Making the Movie Filmmaking tips, resources, reviews, news and links.

Production Notes on Homeschool Dropouts

Some good making-of info on a documentary about homeschooling over at Outside Hollywood:

After shooting all of our interviews, we transcribed the strongest segments (Adobe Premiere CS4’s new auto transcription feature almost worked, but not quite), and began to organize the clips. Despite already having a clear direction for the film, the material we got from the interviews suggested and provided many new points, and so the script was reordered and adjusted.

--Homeschool Dropouts Production Notes - Outside Hollywood

The movie was shot on the Canon 5D Mark II and from the trailer looks like it turned out pretty nice. I linked to their Shooting and Posting with the 5DmkII info post earlier.

Another thing I think is interesting, and I'm only judging from the trailer, so I may be wrong, but this looks like it might be one of those 'super-niche' movies that has a very narrow audience (homeschooled Christian kids who are considering dropping out... when the rainbow is enuf). Using the auto-transcription, the 5D workflow, the batch processing of all audio -- all of a sudden you have financial viability for such a narrowly targeted doc. These are some very clever filmmaker/producers.

I'm wondering if they are the spearhead of a trend of "unobjective issue documentaries" -- not the giant Michael Moore types of issues, but the very targeted kind of issues that matter to a small group of people, but matter very much.

About J. Ott

John Ott is a writer, filmmaker and futurist. Follow him on Twitter or Like him on Facebook.