I asked Heather to recount her experiences in Egypt during the 2011 revolution for the TFPDT editing exercise. She spoke for 17 minutes in total, and the biggest challenge was to cut that material down to two minutes while maintaining narrative coherence and the structural integrity of her sentences. She warned me beforehand that she’s not a natural storyteller, so I had to occasionally chime in and remind her to speak in terms of what she saw or felt, and to paint a picture of what she experienced, so it took quite a bit of cajoling to get enough material to use. It also made it challenging to edit down, because I almost had to manually shape fragments of her story into a succinct, coherent whole.

Being in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution or walking down a deserted street and being stopped by a van full of men wielding machetes are the kinds of experiences that a natural storyteller could turn into quite compelling first-person narratives, but Heather was almost embarrassed by the idea that I was asking her about what happened. She’s naturally very modest and I think she didn’t want to come across as if she was big-noting herself for being close to a major world event, which is an impulse I understand, but she told the story with a lot of self-deprecation — which certainly doesn’t help the process of making a documentary about her experiences!

But having said all that, there were some major advantages in filming Heather for this exercise — she had a selection of photos she took while in Egypt that could be used for cutaways, and there’s obviously a wealth of archival material about the Egyptian revolution that I could use to illustrate what she was talking about. The major disadvantage is that I couldn’t think of any relevant B-roll footage to shoot. It would have been easier if she was talking about a hobby or something like that, so I could film her participating in that hobby, but since she was speaking about an experience in the past it was difficult to think of anything to film in the present.

Ultimately, there were pluses and minuses to this first assessment exercise and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into something a bit more in-depth.

Our class discussion of Notes on Blindness centred around the idea of hybrid documentary, and the relationship between nonfiction filmmaking and “the real”. All documentary films incorporate some level of fiction or subjectivity, and some nonfiction films choose to incorporate much more than others, just as fiction films can use the formal language of nonfiction for their own purposes.

I imagine a spectrum, where one side is “fiction” and the other is “nonfiction”, and every film ever made could be plotted at some point along the axis. An observational documentary like Woodstock (1970) sits further towards nonfiction than, say, any of the films by Werner Herzog, who is quite clear about where he sees himself in terms of striving for objectivity:

But even the film furthest along on the nonfiction side, i.e. the most nonfiction film ever made (if there is such a thing), still couldn’t fairly be considered objective truth, because by definition filmmaking involves some level of subjectivity and cannot possibly tell the whole story.

“In the summer of 1983, just days before the birth of his first son, writer and theologian John Hull went blind. In order to make sense of the upheaval in his life, he began keeping a diary…”

I really can’t believe how great this studio has been for exposing me to new and interesting documentaries. Notes on Blindness is another one that I wasn’t familiar with, but ended up really loving (and taking a lot from). The film was constructed from hours and hours of journalistic/confessional monologues Hull recorded onto cassette tape over the span of years, with archival footage and recreations using actors among the techniques used to visualise the material.

Notes on Blindness relies so heavily on its source material that at first glance the film may seem secondary to it, like it’s just the visual accompaniment to a story told primary through sound. But while it’s somewhat true that the film’s primary vector is sound, and it would absolutely work as a podcast or extended audio documentary, I think the fact that it is a film is quite important to the experience. There’s a scene where Hull describes his appreciation for rain, the sound of which gives him a sense of his surroundings when he’s out in the world, and how he wishes that he could make it rain inside so he could achieve the same experience indoors. What follows is a really beautiful and poetic sequence of shots of the inside of a house — tables, chairs, a piano — being drenched with rain, giving the viewer not only a satisfying visualisation of Hull’s inner desires, but also a indelible cinematic image. The film is full of moments like these, where the material is elevated by its presentation in a film as opposed to being experienced solely through sound.

The film got me thinking about the idea of a director who finds a cache of pre-existing material and decides to make a film about it, as directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney did with Notes on Blindness. I can’t think of too many films that fit this bill, but they range from the important and historic (German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, 2015), to the philosophical (Grizzly Man, 2005), to the weird and quirky (Shut Up Little Man!, 2011).

One film that strikes me as similar to Notes on Blindness is Finding Vivian Maier, which describes filmmaker John Maloof’s chance discovery of hundreds of photographs taken by an unknown but talented New York street photographer named Vivian Maier.

I hated Finding Vivian Maier, and now having seen Notes on Blindness and thought about the implications of making a film based on archival material, I think I finally understand why: Maier was deceased by the time Maloof discovered her photographs in an estate auction, and consequently she has zero agency in the telling of her own story. We discover through the course of the film that Maier was essentially a recluse, and never shared her photographs with the public or even members of her own family. But Maloof not only shows her photographs publicly, he interviews dozens of people who knew Maier about her life and why she kept her work so secret, which I think flies in the face of how she would have wanted her story told (if at all). Obviously Maier lost control of her life and work once she died, and Maloof was completely within his legal rights to make his film, but it never sat right with me that the director knew how reclusive his subject was and decided to make a major documentary film about her anyway.

Notes on Blindness, on the other hand, incorporates the participation of Hull himself and never feels exploitative. Hull made his audio tapes in order for them to be heard, in some way or another, by other people, and the film feels like an extension of Hull’s personal investigation into the experience of blindness and its effect on how he sees the world. Vivian Maier specifically chose not to show anyone her photographs, but then John Maloof came along and decided to do it for her.

I think I’d rather be a Peter Middleton or James Spinney than a John Maloof.

I made a real rookie mistake this weekend.

Filming my interview for Assessment 2, I sat down ahead of time with my camera and set the white balance, focus, aperture and shutter speed — all the things we went through in our in-class camera exercise. Everything looked good, I recorded a little 10-second test video and played it back on the camera, and it looked perfect… so, we got stuck into the interview.

But when I dumped the footage to my computer, it looked like this:

I did a bit of googling and found out that the green blocks are sections of the video where image data is missing, through some kind of codec error/mismatch. I’m still not 100% sure exactly what caused the problem in the first place, but had I dumped the test footage to my laptop first I would have noticed it and been able to fix it.

So, the lesson: always dump some test footage to your laptop and make sure it works before filming anything.

Luckily I was interviewing a subject I have easy access to, so I was able to ask her to come back the next day and re-record the interview. I changed the recording format to AVCHD on the camera, and this time it worked fine — no green blocks in sight.

I’m just glad I made this mistake now, with a subject I have easy access to, rather than later in semester with a subject I couldn’t ask to come back and re-record an entire interview.

I’m posting this here so I remember it for the future:

Today Rohan shared with us a tip for whittling down raw footage into something usable:

• Dump all of your footage in the timeline, and watch through it once
• Every time you come across something that definitely won’t be needed in the final version (your questions, irrelevant answers, coughs, etc.), place a cut before and a cut after it
• Leave the unneeded sections on the first video track, and drag everything else up onto track two as you go
• After doing this for the entire video, drag to select all of the video on track two (that is, the “longlist” of usable material) and move it to a new timeline
• Repeat the same process on the new timeline

This way, you progressively cut down your footage to only what you can use within two full viewings. I think this will save me a lot of time.

My only experience with interviewing someone on camera came in my first semester at RMIT, when I made a little two-minute portrait of my brother and his ridiculous collection of novelty erasers.

I thought it was worth a revisit to see how it stands up considering everything I’ve learned over the past two years.

The first thing that stands out is the lighting of the interview — it’s way too bright and too unnaturally yellow, to the point where the halo of light surrounding the subject blends him into the background. I was going for an Errol Morris / Willy Wonka “clean white room” aesthetic, but my home-made lighting rig was too heavy-handed for the task. If I was to work on this film again, I think it could easily be saved with a bit of a colour grade, but that’s a process I’m still not very familiar with.

Secondly, my zooms/pans on the still photos of the erasers are too drastic — distractingly so. I think less is more in this regard, and if I had my time again I’d only enlarge the photos 3-5% in the faux zooms instead of the 10% I did.

In terms of the edit, and how I constructed a coherent string of sentences from what the subject said in his interview, I’m actually still pretty pleased with that. My memory of the interview was that he rambled a lot (which was 100% my fault, I wasn’t sure what “angle” I was going for and so I wasn’t able to properly direct his answers so he gave me what I wanted), but I managed to whittle it down to something usable in the end. The J-cuts and hiding audio edits with cutaway footage works well, and other than the forced inclusion of archival footage (which I hated at the time and still hate now), the cutaways are all pretty good.

All in all, it’s definitely the work of a first-semester student, but two years later I’m still mostly happy with how it turned out.

Is there anything better than discovering a new filmmaker?

This week we watched Home from the Hill (1987), by British documentarian Molly Dineen. I’m not sure why Dineen isn’t very well known around the world, because I really loved the film and it looks like she’s been doing good and interesting work for decades. I was shocked to discover that her most-watched film, Geri, has been marked as seen by only 22 people on Letterboxd. I feel like there’s an untouched gold mine of material just waiting for me to discover it — if I can find her films anywhere, that is.

Home from the Hill follows Hilary Hook, a cartoonishly old-school British gentleman (think the Major from Fawlty Towers) as he moves back to England after a lifetime abroad in “the colonies”. His 1930s-era views clash spectacularly with the reality of modern British urban life, but he remains an incredibly charming and sympathetic character even as he’s pining for the days when he had (African) domestic servants and a wife who waited on his every desire.

I think the film works so well because Dineen embeds herself so deeply into Hook’s life that we get to see moments that another filmmaker would never be able to capture. Dineen had such great access because she was dating Hook’s son (who was often present when they were filming), so she was more like a member of the family hanging around with a camera and sound person, rather than a traditional and scary film crew. This gave her access to the minutia of Hook’s life, small moments like trying to figure out how to use an automatic can opener, or idly staring out of windows — unguarded moments where Hook has to confront his inability to function in British society.

The question of informed consent is interesting in this case — Hook obviously had a high level of direct involvement in this film. In a video interview we watched this week, Dineen herself said that she likes to keep her subjects involved through the entire process of making the film, so they can protest at any time if they feel like they’ve been misrepresented or don’t like how things are turning out. Informed consent is a continually ongoing process for Dineen, which negates a lot of potential problems — I can’t imagine Dineen being sued by any of her subjects, since she keeps them so involved through the process. This also sets up the subject to feel like the filmmaker is on their “side”, which may encourage them to speak more freely or be more welcoming to the filmmaker into their world.

I wonder if the fact that Hook and Dineen were essentially family played into the consent aspect at all — and if Hook would have given the same access to another filmmaker. Did he trust Dineen to treat him more fairly than other people would? Did he know how antiquated his views were, and how he was likely to be perceived by 1980s British audiences (or 21st century audiences)?

Regardless, the film feels like it is as much Hook’s film as it is Dineen’s — his personality drives the entire film, and you definitely get the feeling that he often “performs” for the camera, verbalising his thoughts and commentating his own actions.

Dineen has also made documentaries about a train station, the London Zoo, and British farmers, among many other subjects. These are not inherently interesting topics, but Dineen has a knack for finding compelling characters who can sustain an hour or more of screen time, much like how Frederick Wiseman’s films sound incomprehensibly boring on paper but once you watch them they are absolutely transfixing. I’d love to know how much preparation she puts into identifying and pre-interviewing people to decide whether it’s worth making a film with them, or if she just turns up on the day and tries to build tension and interest in the editing room.