Planning

 Growing up in a Catholic family, faith has always been a big part of my life. My mother, a very devout catholic, would always discuss how faith is the most important thing to have. She would say that faith connects people together and brings them closer. 

When I heard that we were making a documentary my mind immediately went to a concept I came up with last year. After a heartbreaking rejection from a film competition, I went to get ice cream with one of my best friends Zach. While we were eating we started a deep conversation about religion and even though we practice two different faiths we found that we related to each other. This led to us brainstorming an idea for a documentary on how faith as an idea and how it spreads beyond religion. 

After picking my documentary group I immediately pitched the idea and luckily my teammates (Nicolas, Zach, and Samuel) were on board. We started by thinking of what religions to focus on and initially picked catholicism, as Nicolas, Samuel, and I are catholic, judaism, as Zach is jewish, and hinduism. However, after thinking about the time we had (2 weeks) and how deeply we wanted to go into each religion we decided to stick to 2 religions. We ended up choosing to focus on catholicism and judaism as we were the most educated of those 2 and had connections in our church's/temples to get interviews. 

After finalizing our topic we called that night to work on an outline and structure. Over a two hour facetime call we completed an outline and wrote questions for potential interviews. We decided that we wanted to interview a priest, a rabbi, members of each congregation, and a theologist. 

Here is our complete outline document.

The next day after the call we planned out we sent out messages to St Gregory Catholic Church and Temple Beth Emet, requesting time for an interview. We got a response from Temple Beth Emet quickly, giving us a date we could come in to conduct interviews. St Gregory took a few days and after a call we got a date to interview a priest. 

After researching theology professors in our area and emailing a few, we decided to go with Amanda Furiasse, a professor at Nova Southeastern University, as her schedule matched up with ours the best.

Our actual research delved into philosophy, as we wanted our film to have a philosophical aspect. Additionally, after researching various biblical stories we decided to put a focus on the story of Abraham, as it is a discussion of faith found in both Judaism and Catholicism. 

Overall, the planning went pretty smoothly, stay tuned for details on the production process!