This past week was spent getting logistics together with Kioa and his crew of dancers.

There seems to be a lot left to do with time quickly going by. My goals of this week was to ensure I could get a proper schedule worked out with Kioa about when we could do his interview filming as well as film B-roll with him dancing. He has a lot going on in preparation for a dance event coming up with him and his crew, but I would like to use that to my advantage to film him while he practices, I think it would make for some great coverage. In the meantime, I did attend one of his rehearsals with his crew, and was able to get all of them to sign talent release forms. I also gave Kioa a schedule of my availability and asked him to see where he can have free time for me to film what is needed. Below is a link to a reference video I took during their rehearsal.

#3

The other day I had the opportunity to sit down with Kioa and have a non-formal interview with him. I went over to his house and met with him face to face for the first time since I pitched this idea to him. Prior to this experience I had only been around Kioa twice in my life and that was 2 years ago. Outside of a dancer and business owner I really didn’t know anything about him, but I knew that was enough to have potential for a documentary story.

My goal with this visit was to get a feel for who he is and his story so I could get an idea of what type of questions to ask during the formal filmed interview. He told me about himself, who he is, what he does, and bit about his backstory. I purposefully held back from asking “deep impact” questions that I knew would elicit a large story or provoking thoughts. I want to capture those moments on camera when they are genuine. This instead has allowed me to come back to base and formulate my questions.

Now that I have come this far I suppose I have realized for the first time that was has made this experience unique compared to other interviews I have shot  or rather probably other documentaries is I really had no idea who my subject was or what he was about, making this first meeting almost mandatory. Generally people who reach out to others for a filmed interview have a good knowledge of who this person is and what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t reach out in the first place! Instead, I had to rely on my own subject to give me the sitrep. A very unique situation indeed.

Below are the notes I took during our meeting.