During my time with Gaylord Hall Productions, our class was tasked with making spotlight documentary videos about distinguished alumni for an event at our college. My classmates' assignments were all relatively straightforward, their subjects were all still living in the area or at least in Oklahoma, so they could just go out and interview them and easily grab some b-roll. My assigned subject, however, lived in London. I had to create a documentary video about her without ever being able to actually meet her. 

So I sent lots of emails. When it came time to do the interview for the video, I asked her questions over zoom while one of her coworkers helped her film it in London. When hosting an interview, it's really important to establish a connection with the interviewee, and to listen to their answers and steer your questions around what they want to talk about, to keep an ear out for interesting storylines for yourself in the editing room later. Problem was, the zoom connection was terrible. I couldn't hear half of what she was saying. But I still managed to keep it under control, and I got some really good material. 

Another big issue was acquiring B-roll. Our original plan was to get one of her coworkers in London to film her walking around town and at her office, but that didn't work out. For a while, we had someone from OU that was going and could have filmed for us, but that fell through too. So we got in contact with some of her previous coworkers and had them send in short congratulations videos, along with any pictures or videos they had of her. We went into the OU archives and managed to find one video of her in her time here. We made some creative problem solving decisions, and pulled together a video that made her tear up when it was played at the event.