FILM/TV2 – A&R4 – QUESTION 4

Week Nine’s reading is a snippet (63-73) from Documentary storytelling for film and videomakers by Bernard Curran.

A point that interested me from this reading was on page 69 when it is stated:

“Filmmaking, from shooting through editing, is a process of expanding and/or collapsing real time. “Filming real life is a constant struggle to distill realtiy into a meaningful subset of itself, into the telling moments, the telling gestures, the lines of dialogue that will suggest the rest of the scene without actually having to see the rest of the scene” says Steven Ascher.”

This isn’t a particularly jaw dropping statement, however, I find it interesting as it is just simply stateing something that we may tend to forget about while we are planning our films/documentries. Sometimes it’s nice to just discover the simplicity in a statment, even if it something we consider to be obvious.

Something in which I believe could be applied to our own documentary comes shortly after the point in which I found to be interesting.

“The event needs to be covered with the editor in mind, so that there is enough variety of shots, cutaways, and tranditional materila to make a creative edit possible”

Since beginning this course, I have increasingly found this statment to become one of the most important things that filmmakers need to consider. As an editor of many of our assignments, I can vouch for it’s necessity. I have no problem in saying that this is something we have to apply to our documentary. Pre planning for editing will only strengthen the outcome of our documentary.