Hello, and welcome to this live stream of a case study on how we found our documentary participants for our film, The Will to Change. A little bit about me, my name is Mark Lockie. I am a documentary filmmaker based in Calgary, Alberta and Chihuahua, Mexico. And I have completed three short documentaries which have screened at festivals around the world such as Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Mountain Film, Whistler Film Festival, and have won awards at festivals like Newport Beach Film Festival, Atlanta Docu-Fest, and most recently just last weekend, Winter Park Film Festival in Colorado.

Today we are going to look at a case study of our film, The Will to Change, and how we found the documentary participants for it. We’re going to learn about building trust with organizations who can connect you to participants, doing your research on the film and the participants in the film, doing pre-interviews with potential participants of your film, keeping in mind the goal of your film, and finally making the ask of your participants.

So just as a bit of a background, we were commissioned by this non-profit to create a documentary on the problem of homelessness in the town of Cranbrook where we lived at the time.

The goal of the documentary was to destigmatize and to create empathy for people currently experiencing homelessness, as recently the town had experienced a sharp rise in homelessness as did many cities across North America. And there was a bit of a debate about a new shelter that was about to be built. So the organization wanted to create a documentary to help people understand the perspective of people currently experiencing homelessness.

Now how did they get into contact with us? That’s a good question. And this leads into tip one.

So they didn’t approach us out of the blue. We had actually worked with another program within the Umbrella organization on my second promotional video for a non-profit. They loved the video, they thought it was really good, and I actually interviewed one of the people in that film for my first documentary, which is called New Roots.

Further online, I actually arranged a meeting with the executive director of the non-profit to explain what I did as a filmmaker and as a marketer and help just set the bar to just help her get to understand who I am and what I do.

So that led to her spreading my name around the organization to different programs.

And eventually this program, the homeless program came up to me and asked me if I wanted to do a documentary with them. And I loved it. The idea, I thought it was very important story to tell. I had worked in the downtown Eastside in Vancouver for quite a while at a bar. I’ve seen firsthand the challenges that a lot of people experiencing homelessness have and I wanted to do this story. So building trust with the organizations or gatekeepers, that is how you can go about doing it. Showing your passion, showing your commitment, having simple talks before pitching or before going out there and asking for a story. It takes a little bit of time, but it’s well worth it.

Next up, you need to do your research. We didn’t just jump into interviewing potential participants for the film. We needed to learn a lot more about the issues at stake. Sure, we can find out about it from our contacts at the non-profit, but it’s almost better to just go directly to the people that are experiencing the problem in the first place. Now I’m going to be honest, I was a little bit reluctant to take this step, but my partner in the film convinced me that this was a really good thing to do to know more about the issue and it wound up being for the best. So what we did is we had our contacts arrange a focus group with a number of people currently residing at the shelter.

And we went in and we asked them about their experiences with homelessness and the stigma that they faced and the challenges that they faced getting themselves clean or out of homelessness. Some of the misconceptions that we were told about include, this was from our, we heard about this in the newspaper, but a lot of people in town thought that people experiencing homelessness were being shipped to our town from elsewhere on buses.

A lot of people think that people are homeless because of substance abuse issues. And yes, while that is a contributing factor, a lot of times it’s not the only factor or it’s not even a factor at all. A lot of people think that they’re unworthy of compassion or respect, that they’re not people, that they don’t want help themselves. And that they don’t, a number, a big one is that people experiencing homelessness don’t want to work.

So after the focus group, we needed to find out who was going to help us with the film. So we conducted a series of pre-interviews with, I believe about 10 potential participants of the film, 12 potential participants. And we did these one-on-one to find out more about the personal experiences.

And we didn’t just include people currently experiencing homelessness, we also included people who in the past had experienced homelessness because we didn’t know which direction we wanted to go for sure.

And I think it just helped getting different perspectives. We also wanted to show, we definitely wanted to have somebody in the film who is out of homelessness because what that does is it shows that there is a path out of homelessness for people.

So in these pre-interviews, a few tips that we had were it was very important for us to be transparent about what it is that we were trying to achieve with the film and why we wanted potentially them to be a part of the film.

We also had very specific questions that we asked and we made them feel comfortable. We told them if they don’t feel comfortable answering any of the questions, that’s completely fine. You don’t have to. We didn’t push them in any direction. We just wanted to know and gauge their trust, their confidence with telling us this story.

This is one of the big keys. You need to listen carefully and intently to what they are saying. In this case, it was important for us to not pass any judgments upon them because that would make our situation a lot worse. We really needed them to feel comfortable to share their stories and to let them be in control of what they wanted to share or what they didn’t want to share.

After we completed the pre-interviews, it was time for us to make our selection of who we felt would be interested and to confirm their participation. This was more complex than you may think because we had goals that we needed for the film. We needed to make sure that the people that we selected had, the three people that we selected combined, challenged all of the stigmas that we had constructed in the misconceptions portion.

We needed everyone to be originally from the area or have really strong ties to Cranbrook for that reason for them to be there. We also needed to show that there are hardworking people that are currently experiencing homelessness.

They are not all lazy bums. There are a lot of people that have worked their entire life and are on the verge of homelessness.

We also didn’t want to shy away from the fact that these people had experienced substance abuse issues in the past for various reasons. A lot of times it’s due to trauma, but we could not hide that fact.

Lastly, we wanted a range of people from younger to older to show that it covers a wide part of the population. It’s not just confined to young people.

As well, because indigenous people are unfortunately vastly misrepresented in the homeless population compared to the general population, we felt that it was important to if we could include an indigenous person within this story, if they were willing to participate.

In the end, we decided to focus our efforts on people who had experienced homelessness in the past or were very close to experiencing homelessness in the past.

We felt that we didn’t want to put somebody who was going through challenges right at the moment in the spotlight like this. It was better to tell a story from people who had done it in the past.

Now going on to the ask. How exactly did we narrow it down from 12 to 3 and how did we make the ask? This was important. We did the asks over a phone call rather than through email or text message.

It’s more personal. You get to hear their feedback right away and you get another chance to stress the importance of what it is that you’re doing and why we need them to help.

There’s a few things that you really need to be clear on when you’re making the ask. You need to be clear. Tell them exactly how the film is going to be shown, where you want to show it, potential consequences for them and ways that you can protect them. Cranbrook is a very small community. There’s only 30,000 people and a lot of people are going to recognize the participants that we chose in the films. Some ways that we chose to protect our participants was not sharing their names because there is a lot of people who also don’t know them. We wanted to protect them in that way. We knew we were going to put it on YouTube so we made the decision to moderate comments and moderate comments on Facebook and Instagram very intently during our marketing campaign so that way we can minimize the amount of negative comments that they may receive. Luckily at the end of the day we didn’t receive any negative comments. Everything we received was positive and it worked out quite well.

The process of the focus groups and the pre-interviews really helped us establish trust with our participants beforehand. By the time that we made the ask, the two male participants that we asked, while they were nervous about it, they were on board right away because they knew the importance of the film. It took us a little bit longer to convince our female participant because there were some personal issues she was dealing with her life. At the end of the day she also realized the importance of it and when she came back from her personal problems she was fully on board with the project and came onto it.

Here are some keys that you need to keep in mind when asking potential participants. If your access to participants is through organizations or other gatekeepers, you need to earn the trust of those organizations first. It requires a lot of time and effort on their behalf and a lot of people won’t help you unless you build that trust first. Number two, meet your participants in person beforehand so that way you can have a talk with them and be straightforward, explain the project, why you want to make it and why it’s important to make it. Next, ask them some simple questions about themselves. Get them talking.

Ask them about their experience in film. Ask them about whatever the topic of your film is, what they know about it. Most importantly after this is listen. Do not interrupt them, do not cut them off. Pay attention, show them that you’re listening, hide signs, nods, everything like that and that’s going to help you establish empathy and trust with your participant.

Be clear with them about where and how you’re planning on showing the film and what they can expect in return. For example, if you’re planning on taking it to film festivals, are you going to be able to bring them to a film festival premiere? Are they going to be able, if you’re looking to make a profit on the film, is there a potential for them to receive some of the back end of it? Is there an honorarium for them?

Anything such as that. And lastly of course, give them an opportunity to ask you any questions about the film and anything that they may have.