The Final Countdown

Since the storyboard is done (wooo!), the production team have been putting an enormous amount of work into cutting out the parts of the interview for the documentary. So far, Mr. Vong's interview has been cut down to 13 minutes. This means that it is possible that our film will be longer than 39 minutes if all of our interviewee’s quotations are as long as Mr. Vong's. In my opinion, this would be a perfect length, not too long but also not too short, just enough to transmit the message to our audience.

The production team has also been responsible for deciding the pace of our documentary. They have been choosing where to include powerful pauses and when to cut out bits that are less necessary. During this process, it is important to learn to detach ourselves from some of our interviewee's beautiful words. Although they might sound amazing to us, they might not captivate the audience if we try to include them all.

Another especially important part of our development has been our search for visuals. It has been a challenge to find relevant and eye-grabbing footage to accompany our interviews. NFB has been a helpful tool for this purpose; their site has a lot of interesting footage shot in Cambodia. We are also going to use photos found in the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), who kindly gave us permission to do so.
We have learned that it is particularly effective to show and tell two different messages at the same time to highlight contradictions and nuance. We're attempting to find visuals which go well with words but that also might evoke an unexpected, different feeling. Not only will this technique help in the transmission of our theme, it will also add a bit of a challenge to our audience, keeping their full attention while watching the documentary.

Our posters have also been printed and our invitations sent! It is very exciting to finally see something concretely printed on paper, showing we’re well under way and now there’s no stopping. We have to work incredibly hard to have a finished and, most importantly, beautiful product by May 28th.

-Tais Costa
Storyboard and Research Team