When drummer/singer Grace Evora recorded his "Best Of" live DVD, The Motion Factory created a behind the scenes documentary that tells the story of the reunion of musicians from all over the world, the practice, the hardships but most of all it shows the fun and comradeship between the musicians.

When making a documentary, preparation is important. A documentary tells a story and you need to know what that story is, otherwise you'll just create a sequence of shots that quickly become boring. But you never know in advance what's going to happen, so the story may change when you're filming. So you need to be well-prepared, but at the same time you need to leave room for improvisation. If something unexpected happens, you need to film it!

We started with an outline of the story, a rough shot list, etc. The shot list would also serve as a checklist that we have everything we need.

Why do you need a shot list? Most of the material was recorded on the day of the show and this can become very hectic and you may forget details. For example, in the final documentary, for each artist interviewed backstage, we wanted to show an image of the artist on stage. That meant we had to take close-ups of all performers during the show. To show the technical complexity of the event, we needed shots of mixing desks, lights, etc.  When you're running around during the day trying to film everything that's happening, it's easy to forget some of those details if you don't have a story and shot list ready.

No matter how well you prepare, things never go as planned. In this case, only hours before the main filming would start, the reporter we would use for the day (who would ask all the questions backstage) was unavailable and in the short time we had, we couldn't find a suitable replacement.

Luckily, it turned out not to be a problem at all. We started shooting the scenes we'd need anyway and then one of the members of the band offered to act as the reporter. This gave a very relaxed and funny twist to the documentary. Especially when later on other musicians also grabbed the microphone and everyone started interviewing each other. Some of the people were a bit nervous beforehand about the interviews and the fact that the musicians were now interviewing each other and almost turning it into a game gave a good impression of the atmosphere on the day. Without their help, we wouldn't have been able to capture that.

Afterwards

The documentary was planned to have different parts. One spontaneous part featuring mainly the events of the day itself and the practice and a part with interviews giving more background about Grace Evora, the complexities of organising an event like this, etc. For this we recorded separate interviews. Grace had the idea to show parts of the concert in the background while the people were talking, so we decided to shoot the interviews against a green screen.

A green screen allows us to record the interviews and later put in any other background we like. Although the original idea was to put shots of the musicians who were being interviewed in the background, this didn't quite work, because the background attracted too much attention. So we decided to go for a mixture: for some shots we but the background of the theatre while it was being prepared for the show. For some of the other shots we used background images of the sound check.