Maximizing Time and Efficiency: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Our Documentary Project

It was June 6th and we were headed home from the studio when one of our clients gave us a call. They had just received a significant grant and were tasked with executing a project that had to have all filming wrapped by the end of their fiscal year end… June 30th.

While we have turned around productions in similar timeframes, the caveat was this project was centered around Rural Health and revolved around five key states…Alaska, Kentucky, North Dakota, Missouri and West Virginia. Our job at Mirar was to cover the first three.

If you know us, we have a struggle with turning down work. Yes, there are times we are not a good fit or budgets don’t fit, but we also weigh up the fact that we are in the fortunate positions to do what we love and provide for our families, so a pass from us is always weighed with much detail.

We assured our client we could do this and they put their trust in us to execute it. Now we always tell each client, we can be as hands on or hands off as you’d like. If you want us to run the show and alleviate that stress, our team is adept enough to run a project from A-Z, pre-production to post.

That same day, we began pre-production. This project was a documentary and a lot of the story would be fleshed out through our ability to maximize our interviewees time and move fast enough to capture engaging b-roll, content.

One member of our team handled logistics… not only the obvious, but also the master production calendar that had parallel projects between our team. One member of our team reached out to local contacts and scheduled zoom calls to prep our talent. One member of our team prepped our gear and formed a creative strategy of how we would shoot each interview and had this vetted by our client for approvals to ensure all content would be useable and achieve their objectives.

Once we began our first leg of the journey, we remained in constant communication with our internal team and relayed daily briefings to our client. This included stills of the day’s events, a recap of themes discovered and a constantly refined story began to unfold.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we traversed the country, used every minute of sunlight afforded to us — thankful for the 22 hour days in Alaska during the summer — established meaningful relationships and, most importantly, created powerful stories that ensured our client not only achieved its initial goals, but create a blueprint for additional investment!

Below are a few stills of an unforgettable project that we believe underlines what we do at Mirar so well.

We take every project very seriously and stress communication, alongside teamwork.

Make it matter.