Three West

O.k. seriously, this one film has been an entire crash course in documentary filmmaking and sometimes this is what true learning is all about. This film has been an absolute struggle for me as I’ve mentioned before. When it came down to it, I was on the right path but I was just completely unable to put my story together. It’s taken me 2 years to get to a point where I finally feel like I understand what my story is and why I couldn’t see it before. I’d almost abandoned it.

Sure, I’d read many articles and books about shooting too much of “nothing” or not having a coherent story as being common mistakes made by documentary filmmakers. The problem is I simply didn’t see it. I planned my story prior to shooting. I thought it was a good solid story. However I did shoot more content than what would support my story and the reason why I did that was because I really didn’t know what my story was in the first place. What I thought was a good story was too immense. It was like trying to take an entire season or two or three of a reality show and making it into one feature length documentary. A lot of what I shot wouldn’t even support the story of a multi-volume academic release.

This past week I decided I was going to finish this documentary once and for all. I want to get it done and I want to do it well. So I went back over the footage again. As if a light came on in my head, I wrote out an outline that had a much narrower focus and picked out the footage I’d already shot which supported this story. I’m still in the process of doing this. Whatever is missing, I will arrange another shooting event with the twins.

I found what made this story so difficult was that I started to think I had two stories and my brain was unable to see the interconnectedness of two very connected concepts. My mind kept thinking, “well this movie is about twins.” and yet I had all of this footage about their family. Then it occurred to me that no, this film isn’t about twins. It is about two women with an awesome relationship and the film’s goal is to discover what makes their type of relationship possible. It turns out that their twin-ship, i.e. having shared a life and entered all the normal stages of growing up together has helped but the biggest contributor to their happiness and awesome relationship is their family, how they were raised, their family values and the continued efforts of their family to remain a cohesive unit. It became clear that the footage I have about their family supports the story of what makes these two women happy and why they have such a fantastic relationship with each other. It was equally important to point out their effect on their family as they represent a pivotal and vital component of their family’s lives.

Now let’s see if I can carry this all the way through to the final cut. My next hurdle is editing. I have concerns about my ability to edit this in a creative fashion as to resemble that of a professional documentary. I will certainly try. It’s very important that I produce the best film that I can.