Research for my own doc

This was a little rough not gonna lie. Coming up with a solid idea was difficult because there is a lot of stuff that I want to do, but most of it is just inaccessible to me. Some of my ideas included covering a individual who is a furry and trying to portray them in a unbiased and truthful light, as the furry community is often looked down upon and judged while many of these people are just like everyone else. I think this could make for a pretty interesting piece, but finding a furry is...not really easy. I don't know anyone that is a furry and even if someone I knew was, its not something people are very open or adiment about due to the stigma associated with it. 

R.I.P. Furry Doc, I'll make you one day

Many of my ideas were like this, or me and my partner I worked with just didn't agree on a topic. I wanted to make our doc about something we cared about and not just some dull topic no one would care about. I started thinking about different things or events that I cared about and came to the conclusion that the Israel-Palestine conflict going on would be an interesting and compelling thing to cover. I had a friend that was Palestinian and was the co-president of the Muslim club at my high school so he would be a great interviewee. My partner, Gabi, liked my idea and so we decided that we would go with it.

At first, I thought of having an interview with a Palestinian student and an Israeli student and cut between each interview to showcase the opposing sides in the most neutral and unbiased view as I possibly could from my position. I thought, and still think, that this is important because I believe a lot of the information that is presented about the conflict is often from extremes on either side which can lead to disinformation. However, when discussing with our teacher, we pretty much concluded it may be better to only focus on one because it just a pretty sensitive matter and it was just easy to screw up if we did both interviews, so we stuck with the view of Palestine. 

In order to write the questions, me and Gabi did some research into the issue so that we weren't going in super blind into the interview. We watched footage from past conflicts and the current war Israel has waged against Hamas. We looked at videos and read articles covering the history of the conflict. A good and simple overview that was helpful was this youtube video by Vox. This information led us to being able to create questions that were more informed and centered around the responses we wanted from the interviewee, Yousef. Since the doc was now only focused on Yousef, we wanted to make the piece more personal and focused on his experience of the war at home, with the impact it has had on him and how he may feel the lingering effects of the war on his own life. We wrote questions focusing on this aspect of the doc as well as questions asking about general information over the conflict.

Apart from writing questions, we also made a potential shotlist for b-roll. This wasn't the easiest thing in the world due to the subject matter and since we only had one subject, but we came up with as much as we could think of. Although me and Gabi were pretty sure we would use archival and existing footage of the conflict as b-roll, we still wanted to get some just in case, and that ended up being pretty important later on when we were editing. 

Yousef, the interviewee, was a friend of mine, so I came to him about the idea asking if he was comfortable sharing, and he was super down for it. We set up a date which would be best for us, and that was that.