I think it was after my third year of attending Sforzando String Camp that I first had the idea of making a documentary about it.
For those reading this with no clue what Sforzando is, it’s a yearly one-week camp specifically for young Christian stringed-instrument musicians. My brother and I have attended it ever since 2005, the year after it was started.
The documentary was a fantastic idea at the time, and I wanted to jump into it the very next year. There was only one problem: I had no plan. I had a chance to talk very briefly to the camp director about it that next year, but it didn’t go any further than that. And I still had no idea how I would even begin to approach such a project.
A few weeks before 2009′s camp, a fellow camper contacted me through my site about the idea of a documentary. That’s when I discovered that there were more people than just me who wanted to see a project like that happen. And that’s when I started to think about a creative approach to it.
Below is a narrative on what we did from project begin to project end (well… almost project end — it’s getting close to done). I learned a lot going through the project, and hopefully others can glean some ideas from the process I went through.
Pre-production
• Story Planning
Obviously, it’s hard to write a script for something that happens unpredictably in real-time. The only way to approach documenting such things is to have a general idea of what you’re going into, and how you want to tell the story.
The documentary I planned at first was a very different film from the final plans before 2010′s camp. And that was different than the film we shot that week. And that was different than the film I edited.
In a word, plans change. Here’s how the progression looked like for me:
Plan 1: Completely story-driven in a reality-documentary style (with at least 5 cameras)
Plan 1.5: The original plan seemed too big; instead of simplifying, I decided it would be better to shoot a trailer one year and make the actual film the next.
Plan 2: Simplified, cutting out the extravagance but leaving the story-driven focus (2 cameras)
Shooting: After the shoot, I thought the story focus had been lost because of some mistakes I made.
Post: To my delight, a story focus came into view again.
The common thread running through my ideas for the approach consisted of a couple core elements:
Interviews for narration and information
Classes for interaction of campers, and information
Concerts for music
In hindsight, I’m very glad the Lord led me to simplify the plan.
As the start date of 2010′s camp drew nearer (July 26), I began the real prep. Here’s what I had to prep for, and what I did:
Interviews — After making a master list of camp faculty and staff, I then created interview questions for each person. A few questions were standard for everyone, but since each person would be filling different roles in the camp, it was important to have specific questions tailored to each one.
Story Outline — Though I couldn’t write a script or predict what would happen during the week, I could outline the story I wanted to tell based on my experiences with the camp in previous years. In it I included general topics as well as who to interview for each one, and ideas for how to shoot some things. This outline also became a blueprint for the first cut in post.
Shooting Schedule — The camp’s schedule was the biggest unknown factor crucial to the shoot. The camp has three levels of orchestras, two beginner classes, and a harp ensemble; all of these are going on at the same time in the same building, using the same rooms at different times.
Because I had no idea what the schedule would look like for 2010, I could only outline the classes and sessions I knew we would need to shoot. This would enable us to quickly make decisions on what to do once we were on location and had a schedule in-hand.
General Release — To cover the shoot legally, I created a general release sign which announced what we would be doing, and that anyone entering the building would consent for their “voice and/or likeness” to “be captured on still picture or motion media, and/or audio…”
• Crewing
I briefly mentioned above that my original plan called for at least 5 cameras. And a $2500+ budget.
But, through the Lord’s leading me to simplify and follow His direction, the budget disappeared and 5 cameras would have been serious overkill. One of my best friends, Geno DiMaria, graciously accepted my invitation to help on the project. He came up a few days before camp started, so we could go over the plans and prep for the shoot.
We went over the story outline and tentative schedule together, and I tried to prepare him for what would possibly happen during the week.
• Final Prep
After we’d figured out our action plan for hitting the ground at camp (we would be arriving on Sunday, July 25, with just a little bit of time before my brother needed to be in for his orchestra seating audition), we prepped equipment and made sure everything was ready. Unfortunately, I forgot the crucial step of ensuring that Geno’s camera’s settings were exactly the same as the two I would be bringing… Which resulted in the first minute or two from his camera being unusable, because of the stark difference in image.
Here’s what we had for the shoot:
- 3 Panasonic DVX100Bs
- 3 shotgun mics
- 1 lavalier mic
- 2 tripods
- 1 camera shoulder support
- 1 Steadytracker camera support
- 1 Lowel light kit
Before we knew it, July 25 had come, and some time after two o’clock that afternoon, we found ourselves very much in:
Production
The first thing we did after finding a place for our gear, was to look at the schedule. That was a bad call on my part — we could have looked at the schedule anytime, because there wasn’t much to shoot during Sunday afternoon’s auditions. The main thing I wanted to get was Tyler’s audition, and I nearly missed it.
After that less-than-stellar start, the rest of the afternoon went fine. We shot some b-roll, looked at the schedule more, put up release notices, and spent time with friends.
The next day was when the real work began.
• Interviews
After the first day, I realized it was going to be very hard for me to focus on shooting the story while coordinating 19 interviews in two locations. And those 19 didn’t include parents or campers.
I really should have thought about having an interview coordinator beforehand, but thankfully, my dear Mama stepped up and filled the role. It was such a huge help to be able to run around shooting what we needed to shoot, without worrying about the interviews. She would check my shooting schedule, then work around it to set up interview times.
My two biggest regrets about this part of the shooting were: 1) shooting only a handful of parent and camper interviews, and 2) not shooting the first few as well as I should have.
• Schedule, From Geno’s Perspective
Here’s what Geno had to say about the nature of the shooting schedule:
“One aspect of production that I found hard to adjust to was on/off nature of our shooting schedule. While pretty much all film shoots are like that to a degree, often there is still much to be done when filming is not taking place.
But with Sforzando, once we had laid out our plans, labeled tapes, and charged batteries, there were times where we could even go hours in between shooting periods with nothing to do. Then there were occasions where we might have to run from one class to the next just to make it on time, and we would film for several hours at a time. This made it a bit hard to get into a rhythm, but overall was a challenge I feel we were able to overcome. We got everything shot that needed to be, and did it to the best of our abilities. I can’t wait for people to get to see the end result!”
• Lessons Learned
Before shooting Sforzando, I had the opportunity to shoot a video for the Peoria Bach Festival’s performance of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. It taught me some lessons that were valuable for shooting both classes and concerts at Sforzando. Among them:
Servo zooms are always better while covering an event than manual zooms. I’m not normally a fan of servo zooms, but when relying on one camera angle (which happens even when shooting with 3 angles), manual zooms don’t cut it.
Balance is extremely important for proper tripod shooting. The first night of St. Matthew Passion shooting, I had a mattebox on the front of my main close-up camera. Big mistake. That thing was heavy, and I had to literally hold the tripod handles down the whole hour-and-a-half. That translates to straining muscles, which leads to shaky tripod shots. Which is not cool at all.
Two handles are better than one on a tripod. My preferred method of shooting this way is to place my body against one handle, and control the tripod head by using the other handle. It adds stability, but also leaves one hand free to adjust camera settings on the fly.
Originally I was planning on using only 2 cameras the whole time, but Geno thought it’d be good to use the third camera we had for the final concert… We did so, and I’m extremely glad. Having the third angle to cut to in post helped quite a bit.
Besides not shooting enough parent and camper interviews, I regret not catching more of the interactions between campers themselves. I had plenty of teacher-to-camper interaction, but very little outside of class times. Even though we were pretty busy most of the time, there were plenty of downtime moments I could have utilized, and didn’t.
Post
After taking a week or so off for recovery from production (and to spend time with Geno before he had to go home to South Carolina), I spent a week capturing the 45 tapes we shot. My first priority was to edit the concerts, which I completed in a couple of weeks.
Other responsibilities prevented my starting on the actual documentary editing until December — but when I started, it was my goal to have a rough cut by the end of 2010. To help with assembling the footage (45 tapes worth is quite a bit), I transcribed the interviews into text documents so I could quickly see what people had said without having to scrub through footage.
I used the story outline I had made in pre-production as a blueprint for the rough edit. I didn’t follow it completely — during the editing process I tried to rely on wisdom from the Lord on how to put together the story. There were times when I seriously wasn’t sure where to take it, and He gave me the understanding I needed to continue.
During the week of production, people would ask how long I thought the documentary would be, and I usually gave an estimate of 30 minutes. The rough cut was around an hour, fifteen minutes — because it needed to be.
Once the rough cut was complete, my Mom and brother went through it a couple times with me. We changed the order of segments, cut out a bunch of unnecessary stuff, added some music, tweaked audio, and generally worked on the overall flow. Geno then critiqued it. After I finished going over his notes on the edit, I color corrected and graded the entire timeline.
In Conclusion…
As of now, the completion of the project is literally right around the corner — artwork been designed, credits are done, and the edit’s pretty much locked.
Lord willing, the first DVDs will go on sale during this year’s string camp.
This entry was posted by chadstembridge on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is categorized under All, Filmmaking, Projects and tagged as 2010, documentary, film, sforzando, sfz, string camp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Here's what people are saying:
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I was glad to be able to help with various aspects of production and post-production. It’s looking good! Love you!
Beth Stembridge 
Sage 
Kyle DePriest 
February 7, 2011 at 12:38 pm
So excited!!!!!!!!!!! Can’t wait to see it, Chad!!!!!