Journey For Justice Blog Entry

The first shoot for the documentary Journey For Justice was an introduction to Mahamad Accord. I haven’t seen Mahamad since 2017 so there was a lot of catching up to do. Our team developed some questions for him to answer, with questions highlighting Mahamad’s advocacy work and his experience asking for Justice on unsolved murders from 2007-2014. The location to meet Mahamad was at GUUTO Somali restaurant. GUUTO is also a coffee shop and Mahamad had a coffee ready. I also shot an exterior shot of Mahamad walking into GUUTO Restaurant. 

The lighting setup was simple, I used one  fluorescent light to illuminate the GUUTO coffee shop

And a small five inch by four inch portable light and placed it close to Mahamad’s face to balance out the color. I also did a dual camera set up with the Canon C100 as the “B” camera and it had an 18mm to 35mm lens. On camera “A” I used the Blackmagic pocket camera with a 50mm lens for a tight close up shot on Mahamad’s face.

The interview went really well. One of the things that stuck with me was Mahamad’s thoughts on why Allies are important to advocacy work. Here is one of Mahamad’s quote: “When you are advocating and you have no skills, because there is no map to develop, one of the things that we realized is you’re going to need allies.” This quote stuck with me because advocacy work is really something that begins at the grassroots level and this was the theme I want to keep in throughout the film.