As the semester came towards an end, we needed to put together another documentary. After pairing up, we had to toss around some ideas. Ultimately we landed on doing a spotlight on Jimmy and his music. We were working with a limited time schedule and we had three weeks to get this film from idea to submission and within those three weeks was Thanksgiving break. John and I immediately got to work playing with story ideas and trying to figure out what approach we wanted to take
First up was shooting our A-roll interview. We shot in the broadcast studio on the C200 with a boom mic running into a Tascam recorder. We wanted to go with the black void background so we had to play around for a little while to get rid of any light that was falling on the background curtains. I got the audio levels set and hit record and then manned the camera during the interview while John held the conversation with Jimmy. This interview was really eye opening for us as it showed us some the why behind his songs that we were not expecting. His music really comes from his heart and he uses it as a way to try and convey how he is feeling and to rally people together. Our interview was cut short due to a scheduling issue with the studio we were in. We had to finish up our interview a bit quicker than expected so that others who had also booked the space could get in.
After the interview shoot I sat down and worked through the footage to try and pull our story line together. This was all just a roll interview with no supplementary footage at this point. After getting through a rough cut I brought John in and he helped me work the clips. Johns perspective really helped craft the story line and find parts that could be cut out. We were able to share this rough cut with our class and get some feedback that we took into a second rough cut. At this point we were about two weeks into our project and knew we only had a week left.
We had a B-roll shoot scheduled and tried to have everything planned out as we knew we did not have any time for reshoots. We did our B-roll Shoot in the photo studio which offered a fun set space. We used a variety of different lights, but angled them in such a way as to get a lowkey high contrast feel. I was really happy with the way things looked. We shot the B-roll on a Canon 5D. The smaller frame of this camera allowed us to greater mobility while still giving us the image quality that we needed. We started with some general shots of Jimmy with his guitar and some of his cases behind him. Then we grabbed a speaker and had him play along to some of his tracks. We played through each of the three songs two or three times so that I could grab a couple different angles to cut back and forth between.
Armed with this additional footage, John and I headed back to editing. We started by working through what was essentially the multi-cam edits we had. Once we had them worked through, we placed them within the context of the A-roll. Focusing in on these songs allowed us to trim parts of the A-roll out as well as bridge the individual sections we had. We then cut in the other general B-roll that we had to help cover some of the rough spots in the multi-cam and to round out the bridges.
Jimmy talked about how he came up with the concept for one of the songs while out on missions. He was out by himself by the water and the sound of the water was a big part of that moment for him. He grabbed a quick audio recording of the waves and was able to integrate that sound clip into the track when things were recorded in the studio. It felt like none of the B-roll that we had fit this moment right, so John drove out to a beachy area one evening right before dark and was able to grab some shots that filled in this hole that we had. That last week of getting everything put together was a stressful week, but we were really excited with how everything turned out.
We were able to screen the film in class along with the other documentaries that were completed. After the class we wanted to do more with the film and show it to others. We submitted it to the FMIs which is a film festival held at Stevenson with similar format to the Oscars. It was great to have our film screen alongside many other great films that day. It was a fun night to get all dressed up and watch these films. We were honored to take home the best documentary award that night. We also had the honor of screening our film at another film festival hosted by one of the other Baltimore colleges. At that festival Jimmy had the opportunity to perform which made the film mean even more to those who saw it since they were able to just previously see him perform.