Ron Wilkerson set out to document the experiences of Black education administrators in West Virginia, and I was brought on to produce the interview series. Twelve subjects total — Barbara Cary, Betty Spencer, Larita Kellem, Patricia Wilson, Tiffany Plear, Sharon Banks, Sandra Evans, Clinton Giles, Richard Evans, Scott Swayne, Henry Graves, and Debra Shelton — each sitting for a full interview session.
The production side was straightforward but had to be consistent across all twelve. Multi-camera setup with Blackmagic, professional portraits for each subject, and clean audio throughout. When you’re doing a dozen interviews for a single project, the challenge isn’t any one session — it’s maintaining the same quality and feel across all of them so they hold together as a series.
I also designed the documentary one-sheet and produced DVD masters for distribution. The one-sheet needed to represent the scope of the project at a glance, which meant being thoughtful about which portraits and pull quotes to feature.
This was the kind of project where the content is genuinely important — these are firsthand accounts from people who shaped education in this state — and the production just needs to honor that.