Even within just one specific “envelop” of the media, the skills and roles necessitated by the nature of the work being produced are so multifaceted and diverse. INFJ’s (my own Myers Brigg’s personality type) are notoriously “big picture” people. In the world of production I think that this is more positive than otherwise, given that the primary role of a producer is to oversee and weave together many elements of a production (from pre through to post). Production, particularly documentary, is a focal point of my personal career trajectory and hence it’s the skills required in a production capacity that I am focussing on further developing and refining.
It’s through my current work attachment placement (which is with Vice Australia) that I’m getting better insight into the daily doings of a producer that are required to effectively pull off a project. Central to the production role is, of course, generating ideas for projects and how these can manifest through the more creative realm of the camera lens and in the editing suite post-production.
The ability to authentically communicate these ideas and the narratives by which they’re underscored with maximum audio-visual depth and impact is so pivotal. Yet it’s difficult to affect without a fluent understanding of how the technology actually operates and, it’s for this main reason, that I was attracted to a course that endeavours to explore multiple layers of short film (including the practicalities of film making).
So, in having said this, becoming a far more confident user of the technology at hand is a priority of mine throughout this course. Technical fluency doesn’t come organically to me and therefore it’s a worthwhile challenge to address, yet I have to admit I do find it a bit dry.
What really gets me excited about documentary as a cinematic construct is its capacity to tell people about something that they otherwise would know little or even nothing about. This is particularly pertinent to advocacy documentaries, which is what I wish to gravitate towards as I begin my career.
A massive limitation of the documentary genre, however, is its restricted capacity to serve such a function when its creative potential is suppressed by pre-prescribed notions of what a documentary must look like. Alternatively, I think it’s very exciting to grapple with a more abstract approach to the documentary form and to reject the typical conventions by which the content is typically bound.
Perhaps we should pose the question: can the documentary form delineate the boundary between fact and fiction in terms of teasing the conventions that typically govern the content, suppressing its creative potential were those restrictions not so rigidly in place? And so it is questions such as these, as well as my need to improve my technical competency, that I aim to address in this course.
