Documentary Research

Welcome back. If you remember, I mentioned in my last blog post that I had the chance to go compete in a film festival in New York; what I didn’t mention is that back at home I was working on a documentary. See, since the start of October, in A Level we began watching and researching documentaries so that in November we could fully produce our own. In this series of blog posts, I’ll be detailing my process of creating my short documentary “Off the Mic” starting off this blog post about research and inspiration.

I Think This Is The Closest To How The Footage Looked (2012)

Goodness even just rereading the name sends shivers down my spine and makes me emotional. This was the first documentary we watched in class and truly surprised me on just how genius it was; it conveyed grief in a way I’ve never seen before, and drew at my heart strings without using any dialogue. 

Excellent first documentary to watch because it truly broke down any preconceived notion of what I thought documentaries needed to be considered a documentary (such as containing interviews or narration or be on some newsworthy subject). Instead, the director showed a slice of life through figurines which guided the narrative. The editing felt almost literary to me, especially when a clip played back again and again, I felt the repetition emphasize the anguish of the main subject, the son who lost the last footage of his dying mother, and the suffering his family went through. 

Ultimately, human emotion is what connects viewers to a piece and I believe this did one of the best jobs for its simplistic and humble approach. My team and I would keep this in mind when creating our doc, even if it took us a while to return to a more simple approach.

American Promise (2013)

This full length documentary is one we almost didn’t watch, as our A Level teacher asked her class last year if this doc should be shown our year. Luckily, they voted an astounding YES and my class this year did too. American Promise follows the lives of two boys throughout their entire schooling in NY, kindergarten through senior year, and as a student in my last year out of 13 in the FL education system, this documentary was highly relatable, something most of my peers felt too. 

This documentary was more traditional, utilizing a mix of direct and indirect interviews and an insane variety of broll. Of course, what sets this documentary apart from the crowd is the coverage of 13 years of content, which I can’t even begin to imagine just how much footage was excluded given their 2 hr 22 minute run time. Heck I was stressed out with 40 minutes of interview footage, they probably had way over 40 HOURS of interview footage. 

Something my team liked about this documentary is that while they did have some formal interviews, sometimes the interviews were more casual “ in the moment” so we tried to include that type of interview in ours (although ultimately it didn’t make the final edit).

Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)

TONIGHT THE STREEEETSS ARE OURSSSS.

Watching this Banksy directed creation showed me that documentaries could be FUN. I laughed a lot during this one but also was incredibly intrigued by the progression of Thierry’s story as a filmmaker turned graffiti street artist. 

I did notice that most of the interviews were taken all in one go, despite the broll and footage covering months/years, which would be the approach my team would take (although this was largely a given based on the fact that we had one week for production and could not follow our subjects for an extended period of time). 

The larger inspiration we took from this documentary can be seen in the opening of our documentary, which we began with a montage as well, albeit shorter than the 2:32 montage in Banksy’s piece and also without featuring a song as catchy as Richard Hawley’s Tonight the Streets Are Ours. But I’ll talk more about that in my post production blogpost. 

Abstract: The Art of Design (2017)

This episodic documentary was good research, but I think it will come more in handy later in the year if I decide to do documentary for my portfolio project, as I know advertising must be exemplified, and as I remember from friends in A Level last year, they also had to outline multiple episodes. 

Largely, this documentary showed us the beauty of staged broll, and how it can be expertly used. The examples in Ruth’s episode was one my group kept coming back to when we needed to film our subjects but had little way of filming them live in their artistic environment. On my own time, I watched Christopher Niemann’s episode, where I realized that every single shot was deliberately and expertly planned and choreographed, as they needed to incorporate fantastical animation elements to the majority of the shots, and this stuck with me when planning because I truly realized that success relied 99% on pre-production.

Op Docs

As a part of our Op Doc assignment, I watched two: Ellis Island and A New Wave. These documentaries were short, around the length that our A Level documentaries were going to be, so it was nice to see some examples of similar length, especially because one I watched was made by students. 

Ellis Island

One of the images featured in the Ellis Island op doc.

The first one op doc I watched was made by two high school filmmakers but in the early 1970s and filmed on 16 mm film. They documented the abandoned spaces in Ellis Island and created a very eerie tone and by the end of it I was confused, but upon a second watch I understood better. See, initially the documentary was quiet, only using natural sound, but in the second portion, sound interviews from Ellis Island immigrants were used, and they shared their experience. And so, while at times the whole thing felt unsettling, I realized that was intentionally the goal of the creators because they wanted to show the other side of the story to a place in American history that’s been remembered iconically, a popular tourist destination, but doing that we have erased the horrors of family separation and human starvation along with it. 

The creators here had a specific goal for the viewer, not just to entertain, inspire, or educate, but to hopefully change the mind of their audience. We hoped to do that too, or at least provide a new perspective on our chosen topic. 

New Wave

A still from New Wave op doc.

New Wave on the other hand was more “traditional”, telling the inspiring story of the first Black South African World Championship Surfer; however, what stuck out to me was that the whole doc was shot in greyscale, except for some yellow graphics. This struck me as strange, considering that a large majority of the broll included waves and surfing, and with filming a beautiful blue ocean I wondered why color was not used? Ultimately though, I realized that the doc was never about the surfing but about the difference the surfer was making in the world/community. His surfing was only the tool he used to do that, which is why the greyscale was used to diminish the focus on the footage and allow a viewer to focus more on the story.

Certainly a unique approach, I would remember that even while trying to get all the most beautiful broll possible, ultimately what makes a documentary great is if the narrative of the story is great, which for us would need to come from the quality of our interviews.