Campbell, Like the Soup

Campbell and I have known each other since middle school, and reconnecting with her at college again was such a treat. That's why choosing her as out interview subject was such an easy choice. Campbell is that type of person who you can get lost in conversation with for hours on end and enjoy every second of it. In fact, that's what ended up happening at our shoot. We were not prepared for what Campbell was going to get us lost in, and two hours of filming later, we had an overabundant supply of material to use for this 5-minute documentary. 

My job in all of this was to ensure that the interview went smoothly. This was a group project for my Intermediate Documentary class, and I'm so happy I had the opportunity to work alongside Sara Grossman, a friend that I made through the a cappella groups on campus. Where I had a lot of knowledge on Campbell back in middle school and high school, her and Sara were closer friends in college. That said, it was more than natural for Sara to take a little more of a lead on this. Where Sara was the one conducting the interview, I worked more in the background: camera setup, lights, sound. Not expecting the interview to span close to two hours, we decided to come back another day to shoot B-roll.

The next day in class, we were told that a third member was to join our group: Patrick Johnson. Working with Patrick was also phenomenal. I had seen some of his narrative work before and was excited to bring him into the project. Acquainting him to Campbell went really smoothly because of the personality that she has. We decided that it would be best to put Patrick in charge of B-roll and some of the script editing once a transcript was made. With our collective effort into this project, I really started to understand the allure of working as a production since everything of mine up to this point was primarily self-made. The ability to learn from others and have that mutual trust in their work is something I definitely need to continue learning, but this project opened my eyes to that.