After the first meeting with Sylvia we realised immediately that learning was a big part of her life (and she confirmed it several times) and we felt that we had to somehow capture that in eight minutes. Sylvia says that her life has been divided into parts: her childhood, her teaching and her involvement in community services. We discovered in the time spent with her that within these parts of her life were several incredible journeys. However after several hours spent going through footage what stuck with us was the great companionship she shared with her husband Manuel Gelman. It really seemed to resonate from the footage and because he was such a big part of Sylvia’s life we decided to focus on that. We learnt that they travelled quite frequently for long periods of time so as soon as Sylvia told us that there were slides from her travels we knew that we would have to use these. Moreover Sylvia has a lovely narrative voice that blends well with the projection of the slides. Our approach seems to fit, not only with Sylvia’s outlook on learning and knowledge but with her vibrant and colourful personality as well.

Also, we tried to keep the entire piece as simple as possible and focused on pockets of travel stories with her husband; little gems that would work with the slides and also convey Sylvia’s experience from those travels. The actual timeline is framed around Sylvia’s comment on her husband being “the linguist” and herself being “the scientist” and other traits that belonged to them as individuals. You find that the piece consists of the actual stories of each slide and general details about how they met, her view on travelling; this inter cutting was our way of personalizing the piece.

Along with the slides and footage of Sylvia we also decided it would be lovely to film certain objects that are significant to her travels that we could use as cutaways. We wanted a similar visual appeal that the slides have to maintain a standard aesthetic and theme for the documentary so we shot these objects against blacks and we lit it well and planned for tracking shots. At the end of the day only the shot of the projector made its way into the documentary because we found that as the shape of the film emerged most of the objects shot became less and less relevant. The projector proved to tie things together, making it feel like we’re watching 8 minutes of Sylvia through the projector. 
- Emma, Joelle, Xavier