Why can't there be a great school for every kid in America?

This is the question put forth by An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim in his latest film, Waiting for Superman. Guggenheim follows five families trying to get their kids admitted into magnet and charter schools around the country. The admission processes in these cases are based on lotteries, and Guggenheim uses them as a throughline for the story, jumping off at different points to examine how teachers and administrators must battle the bureaucracies of local and state government for proper resources and programs.

"All these reforms have been created with the best intentions in mind, but the system itself has grown into a monster," says producer Lesley Chilcott, who collaborated with Guggenheim on An Inconvenient Truth, A Mother's Promise: The Barack Obama Story and the rock-doc It Might Get Loud.

We first meet the families in the fall of 2008 and follow them up to and in some cases beyond the lottery process in the spring of the following year. With families located in East L.A., Washington, D.C., Northern California, Pittsburg and New York, a different production crew was assigned to each.

While portions of Guggenheim's previous documentaries were shot on film, Waiting for Superman was shot exclusively in HD with the Sony PMW-EX3 and Panasonic AJ-HDC27 VariCam.

"The first model VariCam is 720p, as opposed to 1080p," Chilcott notes. "We knew we'd have a lot of older footage in the movie, and a lower-resolution camera would match it better. Also, that perfect 1080p look lends itself better to drama than documentaries. Our film is very real. We don't need to be too slick."

She adds, "But when you have the time to light a subject properly, the VariCam is one of the most beautiful HD cameras you can work with."

The VariCams were used primarily for sit-down interviews, while the EX3s were used in run-and-gun situations where the cameramen needed to follow their subjects into taxis, subways and school buses. According to Chilcott, there isn't a huge disparity between the two images; even with the different resolutions, the footage cut together perfectly.

Cameraman Erich Roland is another frequent collaborator of Guggenheim, having previously shot many of the documentary elements for It Might Get Loud. "The EX3's ability to overcrank and capture time lapse made it an invaluable tool," he says of the smaller camera.

Waiting for Superman makes its debut at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, and Chilcott is hopeful it will stir some of its audience to action: "A big chunk of the film is about the folly the adults have made of the system. We've lost sight of the kids and we're waiting for someone to come along, a superman, to fix our schools, but we can't sit around and wait anymore."