Collaboration Post:

Working towards a final piece as an individual, there wasn’t a great deal of collaboration in which I partook throughout this semester. In having said this, however, producing a piece of media is never really an individual task, various components of creating (from pre to post production) requiring constant communication with individuals outside of the project.

One of the most obvious examples of individuals or groups with whom you are required to collaborate is subjects, especially in the case of documentary. In the instance of creating media for a university project, your greatest barrier to finding, and foregrounding, interesting and insightful interviews is the perceived lack of “credibility” you as a student have, rather than as a professional.

Due to this, often the majority of the potential subjects that you reach out to are unlikely to even reply to your inquiry, which often limits your choice pretty significantly. This then poses further challenges to the quality of your interview, merely as a consequence of the common unwillingness of people to participate in a student film.

In this particular project, this is a problem that I did find posed barriers in working towards my final piece. Knowing that I wanted to foreground some facet of Eastern culture and its influence in our Western world, I quickly closed in on addressing the potential impact of Buddhism in our contemporary cultural climate. This was particularly after having visited Footscray’s Heavenly Queen Temple, and falling in love with what a spectacularly beautiful location it was. My stumbling across the temple was a fortunate discovery, given that the location fit well into my brief, from an aesthetic, metaphorical and more logical standpoint.

Following on from this I quickly researched potential subjects, Melbourne-wide, contacting them almost immediately to lock in an interview well ahead of time. Not only did I experience the aforementioned problem (being just a lack of enthusiasm in participating in general) I also had subjects agree to an interview, then to withdraw their offer to volunteer time weeks later.

Acquiring reliable subjects is a difficult task whenever producing media content, that I’ve certainly come across before. I also feel as though the lack of familiarity between myself and potential subjects, often cemented through communicating via email, makes it easier for otherwise willing subjects to pull out last minute. In future instances, I’ll be sure to call as opposed to email, to try to make a better connection straight off of the bat.

Thankfully, I did have one interview subject (from the Buddhist Discussion Centre) who was willing to lend his thoughts in response to my inquiry question. (I’ve edited his interview and have included it in this blog, as an important component in the process of constructing my final media piece). While I did acquire interview footage and answers to my questions, then came the problem that the creative limitations posed onto said footage. While I found my subject articulate and insightful in regards to the content, his delivery wasn’t as engaging as what I would have hoped for.

It’s also noteworthy to mention that you could certainly say that the quality of footage was compromised, for reasons that I’ll expand on in my summary of my final body of work. It’s due to both of these reasons that I decided to put his thoughts into text, which offers an alternate angle on the documentary mode (an objective I strove to grapple with and explore in this studio anyway).

So, all in all, these are the main problems that I came across in collaborating with others while working towards producing this final studio piece. In future cases, they’re hurdles that I believe will become easier to overcome, as my experience, repertoire and (hopefully) credibility expands.

Summary of work:

The border between fiction and factual film is often well established and rarely delineated by filmmakers. While those striving to work within the one category subscribe to a certain set of tools and techniques, most often those working within the other category operate with an entirely different framework. As a loose example, fiction focuses heavily on the mies-en-scene and visual impact of the film that drives the story forward. You could even argue that it’s the more “exciting” of cinematic elements – the dramatic and orchestrated visual effects, the considered locations and a soundtrack that underpins so carefully a narrative – that is so inviting to an audience.

Yet so often documentary, often arguably with a more important story to make and a greater impact to have, functions within such different parameters: often utilising the more constrained elements of film while using less of its creative license to do so. It’s the unfortunate rarity with which documentary often ignites a screen with the same invigoration of fiction, that leaves so many crucial stories begging to be told but lacking the proper vehicle to do so.

From the outset of this course, my primary aim was to grapple with and explore documentary from outside of the confines by which the mode is so often bound. Now upon looking back, I feel confident that this is accurately reflected in my final piece of work as well as being an idea I really wish to push forward and pick apart in far greater depth in instances of future production.

Documentary is the ideal format to put forth to the world critical social problems, often operating in a cultural context so distinct and inaccessible to our own (other than through film). I really also feel as though it’s due to the lack lustre and predictable use of documentary, that (I wish to argue) so many doco-makers employ, films only draw the attention of those who would seek out the content elsewhere anyway.

In an technical eco-system where competition for attention is increasingly difficult, while trying to appeal to an audience with a collective withering attention span, creating content that takes from the more successful elements of fiction (I believe) is critical. Not only this, by not spoon feeding an audience, as well as toying with their expectations through presenting documentary in an unfamiliar light, you ignite their senses to actively take in what they’re consuming.

As an aspiring filmmaker these are ideas that I really want to always underpin and ultimately drive the work I produce and create. This is particularly in terms of bringing into focus the weight that composition and visual appeal of an image should bare, as well as a unique and unsuspecting use of sound (both through music and audio footage).

I will explain in greater depth, shortly, how this is considered and put into practice in my final piece. Firstly, however, I’ve chosen to include screenshots of film from my shoot on Monday (as well as previous experiments), below, that bring attention to the importance of experimenting with composition and texture in a visual image.

For whatever reason, common themes that I believe are recognisable in these images (in particular the use of plants and flowers at the forefront of an image) have really come to the fore in my personal photography (as below). I don’t really understand myself what attracts me to seeking out these “subjects” to capture through the camera, yet constantly find myself documenting this onto film. I’ve hypothesised it’s the “space” to contemplate the information being given, that these more organic subjects lend, as opposed to the “denser” content with which it’s superimposed.

I’ve included more images from my personal collection to, again, reinforce the leading role I believe image and aesthetics have to play in documenting and curating a story for maximum visual impact.

Now getting back to looking at my final piece of work as a response to my inquiry question, being “how do we see Eastern culture at play within the West?”, I must acknowledge that this wasn’t really the focal point of my work. (It’s important to note that underscoring this was an investigation of whether or not we can cross-pollinate documentary and fiction in terms of how they independently strive to convey meaning and explore the world?) The latter was realistically the more significant aspect of inquiry dictating the direction of experiments throughout the course (which is why few points of research or experimentation focus too much on aspects of Eastern culture at all).

In line with this train of thought, I wanted my final piece of work to explore a topic or idea (being the impact of Buddhism on contemporary Western culture), via slightly playing with the conventions by which documentary is typically categorised. Notably, there was not one single piece to camera or direct interview featured, nor did we hear the voice of the subject. Instead, we get their perspective not through their voice but through subtitles. Admittedly, this was a convenient solution to the problem posed by the quality of footage (as well as the subject’s voice not really fitting the tone of the piece).

As alluded to previously, the quality of footage was somewhat compromised due to my own difficulty of focussing in on two streams of audio simultaneously. (This is noteworthy and an area to pay greater attention to next time as an opportunity to collaborate with someone who is able to fulfil this role). I do have a hearing disorder, called Auditory Processing, which is best explained as dyslexia for hearing.

There is nothing wrong with my ears or hearing. However, when I am exposed to multiple sources of sound at the one time, the content coming from those streams starts to get particularly muddled and confused. I think it was largely due to this that I struggled to focus on both my interviewee’s words and how they were translating through the Zoom, despite everything looking fine on the levels.

Nonetheless, the use of subtitles was more congruent with my wanting to create something that played with the audience’s pre-conceived perception of what a documentary is. Thus the use of subtitles as a means of communication, more commonly used in terms of for artistic effect in film, was quite appealing. Not only this, I wanted to really foreground the use of space and sense of atmosphere (as discussed in greater depth previously), more so appreciated in fiction film.

The last element of my video that I felt was an important measure of how well I could step outside the boundary traditionally established by documentary film was the use of music. Especially in light of the topic (being the therapuetic functions of Buddhism in the West), the trap of using cliched and predictable audio (insert Chinese flute music) would be an easy one to fall into. The song that I used, “Goodbye Sleepyhead” by Coloured Mind (a CC clip), does tilt its head in this direction, referencing the “oriental” (for want of a better word) origins of the subject matter. More importantly than this though, it gives a more modern twist compared to the music we would typically expect and also makes reference to the “Western” component of the inquiry focus.

All in all, I feel as though the final piece accurately reflects the initial point of focus I set out to explore. Documentary can borrow from its cousin, fiction film, so many elements that draw in audiences in an increasingly competitive and crowded digital age. I am glad that my inquiry was successful in this regard and will continue to delineate the boundary between the two modes in the pursuit of creating more impactful documentary content.

Reflect on the relationship between theory and practice:

The practicalities of filmmaking often impose themselves upon the intension you have, prior to bringing out the camera. In the case of my last project, the greatest example of this proved itself in that it simply wasn’t appropriate to film everything that I wished I could film while at The Heavenly Queen Temple.

Prior the showing up on the day to film, I of course called ahead to ensure that the filming was able to take place as well as whether or not there was a most appropriate time to do so. The gentleman on the other end of the phone kindly insisted that it was fine to come at any time, however, there also might have been a slight communication barrier.

While not strictly a conflict between theory and practice, it’s instances such as these that illustrate the limitations presented while creating a documentary. Thus you need to deal with “real life” situations and people that aren’t revolving their actions around what is being filmed (as more likely the case in the filming of fiction).

It just so happened that when I showed up to film, there was a celebration of sorts taking place within the temple itself and on the entrance steps. Temple members were obviously taking a part in said celebration and hence it didn’t feel particularly appropriate to fixate my lens obnoxiously into the middle of what they were doing? I also didn’t know if it would be culturally appropriate to film objects of their worship and, again, due to a slight communication barrier, this was even more difficult to ascertain.

Essentially, it’s important to calculate into your plans that instances such as these make it difficult to always film on location as you wish. But, as a plus side to this, comes the opportunity to look for yet another way of seeing things and then creating a means of communicating this through film.