Well, now that you’ve read all the theory… Want a little insight on how we dealt with it personally?

We’ll be honest. It wasn’t easy. It’s never easy to agree 100% with someone that you’re working with, even more so when you’re working with someone as close to you as your sister, and even more so when you’re working on such a personal and intense project.

We had a little bit of a meltdown on Tuesday, and all due to answering the list of questions that we had collected from Vani and David. To be more specific, we LOST IT when we had to answer the question “What do you want your audience to take away from your film?”. To have to answer that question in a way that both of us were happy with and satisfied, took us more time than answering all the others…

BUT we pushed on and got out of the hole together!

… and realized the whole thing happened because we thought we wanted different things from the project/we wanted to tell different things, when, in the end, it turned out to be that we wanted the same things all along, but have very different ways of expressing them and ourselves!

So HUGE THANKS to Vani and David for making us question what we know and what we want. It was tough, but it DEFINITELY worked.

We built a pitch that we were really proud of for the kick off meeting, and it was SO much WORTH IT!

We got amazing feedback from the Mentors and the Tribe. Here are some of their thoughts:

MENTORS:

  • Loved that we had a deep understanding of what we want; that we want a teaser and a poster by the end of STL, which are feasible goals.

  • Be open to feedback and changes.

  • Think about the LENGTH of the documentary, see if it’s feasible to apply to which festivals with the length that we want. Maybe start with something shorter?

  • Who is the audience that we are targeting it to?

  • Include our point of view; we need to be able to relate to the sisters

  • Share and work on the script

  • Is it Carmela’s story or our version of her story?

  • Be careful with the VFX, do it in a way that won’t distract from the story/won’t collide with the documentary style

  • Sound/music is HALF of the film, it won’t work if it’s just people talking. Include it as part of the bible

  • What is the visual style going to be? Get more specific with this

  • A title that doesn’t reference just her?

TRIBE: Jesús, Aishwarya, Filipe and Inês gave us GREAT references that we need to check out and sound amazing (video games, comics, films…). Dilruba gave us a very interesting question to think about: “What was freedom for Carmela, even the most mundane things?”; Cephas brought back a point that we had heard on our kick off about the point of view of the film; and Shelley sent us some good feedback after the meeting (an example of a VFX that we could use and the idea that maybe the way to go is public/philanthropic funding rather than private).

THANKS SO MUCH FOR THIS WEEK!! ON TO THE NEXT ONE!