Director/cinematographer Amy Rice got the idea to start videotaping Barack Obama after hearing his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. She contacted co-director Alicia Sams with her plan, and in May 2006 the two found themselves documenting the burgeoning political career of the still relatively unknown senator from Illinois. The result of their timely collaboration is the HBO documentary By the People: The Election of Barack Obama.

The initial plan was to follow Sen. Obama as he gave speeches at home and abroad. The filmmakers both had a feeling that he'd run for president someday, but as Alicia points out, “We were thinking it'd be a long-term process. We didn't think it would all happen so fast, but once we knew he was running, we knew we were going to be filming for the next two years.”

From February 2007, after Senator Obama announced his candidacy, Rice and Sams were shooting full time. The senator's people didn't want to have an entourage following him around, so the crew consisted for the most part of Rice with a camera (shooting SD with a Panasonic AG-DVX100B and then an AG-HVX200) and Sams on sound. At first, they got as much access as we wanted. They were able to sit in on meetings, come along to social events; basically seeing all of the things the press usually doesn't get to see. “We had to make sure we differentiated ourselves from the press,” Rice says. “Here, we're archivists.”

By the summer of 2007 they'd amassed 180 hours of footage. They asked editor Sam Pollard to take a look at what they'd shot and help them single out the viable storylines. It turned out that some of the most interesting storylines in By the People aren't about Obama at all. “Obama is so even-keeled all the time, so relaxed, which is great for a politician but not so great for a documentary,” Rice remarks. “It's a good thing the people working with him on the campaign had interesting stories.”

“We wanted to show people not only the real Barack but also the people around him and how he affects them,” Sams adds. These people include political veterans like chief strategist David Axelrod and a cadre of young newcomers who might be green, but prove their worth throughout the 21-month rollercoaster campaign: tireless campaign staffer Ronnie Cho, Iowa press secretary Tommy Vietor, and young speechwriter Jon Favreau.

As things got more involved, campaign access got trickier and there were a lot more hurdles to get through. “It was always really good, but it was never enough for us,” Sams notes. There were also times when the filmmakers couldn't get all the footage they needed with their crew of two. For the Iowa caucuses, Super Tuesday, the Democratic National Convention and election night, Rice and Sams enlisted the help of additional videographers, taking their coverage from one or two cameras to 10 or 12.

In the spring of 2008, Sam Pollard began editing in earnest, along with co-editors Arielle Amsalem and Geeta Gandbihr. Approximately 600 hours of Mini DV tape was digitized and edited in Final Cut Studio. “We were cutting everything that they shot,” Pollard recalls. “It was important to get every scene to get a sense of where this film was going.”

By the end of the summer of 2008, they had a rough assembly of everything that had been shot up until that point. The directors had split up their team to maximize coverage, with Sams in Chicago and Rice out on the campaign trail, and were mailing their footage back to the editors in New York City. After a flurry of work following the DNC and a victorious election night for Obama, they submitted a rough cut of By the People to HBO in November.

The team had hoped Obama would win the presidency but, as far as the movie was concerned, it wasn't a make-or-break proposition. “Even if he lost the election, we believed this would have been an interesting enough film,” Sams remarks. “We would've just gone back to shooting for another eight years.”

“Obama and his team were the underdogs, they were never supposed to win,” notes Rice. “But they persevered. The intent of this film is to inspire future generations, Democrat or Republican, to go out there and beat the odds.”