Question 1:

This was a really great exercise in terms of simply looking at work we’d shot previously and editing things together with some semblance of meaning. Obviously at the time of recording, we didn’t know we’d actually be doing much with the recordings, and so a lot of them had little motivation or meaning, not to mention flow. This was true somewhat of the video – I think my partner and I had given ourselves too strict of a theme (movement/travel), and thus we didn’t take the opportunity to film more/more interesting things we could have.

There is very little meaning behind my film: it’s mostly quite disconnected material, even in relation to the other video or audio. However, I think that while there isn’t exactly a narrative to it, there is some kind of visual flow to the piece. I enhanced that with a black and white effect, which does wonders for automatically inscribing some sort of poetry on visual art. I also colour corrected slightly to make the contrast in the clips stronger. In order to further tie the film together I added some music from the very talented Kevin MacLeod.

I don’t think the quality of our recordings was particularly great, and I think it’s visible even after post. We definitely could have been more watchful of our focus and framing in the video and with ambient noise leaking into our audio, but for a quick exercise it’s not too bad. For a future exercise I would be more mindful of framing and focus, and also look at experimenting more with movement.

Question 2:

In this question, I read the Week 4 section of the Directing the Documentary reading from M Rabiger.

I found the point about providing sufficient exposition particularly interesting – earlier in the semester I was considering creating a documentary about comic books, sort of a ‘take two’ of a documentary I had done in my Year 12 Media class. That documentary scored fine, but looking back I was very unhappy with it because it didn’t have a clear point and most importantly, it had very little exposition that really helped the audience understand it. I think it’s very important to make facts clear to the audience while not treating them like idiots.

Something else I found interesting was embracing the drama of documentary. In ‘True Lies’ we saw many different types of documentary and the bulk have drama in them, which is what makes them interesting. Even observational documentaries about penguins have some sort of storyline with some drama! Rabiger says that it is vital to look for and recognise a “change in consciousness” in a documentary participant, and respond to this change and capture it on film. This is what sets the best documentaries apart from the others. (And I think it’s why Forbidden Lie$ is so captivating: it really engages with the main documentary participant and responds to her.