Katchchateevu Short Documentary

Professor Rohan Gunaratna

sovereignty or fallacy?

When the Indian PM made a shocking statement about a tiny Islet belonging to Sri Lanka Professor Gunaratna couldn’t sit around and watch people talk smack. We contracted us to help make an educative short documentary video that explains this historical issue in great detail and clarify why the Indian PM was making this statement.

We were happy to help of course. We planned, filmed, edited and created all the motion graphics used in the video.

Creative Challenge

The challenge was ensuring that the professor was prompted with all the relevant questions during our interview while also ensuring we are getting material that can be crafted into a story. If its going to be a documentary we need it to flow and tell a cool story.

Outcome

In the end we created a stunning and highly educative documentary episode that is out on Youtube. Its a timeless piece so whenever this issue pops up this video will also resurface.

The Process

This was one of our first documentary style projects with the professor. We needed it to be perfect. So we spent quite a lot of time and energy in the preproduction process. Trying to figure out a good series of questions that will both cover the issue and also help us tell a story.

Our question list

The time limit with the professor was also a challenge. He was in the country for a short while and only gave us 2 hours with other material that needed to be filmed for a different video as well.

Screenshot of our shot list

However we were able to make do because our pre-production process helped us figure out a great location to film, had the right questions to ask and managed to cover enough of the story to create the video on time.

Hiccups along the way

A few blunders did occur. We planned to use a projector background to get some interesting backdrops, but the projector wasn’t working well with our camera and we were on such a short timeframe that there wasn’t enough time to trouble shoot the issue. In the end we ditched the projector and re-oriented the scene.

The results

In the end we spent a few weeks in post with the video. Focusing a lot on using motion graphics to help tell the story. This specific video had a lot of motion graphics shots which lengthened the post production time.

But in the end we produced something that was extremely interesting and helped tell this story once and for all.