down on a post-it, “over Macy’s shoulder, get JT coming around isle, checking Macy out.” When we filmed the shot, after two takes, I knew I had what I needed. So editing was super easy, just setting in and out points.
The other cool thing about this was that as a re-enactment, I got to use the real people, and they got really into it. So it might classify as a ‘docudrama’, but hey, whatever the case may be, it was fun, and got some good laughs at the wedding reception.
I have to thank, of all people, the New York Times for supplying some great ideas and inspiration from their series of wedding videos entitled “Vows.”
~Chris.
December 16th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
This is such a sweet and interesting story, kind of a story we need more of in this world. Macy and JT are such “naturals”; I love their facial expressions as they so remind me of my own reactions during my “first meetings”. Your video has resurrected some of my best memories and I just wanted to say Thank You for that. Best of everything to you, your sister and your brother in law!
JG from Canada
PS. Pity King Soopers for being such PR clods…