“One human looking another human in the eye through a lense”

Okay, so Wednesday 8:30am classes has suddenly become a time I am willing to sacrifice a sleep in for. Firstly, Rohan has such a great energy to liven up our Wednesday mornings and secondly, it’ll be my third time filming in the documentary style.

In my early years of high school, I never found myself interested in watching documentaries as I’m guilty of getting caught up in purely watching Hollywood blockbusters that lead to a “k-hole” of sappy rom-coms. It was until watching and studying Werner Herzog’s 2005 Grizzly Man in first year did I begin to appreciate and question documentary style in a broader sense. Even though documentary presents fact, the director still has the ability to control how you perceive or to what extent could Werner portray Timothy Treadwell’s life and death and the ethical debates that surround creating a film after the person has passed away.

We call this style non-fiction and often, people describe documentaries as factual content. But to what extent is a doco factual if it’s still in the hands of the director’s creative control?

“What types of ethical issues arise when we turn the camera on documentary participants, and, from a production standpoint, what creative and technical challenges arise whilst filming and editing interviews?”

The brief for They Film People, Don’t They? challenged my perception of filmmaking itself and particularly intrigued me about ethical issues within the finished product of a documentary film as a result of the production side of it all. It’s this idea of exploring that grey area portraying and condensing real life into a time frame.

Judging from the weekly schedule of our class time, I look forward to soak in as much of the fired up class discussions, explore the different documentary rhetoric’s and styles from a range of directors, and most importantly open my mind up to the various stories that encapsulates humanity as it. With that information soaked up, I hope to implement that into the next human story I tell and simultaneously gain more experience in my practical skills such as lighting and audio. But I guess the first step into making it happen, is finding that courage again to ask someone to tell their story – the need to overcome that social hurdle yet again.