John Forbyn and Dr. Dean Duncan, Theatre and Media Arts

While spending May/June/July 2009 in Paris, France, to conduct an Individual Field Study and complete my Honors Thesis, I worked to produce two short (4-8 minute) films examining the lives of immigrant students and refugees in France who have recently converted to the LDS church. My intent has been to contribute my films to the corpus of BYU’s Fit for the Kingdom documentary project where they would be featured in the website’s streaming video collection. Fit for the Kingdom films tend to focus on one individual at a time, so my intentions as to the subject/ characters I’m seeking were specific: I planned to make one film highlighting a “foreign” student who will eventually leave France to go back home, with the other examining the life of a refugee who may not have the option to return. Throughout the preparation phase, everything went according to plan, but the results began to diverge from my expectations over the course of production and now, in the post-production (editing) phase, I find myself in possession of two documentary film stories which, though significant and effectively accomplished, will not likely see publication in any form, even as part of the website collection for which they were destined at conception.

PRE-PRODUCTION
As proposed, I made contacts and made lists of identifiable potential interviewees and worked on coordinating a schedule permitting me to visit some of them during gaps in (or forays from) my field study work in Paris. I was not granted acess to the department equipment I had hoped for, and ended up purchasing my own small, HD prosumer camera. The process of becoming equipmentliterate was truly educational, and I gained much familiarity as I researched technical qualities and shopped for the camera I used. I gained a preliminary education in production modeling by desinging my own budget, accountability, and correspondence system.

PRODUCTION

As I knew that some subjects might discontinue or decline full participation, I planned to interview at least half a dozen individuals before determining which two stories to carry through editing and post-production. That need for varied sources and an adaptable production plan is yet another reason why the extra travel made possible by the ORCA grant will proved integral to the success of my project. I ended up having no filmable experiences in Paris, but my side trip to Lyon (revisiting an area in which I had served as a missionary) yielded three significant interviews. Shy and generally reticent as they were, it was hard enough to get people I’d spent days and months with as a missionary to let me film them, but we succeeded in filming two immigrant families, the Joulacs (from Lebanon) and the Opoku-Mensahs (from Ghana) as well as a sextagenarian recent convert, Simoene, who overcame (and continues to struggle with) severe motor disabilities to attend church. The head of the Joulac family, Jean-Luc, gave us a detailed account of a recent invention he was in the process of patenting, a canned-food strainer he planned to name “Nephi” in hopes of accomplishing some subtle missionary work. The Opoku-Mensahs told the story of their separate immigrations and shared their feelings about the role of music in their conversion and family home evenings. Brother Opoku-Mensah even recounted his experience of learning to play the organ and serving as the first organist in his district in the Church in Ghana. Simone told about her difficult childhood, abusive parents, and her years of rocky marriage and relatively unstable employment prior to meeting with the missionaries. Even her investigation took over a decade to abut in baptism.

POST-PRODUCTION

Finding a suitable HD video file decompression software took much longer than I had anticipated, but it was another self-teaching experience which yielded much beneficial knowledge along the way. Before I was finally able to decompress, view, and import my video files for editing, Simoene called me and expressed a desire that I refrain from sharing her story with anyone else, as she was afraid it was too private and too sensibile for general distribution. I agreed and assured her that I would only do with it what she would approve, but I still hope to find an occasion to present a rough cut of it to her to see if we might be able to compromise on something she could feel comfortable with. As for the footage from the Opoku-Mensahs and the Joulacs, upon reviewing what I filmed, I have been disappointed to realize that I failed to capture enough B-roll, or backup footage to be used as interstitial filler and transitional material for the inevitable gaps and cuts created in chopping up and assembling a documentary story. While the interviews offered by these subjects contain good, complete thoughts and anecdotes, the final product is lacking the visual language components which would qualify it for publication alongside the films of the Fit for the Kingdom series.

OVERALL EVALUATION

Both of these “setbacks” have taught me valuable lessons about what it means to be a documentarian. First, one has to be deeply conscious of the fact that, in order to gain access to the stories of other people, one must approach those people and cooperate them in a way that will earn and keep their trust. One must be true to them and their wishes. Second, one must be constantly, vigilantly aware of the technical and æsthetic requirements for a documentary story. Over the course of this project, I increased my awareness and improved my instincts as a documentarian, intentionally striving to capture an adequate amount of B-roll, for example. Inviting myself into relative strangers’ living rooms and unsheathing my camera proved a social challenge, however, and I ended up showing so much deference to their desire to restrict our filming times, locations, and subjects to only the parts of the family and parts of the house they felt comfortable with, that the filmed material I cam away with was unfortunately thinner than I wanted. I now have a better sense of how to be a bolder investigator while maintaining a sensitive and trustworthy documentarian.