Beyond The Streets

Beyond The Streets is a short documentary that follows retired pro skater Sammy Baptista and his battles with mental health throughout his life. As someone who has skated throughout my life, I was extremely excited to collaborate on this project with one other person, Drew. Drew and I learned from our mistakes and realized the value of storyboarding, even for documentary shorts. After a few sessions in the library, we completed the treatment and decided it would be best to visualize our film beforehand.

Not knowing Sammy’s story well before the interviews, we conducted a practice one to better prepare questions. This was the smoothest pre-production filmmaking process I had undergone yet. The cinematography for this project was kept simple because we didn't want to distract viewers from the heavy subjects within the story. Since Drew and I were on different sides of the country, he handled all the editing. He would send me updates on frame.io, and I would add comments, continuing this collaboration for three weeks. Not being an editor was a lot less stressful, but I'm bummed that I missed out on the lengthy process of piecing together the story from interviews.