In life we tend to get comfortable with things, or are raised with a particular mindset that certain things comply with a set or rules, and they have been and forever will be the same. When it came to documentaries I always saw them having to meet a certain criteria, and if they didn’t they weren’t a documentary.
One of them was that I always thought it had to be about history and its goal was to present information. Secondly the information had to be presented by academics or experts in the particular topic that is being covered in the form of interviews. Thirdly it had to be shot. That was my mindset when it came to documentaries anything else was just not authentic, as I was never aware of any other kind of documentaries.

What this meant was that I was stunned when I found out that among the criteria for the projects of this course was there could be no interviews or shot footage for most of the projects. Initially I did feel overwhelmed by the prospect of not having to follow the “rules” but then I realized that myself and the people I work with are being presented an opportunity to be creative in different ways and quite hopefully create very unique pieces of art. I’ve often heard the expression learn to think outside the box and I always felt that was the standard of making original however the experience of making a found footage documentary made think otherwise. Limitations are interesting way of harnessing creativity and that and that being restrained or in the box is what actually helped me see things in a different light.

Of course the end results of the film didn’t come without a source of inspiration or reference, I had seen some great examples such Santiago Alvarez’s film Now (1965) which was five minute film that used one song, titled with the same name as the film, and still images to show racism in the sixties and that it really should be a line that should be crossed and left behind us in the modern world. This film was a very helpful guide, not in the deliberate sense, but it ensured me and helped give me a sense security that a project like that could be accomplished, which I think was a good thing because whenever I, and I can only speak for myself, hit a creative low point or was feeling stressed I always knew that we could do it.

Looking back at the projects that I’ve worked on there was a lot creative humps
I faced alongside with my groups. There were times when a project wasn’t working for weeks and no matter how many we discussed it together we couldn’t really figure out how to make things work, that’s were all the feedback sessions came. Hearing the thoughts and ideas from other class member as well as out tutor was very helpful and once again speaking for myself, allowed me to be more proactive in class as well as outside class, and motivated to experiment and try the different styles involving the different elements of the films, such as music, sound and structure and what all this working and discussing back and forth helped me realise is that as great as having ideas are its true value is in its execution.

Growing up I was a child who was raised on films. I watched and re-watched my favorite films, day in and out when I could. I did this because the films that I grew up with captured my imagination at a young age, and I sought out to make or recreate the things I saw anyway I could. As I grew older I began to understand the art of storytelling at a deeper level, I no longer watched films for the sole purpose of being amazed and to be filled with wonder, I looked to deconstruct and find the meanings or the intentions the filmmakers had when creating their work of art. Some of them never had their intentions explicitly delivered things were always implied and I had to form my own interpretation of what I was seeing, which was always fun because now if I saw something that interpreted differently from someone else neither of us could really prove each other wrong, what was ours was ours.

What this ultimately was is that I began to hear voices in the films I was watching, and not just of the actors who are performing, but also the presence of the filmmaking, and this got me completely hooked on storytelling, and it led to me consuming different platforms of stories, like comic books, video games, music etc. However I never followed the route of documentary films wile I was on this path. I’ve seen a few documentaries, and from my experiences my notions of what a documentary and its intentions are, was that they are history pieces that primarily exist to explore and provide the audience with information about a particular era. I never sought the experience of documentaries unless there was a topic the interested me.

Early this year I was asked two questions, ‘can something be poetic and political?’ and ‘what’s wrong with simply observing the world?’ These two questions asked by my course projects observe documentaries and unpack them as I did with all the other stories I consumed. Through this assessment and course I was exposed to documentaries that are not just as expositional narratives, but also ones that have strong views an opinions about a topic and seek to enforce change in the world.

My eyes were opened to and shifted my perspective and I began to see documentaries as an effective, if not the most effective, platform to invoke action simply because they do not have the baggage that fiction films carry. What I mean by that is that fiction films can try to comment or send a message to the world regarding an issue, but at the end of the day from experiences they have done very little to get my engaged in a topic. I used the film Avatar (2009) by James Cameron as an example, the film tried to comment on the environmental issues of our world and their causes, but what I and many others walked away from was a visual treat as opposed to a political film.

Comparing this experience to that of the film Blackfish which documented the abuse and captivity that orca’s or killer whales while they are kept in Sea World, shed some light on how badly these animals a handled and exposed Sea World as a dreadful place and suddenly I as a viewer gained a new perspective. This place Sea World that was linked to a time in childhood that filled me with joy is know a place that I am disgusted by and if I had the power I would shut it down. This experience made me realise the power of documentaries, but most importantly to be a documentary filmmaker one has to have a different voice to that of a traditional filmmaker. Its not only important to have something to say but also knowing how you want to say.