Where to start with all the information our brains have been absorbing for the past 2 weeks? The mentorships were no more about “general theory” and tips but completely focused on our project and current needs. However, we think sharing our process may actually be useful for someone out there who's also working on a personal project, so let’s see if we can summarize it for you. 

What's really cool about this program and the mentors we have is that we're focusing on very specific things with each one of them, which allows us to move forward without losing sight of any front, as we probably would if we were alone.

In our meeting with Vani, we talked about the importance of setting up the tone and style of the documentary and also remembered that we should always take into account the audience and what we want them to feel / to convey. Our homework after this mentorship was for both of us to individually write the character profile of the other one (since we decided the POV of the documentary would be the sister’s POV) and reading about color scripts and different documentary types: cinema vérité, expository, participatory, reflexive, impressionistic, experimental, poetic…

With Kris Pearn, we started looking at the script like we had never before. He started talking about the film using this metaphor where we were in a cab in NY and we had to build the map of the city (the structure of the film), so every turn and every corner would be the emotions of the film, which is the most important part. He said to ask ourselves: what emotion am I following until the next turn (a shift in the script)?
He gave us a million ideas on how to tell the story, which was very freeing in the way that we can make of it anything that we want (it's also terrifying...) It helped a lot to keep listening to him going on about the "versions" of the documentary that he was imagining (he'd keep repeating things like: "there's a version where...")

Last but not least, we had the first meeting with David Prescott, which we were extremely excited about. We talked a lot about how we view the different symptoms that we want to depict with VFX and how to try and find the way to give it cohesion with the rest of the film. He gave us a couple of amazing ideas that we need to explore, like starting to make the VFX more and more confusing or disturbing as the time goes by, to depict the worsening of the symptoms.
He also gave us a great tip: DRAW how we picture the individual scenes and think with images.

As you see, it's been a pretty crazy first couple of weeks. We can't wait to keep going and let you know how it goes!

PS: Fun fact, this week had an additional difficulty, which was that Clara was in Mexico, so working with a 7 hour time difference was something else...