That day, I spent approximately 3 hours gathering the maximum amount of B-roll of the store possible, filming my mom, her coworkers, employees, inventory, and decorations, all in attempts to demonstrate the hard work, perseverance, and happiness Fernanda illustrates in her redirected path. Below are a few clips that unfortunately did not make the final cut of the documentary, yet nonetheless perfectly highlight the positivity and beauty of her current career and newfound life.
The following day, on November 19th, the time came to conduct the interviews with Fernanda and her husband Guilherme (my dad). In order to do so, I traveled to Lauren's house to pick up the tiny microphones she purchased for the occasion, which she had already experimented with through Joey's interview. Collectively, we concluded microphones would be crucial to gather the best quality audio possible, attempting to uplift the effective translation of our documentary's message to audiences. After gathering the mics, I tested them out myself at home; enjoy this clip of my dad complaining about the way I placed the microphone onto his shirt:
Me: "You look weird."
My dad: "Of course I look weird, (in Portuguese) this thing is here on my neck..."
After multiple interruptions from my two brothers and various instances where my mom asked me to turn off the camera so she could translate her thoughts from Portuguese to English with less pressure, I had completed the interview process. Consequently, employing the information I gathered from both Fernanda and Guilherme regarding their journeys, I was able to continue my search for B-roll, beginning the process by diving into my mom's photo albums.
During my photo-album journey, the primary elements I searched for were college and immigration memories. Specifically, I felt these two life events were crucial to exemplify through archived images, considering the fundamental effect both her studies and move to the United States implicated on her career switch. In other words, by eliciting pictures of Fernanda from both the instances, I hoped to demonstrate to audiences the subject's story in a more clear, visual manner, attempting to diverge away from simply including clips of her interview as she dictated the events. Below are some of the images we incorporated into the documentary.
However, the B-roll journey was not yet over. In the interview with my dad, the topic of immigration laws was touched upon, a subject I felt would be best illustrated through information-backing text. After researching the regulations my parents referenced, I discovered two websites backing their statements: USCIS.gov and Travel.State.gov, both of which I incorporated screenshots from in order to better validate the facts to the audience and maintain consistent viewer comprehension of the matters discussed.
Moreover, as stated on my last blog post, my group and I decided Fernanda's story would require extensive staged B-roll exemplifying the subject's career at Globo TV, considering her lack of raw footage from the time period. Together, my mom and I searched her computer and files for past set-design projects that she could "pretend" to work on for filming, clips I felt were crucial in order to properly illustrate to audiences the extent of her involvement at Globo and her love for and dedication to the mise-en-scene craft. In addition, following the interviews, it became abundantly clear that we would need to gather staged B-roll of the subjects with their families as well, a mission we quickly resolved. Given both of their discussions on how their career change has benefitted their personal home lives, we felt this facet was crucial in maintaining the consistent, visual-dependent storytelling we planned on constructing for the documentary.
Here are some of those staged videos:
While conducting the staged footage, I came to the conclusion that, in order to illustrate Fernanda's set-design work to the fullest extent, we would need to incorporate her projects alone as well, instead of merely including the staged clips of the subject "working." As a result, I dove, once again, back onto my mom's files and computers, attempting to gather animated videos of the sets she digitally built for Globo during her employment. Luckily for me, Lauren, Abby, and Riley, my mom understood the value of her work and treasured nearly all her projects, providing us with a pool of B-roll to select from. Below are a couple of the animations we decided would be beneficial to our documentary.
The hard part was yet to come...
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