A GIANT Conversation with Director and Filmmaker Thomas Verrette
This week, director and filmmaker, Thomas Verrette, joined The GIANT Room for a special live online workshop focused on documenting fascinating stories.
Watch GIANT creative prompt inspired by his work on the documentary Zero Gravity, currently being screened at New York International Children Film Festival. Zero Gravity follows a group of California Kids as they work on a coding project for NASA.
During our live workshop, GIANT participants had the chance to ask Thomas questions, receive feedback about their ideas, and provide feedback to him about his documentary. Here we share a snapshot of the conversation we had with him during the workshop:
Welcome to our live workshop! Would you please start by telling us about yourself and what inspired you to make a documentary about kids and NASA?
Since I was a kid, I was obsessed with space, cosmos, stars, and planets. Growing up watching Star Wars and Apollo 13, I just loved it and always got me thinking anything is possible out there in space. In a way, “Zero Gravity” is your dreams in space! That obsession never left me and became where my imagination stayed relatively the same from a young kid to an adult as a filmmaker.
Then I found out that there is this group of kids who code satellites in space for NASA and that blew my mind. I thought if I was a kid and that opportunity was available to me I would have jumped at it, and so I decided to follow their journey. I hope the documentary inspires millions of other kids to follow their dreams even if their dreams don’t rely on stars!
Does Zero Gravity actually exist or is it a myth? (This question came from one of our participants)
“I don't think there actually is a place for zero gravity. It's not like when you let go of something in the open space on the moon, it would never fall down. It does fall down but slower because there is still gravity,” GIANT participant pointed out.
Thomas replied, “That’s right. No matter where you are, there is some gravitational influence even if you're way outside the solar system - In fact the international space station is technically in low earth orbit.”
“Yes, so if there is no Zero Gravity, why did you choose that title for your documentary? Maybe you should have called it 0.0000001 gravity but not Zero!,” GIANT participant wondered.
“Well, now I’m questioning that decision!” Thomas answered, “Maybe I can add a small font at the top of the title “There is NO” Zero Gravity… but in my defense, I have to say the title of the film is metaphorical more so than an actual place. It’s like a lift off! What can you do if you reach for the stars to achieve your dreams?”
What’s the process of making a documentary? Do you plan it based on a storyboard with panels similar to how some of our participants are planning their stories?
Since my focus is on documentaries, I don't really have anything in the sense of a storyboard with panels. Having said that, in making a documentary like Zero Gravity, because we had a relatively large crew and different units were filming different parts in different locations, we gathered print out of shots from the film and shared among the team so that the other filmmakers could follow the style and everything feels cohesive and universal at the end. So what we have is more like a shot list that breaks down each shot of each scene and the order in which you plan to shoot them. Having that plan ahead of time helps the editing process later, so you know that those shots are going to work together in the best way. While filming the actual shots, there's so many things that you're worried about at the time, like where the sun is, or which angle a particular shot should be filmed from, and knowing that big picture helps you navigate throughout the process.
If you work on a fictional movie, then, yes, absolutely, you do need to prepare a storyboard in advance. Storyboards break down each scene of your movie, and that way you can show your cinematographer and production designer your vision for each particular scene, which is very similar to what most of you are doing in this workshop. The panels help you visualize what you want to do and see, and a great way you can share your vision with the rest of your team.
In theory, documentaries are about following a group of “real people” that are not actors and actresses. To what extent did you have to ask kids in your documentary to redo/act as opposed to actually just documenting them?
In Zero Gravity, there was very little recreating of anything. Not to say that recreating doesn’t happen in documentaries, but when you're working with kids, the moment that you try to get them to do something again, like if you missed the moment or whatever, they do it in a way that’s not “real” - in a way kids are good at giving a hint to the audience which parts are “kinda fake!” So I tried to avoid recreating scenes as much as possible, and instead, focused on documenting the kids' journey as carefully as I could.
During this workshop, we asked ourselves what kind of story we would document if we were going to make our own documentary. One of our participants thought of documenting a fictional story about a jellyfish. Can documentaries be about fictional stories?
Yes, absolutely. The ones I can think of are fictional documentaries for comedies like Spinal Tap - it's a movie that's pretending like it's a documentary! They are called “mockumentaries”. There's a moment where they're talking about they gotta make their show louder and turn it up to 11, if you've ever heard that joke. The mocumentaries I can think of are mostly from the early 80s but there may be more recent ones that I just don’t know about.
What is your hope for Zero Gravity and what’s next?
My hope for Zero Gravity is that it provides audiences of all ages with a sense of hope for the future, and that we can achieve incredible things together with hard-work, determination, and collaboration. And I also love for it to be utilized in schools and classrooms to inspire students to reach for their dreams and find their path that suits them, whether it be in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) or otherwise. I believe it’s important to prepare the next generation with the tools and access to opportunities like this and to inspire them to dream, as they are the ones who will be taking the next giant leap for mankind. It may one day be on Mars, but just as importantly could be right here at home on Earth too.
Below we have included a trailer of Zero Gravity, currently being screened at New York International Children Film Festival.