In today's session we also organised our groups to work in for the projects and had an initial discussion within our group regrading potential ideas for the projects and our preferred roles within the group.
We began the session by discussing, as a class, what we think documentary is. The ideas that we came up with included; documentaries reveal lifestyle, offer people's opinions, can open discussion by offering a different angle to a subject and can therefore be biased or balanced.
For our assessments we have to organise ourselves into a group / crew to work on two projects, the first of which will support and feed into the second.
The first project is to be a Poetic Documentary which will last 2 minutes. This will draw on 'story telling techniques' and is designed to focus our attention, as film makers, on the visual aspects of the film; framing, shot length, composition, rhythmic structure, mise en scene etc. The sound is to be non-synch sound and the soundtrack must be created from our recorded sounds.
Whether music can be used on the sound track is to be confirmed.
This exercise will feed into our second project which is a 5 - 10 minute serious film regarding a subject that we feel strongly about.
To start the process of idea development for film subjects we were asked to consider the following questions:
What makes you angry?
What makes you passionate?
What do you want to change?
What do you really care about?
.............. also ............
What kind of documentary do you want to make?
nb, Show viewer something new about subject: show it from a different angle
At this point we started to look at the different types of documentary and what documentaries 'are for':
What are documentaries for? = present facts, present truth, answer a question, interrogate / reflect on a subject, create a portrait, campaign on an issue
What are documentaries concerned with? = Truth, Objectivity, The Real
Reality & Artifice = recording of actual events v treatment of actual events
Group Discussions on Notions of Documentary
'Documentary Film Maker is Subjectively Objective'
This was the notion that our group discussed. All the members of the group had good thoughts about this and mad strong input into the discussion.
We discussed how it is not just the film maker and / or producer that have creative input into the documentary and that it is difficult to keep a documentary film unbiased as everyone from the cameraman choosing the angles and what is framed, to the director who is choosing what to show, to the editor and sound editor making decisions which all have the ability to manipulate the viewer's interpretation of what is being shown.
We agreed that documentaries do supply somebody's take on facts and the images are chosen to support that view.
We also agreed that when documentaries present things as fact, we as the viewer feel that we are now informed in that subject, and for the most, take what has been presented to us the truth.
Another group discussed 'Fly on the Wall' and fed back how this type of documentary is often seen as close to objective as we are being presented with actual footage of events where people are behaving naturally. An example provided for this was the series One Born Every Minute.
However, the validity of this is questioned when there is an element of 'constructed scenes', for example in Big Brother, The Only Way is Essex or celebrity 'at home with the stars' type series'. At some point all of the participants have agreed to be filmed, so are in some way aware of the cameras and may change how they behave with that in mind.
The groups that discussed 'The Camera Never Lies' and 'Every Cut is a Lie to Tell the Truth' described how the "camera is gullible" and how camera angles and framing, and editing can be manipulative and can be used to create dramatic effect.
While the group was reporting back on their discussion I remembered a good example of the way that footage is filmed and interpreted by the viewer was used in the comedy series Drop the Dead Donkey in an episode called The Godless Society, where a bishop and a sociologist were due to be interviewed for a news programme offering opposing viewpoints: a Christian viewpoint from the Bishop and an atheist view from the sociologist. After seeing the VT for the footage to be discussed the Bishop loses his faith and the sociologist realises that their is faith in the world and therefore can't argue against the idea of God per se.
Another thought that came out of the discussions was: is leaving a camera running on a wide shot any more truthful than a constructed film?
In order to make a documentary, we will, after all, be "manipulating material".
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