Category: Media 2

Week 12 felt like a race for me. I know I should’ve started organising all the videos and plans before, but I didn’t, so pity me. I just finished recording IMCV a couple of days before and now I have to sort through all the clips, and make scripts to align the narration. A friend gave an advice, that I should rename of all the files, so you could organise it with ease. How thankful was I, had it not been renamed, it would take me a minute just to find an image/sound that i wanted to see. Another important organising tool that I learned was marking. I use mark to mark certain scenes that I want to cut into the movie. And sometimes I use marks in the sequence to bookmark chapters, or to put notes, to remind me what I should put around those two videos. It’s really handy and I’m glad to have learned it. The picture above was me spending I don’t know how long to create the most possible coherent narration that I could make.

with a sprinkle of stress because of my other projects, and topped with my interviewee that kept postponing the interview, I would say I was ready to jump off the bridge (figuratively). Because of their busy schedule, my subject of interview from Baitul Ma’mur had to do the interview on the last minute. This gave me a considerable strain because her narration is 50% of the whole interview. But thankfully we did it anyway, and fortunately the interview went quite well. There was some problem with the audio, because some kids were playing in the background, and the frame for that interview was perfect, so changing location was a bad idea. But because of the noise, I had to ask my subject to repeat her answer several times, only to be interrupted by the kids again. We had a pre-interview, so my subject was not very uncomfortable/surprise to answer the question, so it went smoothly. The only thing that I regretted was for some of the questions. I felt like the interview didn’t have the personal touch that I wanted, and it looked too formal sometimes.

Week 10 is interesting. After coming to many festivals i have many potential subjects that I contacted and agreed to be filmed upon, unfortunately I can only start recording around this week. The only best thing I can do now is to create a solid structure and use the materials I already got.  The community that I found rest in Lavernton, called Baitul Ma’mul, an Indonesian muslim community under the Indonesian Muslim Community Victoria (IMCV), and another group called Bethany International Church (BIC). You may ask “why are they all religious groups jason?” It’s because Indonesia is a very religious country. Just look at the first principle of Indonesia’s fundamental politics, Pancasila:

Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa

it means: Belief in the one and only God

Indonesia is a very religious country. It has it’s ups and downs, but I respect it’s integrity. Since my documentary wants to focus on community activities, their religious practice will also be observed, even though not as detailed as the concept of their general community.

Found footages will be important as part of my documentary, as I recall their history and their commitment to the community.

For post-production, I will try to the best of my ability to edit it well. Using music in documentaries is not my forte, as it seems. I am still struggling to incorporate music, and I will ask Kim a lot for help (I’m sorry Kim)

Fun fact: Indonesia is Not a muslim country. Indonesia is a country with muslim as a majority, that is why many people mistook it to be a muslim country. Not trying to implicate anything here, just a fact.

thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

During week 8 I was unable to come to class due to an unexpected circumstances. But still I asked around friends to see whether my topic can be approachable with potential subjects. Unfortunately all of them still considers the topic to be very sensitive, and is not open to discussing it. I do not understand if the topic still to harsh, even though I had directed the narrative not towards the victimised story, rather the survival one. It was very stressful as everyone that I asked advised me to change the topic again. I tried very hard to think how to manipulate this dire situation, and alas, I brought a more positive vibe to the topi. Instead of the the subject’s journey after 1998 May riot, I want to find 2/3 subjects, each planted on his/her own indonesian community, and find out how they find and what do they consider about the community.  I hope in this very condescending situation i am still able to find good materials to work to.

I have been off-focus between my obligations and my other works, and I feel like it’s been dragging me down deeper into the well of misdirections. Scraping back into the right path will be hard work, but I have to try.

While other are already settled on their creative projects, I am still struggling to find ‘the one’. With Kim’s link I open a website and saw this collaborative doco “The G word” that gathers stories all over the world about gender issues to transform what I think a very stigmatised norm. It’s very interesting to look at, even though it’s a little bit laggy because of all the submissions inside.  check it out here

During the week we discussed further on our ideas with the projects, how we see it’s going, and how do we play with the format, so it becomes more collaborative, more open spaced. But the week was also pinned in the board with interviewing practice.  There are some great tips that Kim gave us:

• as filmmakers, what am i allowed to do because i am a filmmaker, what access you are given and how to get people to open up to you 
• if you let people talk, without interrupting them, the will reveal something inside them, someone they think they are. 
• when you keep silent, it makes the atmosphere a little bit uncomfortable and it forces them to speak more, something that they have no thought before. 
• not just the world around them, but the world inside them 
• instead of asking people a question, you let your subject discuss it in a group. 
• if you feel like its not going anywhere, try to ask them a dumb question, that surprises them and shake em off (dance with them), so that the question gets more interesting. 

I’ve never tried the tips that Kim gave before, it will be a good addition to my next set of interviews. Kim  also gave us an article about reading, but I will cover the contents of it later. Instead, to further my understanding of open space documentaries, I read this discourse on collaborative documentary by Sandra Gaudenzi. Her focus is on collaborative online participation, which i think is not on the same track as mine, but she gave a lot of useful information about the role of participation in collaborative documentary. Particularly questions when making one;

1. In what way is this a participatory documentary
2. How has this collaboration/participation influenced the production process?
3. What is the role of the documentarian  as an author(?)

Kim also stresses out that sometimes there are people who are just not the camera-type, they do show a unique characteristics in the interview, so your job is to find one that fits the criteria.

A line given by her (Sandra) also ponders me

While in linear documentaries meaning was created by framing shots and editing them together, in participatory interactive documentary meaning is shared and layered

the word ‘shared’ in conjunction with ‘meaning’ give me a new meaning of participatory. If the usual type of representation that I did in my videos were my own interpretation of meaning from the ‘represented’, then Open space & participatory documentary should be an interpretation of a ‘shared’ meaning. The role of the author is that of initiator,juxtaposing, producing the sketches into one book, but what’s inside the sketches must be made by the subjects themselves.

The lesson’s i’ve learned will certainly helped me in my documentary, but i’m still struggling the type of content I want to make with my documentary.  I want to make something new, yet I do not have the time for it. It’s interesting how everything that I did seems to be done in the last minute :’).