Making a documentary is certainly a unique experience that I was lucky enough to experience. In our interim, we were given an entire week and access to filming equipment. While the idea was to film the music-making process, our group decided to do something completely different. We instead focused on making a documentary on 9th and 9th. What inspired us to do this was an interest in the community created around all the local shops. 

We started with coming up with a game plan and an idea. Me and Rayne went around to all the different shops on 9th and 9th and asked them if we could have an interview with them. The thing about documentary making, however, is that sometimes plans change, so while we originally had Coffee Garden and Cloud Ninth on our list of places we wanted to interview we couldn't fit them into our schedule, but that's all part of the process, and that's ok. It took us a lot of time to plan and schedule interviews with all the different shops, but once we did, we had a few places that were willing to give us an interview. We had started with six different businesses, but the two shops canceled, so we ended up only having four left. We interviewed people at the fire station, Cafe Expresso, Pie Fight and Dolcetti. We learned a lot of cool things about each place and how it fit into the community. The firefighters especially were a unique experience, and it was my favorite part because I have an interest in becoming a paramedic, and the firefighter we spoke with had previously been a paramedic. The interviewing and planning processes took about three days, and after that it was time to start gathering all of our B-Roll!

B-Roll is what people call background footage you play during your documentary. It's to ensure your watcher maintains focus throughout the entire documentary because just watching someone talk can get boring. We dedicated a majority of Wednesday to capturing B-Roll using our Gimbal. The Gimbal is a handheld stand for your phone to make sure it stays steady even when you're moving, which is why we decided to use it instead of our camera. Sadie is the one who decided to use the Gimbal, and she said, “It just makes it easier than having to set up a tripod and still have it be shaky.” The goal of B-Roll is to capture things that your interviewee mentions while talking. For example, the DJ at Cafe Expresso talked about the sign in the front of their store, so we captured B-Roll of that. We also took footage of general 9th and 9th life for times we needed extra footage. The last thing to do was to put it all together through editing.

For editing, we only had two more days to complete the documentary, so it was a lot of pressure on our editor, Theo. He said, “I was really worried about not finishing it in time, with how much editing we had to do,” but he really pulled through and made a fantastic final project. We tried our best to support Theo, but editing really is a one-person job, so the best we could was put in our input and hope for the best. We had started with almost 15 minutes of footage that ended up getting cut down into almost 5 minutes. One interview was even longer than the actual documentary! The other key factor of editing is including all the B-Roll footage you took and knowing where to place it in your documentary. Timing is very important to make sure your cuts flow smoothly. Sometimes during editing you can run into bumps; for example, we needed to do some more filming of us talking about the documentary and giving an explanation as to what it was. We had to do this all on the last day, which didn't give us enough time, but we persevered and got it done. The last thing that needed to be done was to double check the whole film one last time, set up the music track, and finally export it. Once we were done, we sent it through right at the end of the day Friday. Matt even ended up showing our film to a couple of people in the Larimer, and we got really positive reviews like this one from Señora Oliva who said it was “Really good!” It was really powerful to walk out of this experience with a finished project, and I felt really proud of myself and the entirety of our team.

In the end I was super happy with how our documentary turned out. I would encourage those who want to do any sort of film making to try doing a documentary because it is a lot of fun, especially if you're passionate about the topic. It really is amazing to have something that was put together by so many people work out in the end. I am so grateful to be able to have done the film and music interim because it was one of the best experiences I've had.