RMIT University

COMM2624  Media 1

Week 6 Workshop

 

EXERCISE – NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN PB3

 

The following exercise is designed to prompt you to consider and analyse the narrative structure of your PB3 portrait piece. It doesn’t whether it is still a work-in-progress or finished.

 

It will be useful for your accompanying reflection.

 

It adapts some ideas from Michael Rabiger’s (2009) Directing the Documentary, 5th Edition (Focus Press). As he puts it: ’Answering these questions probably won’t produce ready solutions but will lead you to think hard about your story’s essentials, which is the spade work of creativity’ (p.317)

 

Exercise:  Answer the following questions (and make sure you publish it as a blog post). Make sure  you elaborate on each answer at least two or more sentences of context/explanation. (There may be some questions that you can’t answer or that don’t apply – that’s OK but you need to think carefully about why this is the case and explain in your response)

 

1. What is the ‘controlling idea’ (Robert McKee) of your portrait? In other words, what is the most interesting thing about your participant/interviewee that you want to communicate?

 

The life of an athlete and the sacrifices they have to make to excel in their sport.

2.  How is your portrait film structured?  (Remember there might be multiple forms of structure employed)  E.g. Discussion and depiction of an event or process? A Journey? Use of voiceover narration? Other?

It’s an interview with my subject beginning with an introduction of who she is and what she does, and then adding in some footage of her training. I then continue with some harder questions about qualities of an athlete, with more found footage and the ending with a shot of a skiier skiiing into the distance.

 

3. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee? (e.g. What are you saying through them and/or human nature, human folly, or noble human inspiration?)

How much time and effort she puts into to do well at skiing and how passionate she is about it.

 

4. How is your portrait being narrated? Why? How does it affect the structure?

It is being narrated by an interview that she is answering questions to that form the basic structure of what footage I am using and how I edit it.

 

5. What role will the ‘found footage’ play in your portrait? For example, reinforcement? Ironic counterpoint? Contrast? Comparison? Other?

It is used as explanation with some of the training shots, reinforcement of certain points and just general added texture to some things she points out.

 

6. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point?

I wouldn’t say dramatic, however I ask her about a low point in her life and that is where she explains the difficulty she faced with Year 12 and skiing and juggling both but she was able to do it.

 

7. When does this turning point  in your portrait and why? At the beginning? At the end? Two-thirds through?

The turning point is ¾ through, towards the end as I feel like she resolves the struggle she has and then I add in footage of a skiier so it really ties up the video well.

 

8. How does your portrait gather and maintain momentum?

By adding many shots of training and then olympic shots I feel as though it gradually builds up from her training at home, to her skiing overseas and thinking about the olympics.

 

9. Where will your portrait’s dramatic tension come from? The gradual exposition of an overall situation? A volcanic, climactic moment? An impending change or crisis? The contrast between what the interviewee talks about and the found footage?

I didn’t have any dramatic tension within my piece, as I focused more on the positive outcomes of being able to balance life and sport at the same time, and I don’t think dramatic tension would be appropriate for the video.

 

10. Does the portrait have a climax and/or resolution? Outline them.

The portrait has a finishing statement about the fact that she did manage to balance Year 12 and skiing and came out the other side keeping both important things in tact.

In our workshop we were asked to film a short video of a couple of interviews about life at RMIT in the first 6 weeks and tips on how to survive. It was really difficult to find a perfectly silent area in the uni area and we ended up going outside to shoot, however the sound quality wasn’t as good as it would have been in a silent room. I was really impressed with the camera quality and the how easy it was to manipulate and move around on the tripod. The girls in my group, Grace and Hazel were amazing to work with and we had a lot of fun putting it together! I do think next time that we should plan a bit more as the process was quite rushed.

 

Here is my Project Brief 3 video called “Stella Ajani”….

I had a lot of fun filming and editing the mini interview. I think I enjoyed it a lot more than PB2 as it wasn’t focused on myself and didn’t feel as susceptible of being judged. I could focus on someone else and not be in front of the camera. I used my SLR at home, but found it difficult to get the best lighting but finally found a light room upstairs to use in the interview. I really liked the way my subject spoke about the questions I asked her and as she is a friend of mine I chose her for that reason on top of her skiing talents.

As a beginner in Premiere, I am still learning the ropes, but when I got stuck I would try and google something and watch a tutorial which helped a lot. The found footage was also something that I enjoyed finding and slotting into appropriate moments in the video. I never realised how much documentaries and news segments rely on B-Roll footage and I can never watch a segment in the same way.

Although still having a structure, I believe documentary is something that really interests me as the structure is more leniant and it does not have to appeal to certain box offices (like Hollywood films). I’d really like to have a play around with documentary more in the future and I’d like to shoot things being “a fly on the wall” in order to obtain real, raw footage.

One struggle I faced was time pressure, as my subject was away skiing until last week so I only had a short amount of time to film her. For next time I think I would access how doable the time frame is, however I managed to finish the video in time.

The other people I had in mind for this exercise was my Dad who is a lawyer, and I chose to do my friend Stella as I thought I could represent her more easily as I find my dad and I get are always joking around and I would get mediocre footage.

Stella Ajani was able to give me some of her overseas skiing footage which I have slotted in, as well as my filming of some of her trainings which I believe gives a good mix of her international and national status. Stella is training for the winter olympics in the next 5 years and I wanted to capture her hard work and dedication on film as she is one of the most driven people I know and I really respect that.

I felt really professional getting Stella to fill out the consent form and am looking forward to working more professionally in the Projects coming up. Overall I was quite happy with how my video turned out and I feel like I am becoming more and more comfortable with Premiere and Audition because at the start of the year I had no idea what either of them were.

 

 

After finally getting a new laptop I was able to complete my recording assignment in Audition and upload it to Soundcloud. It was difficult to edit the recordings as we had accidentally done two different questions so it was hard to merge the two into one track. I used an ‘AM radio effect’ on the formal interview part and included background noise and recorded effects in the casual one.

In today’s lectorial, we talked about non-linear form and how according to Platinga it is an “open structure”. The example that was mentioned was a documentary by Fred Wiseman. He documented 6 hours of footage in a police unit in order to provide a realistic insight. The technique of filming a chunk of footage over a period of time and then taking it away to edit and create a structure was what reminded me of the show 24 Hours in Emergency. The show documents what happens in 24 hours at an English hospital through the use of hidden cameras placed over the whole building. The footage is then edited into separate cases and events in order to create a structure for an audience to watch and engage with. The constant filming catches every single moment within the hospital and I think it is a really effective way to capture reality behind a camera.

 

After re-watching the film the Wizard Of Oz the other day, I realised it can be broken down into it’s key elements. With the overall idea that we always want what we can’t have and that “there is no place like home”, the movie begins with the main character Dorothy in the city of Kansas. Dorothy is unhappy with her life in Kansas and wishes to be somewhere else, however when this happens and she is thrown into the Land of Oz, she wants to be back at home. The opening and introduction to Dorothy and her family was seen as Part 1, after the tornado occurs and she is swept up into the Land of Oz is seen as the beginning of Part 2, continuing on in Part 2, Dorothy comes across many struggles with which way to go and meeting new people till she gets to the Wicked Witch of the West’s castle in which Toto runs off and her life is at stake. Part 3, and part of the resolution was when Dorothy spills water on the witch and she melts, she is then transported back to Kansas with her ruby slippers. Still one of my favourite movies!

Finally got my new laptop and everything is so much easier. On the weekend I filmed and edited my interview with my friend who is a skier and I am on the way to catching up with things. I found it interesting in last weeks lectorial how even non fiction can have narrative, such as topics like gay history and Australia’s identity.  There is still (more fluid) structure within these non-fiction topics.

In this week’s workshop, I unfortunately had major issue with my laptop ( I think technology hates me), meaning that I couldn’t even log on. It has slowly been getting worse over the past few weeks, and I it is definitely time for a new laptop. It cannot handle the new applications we had to download and is constantly shutting down and not saving any of my work, hopefully by tonight I will have a fresh new one where I can catch up on all the things I am behind on!

I happened to flick on the tv the other day and a documentary on people who are over 600 pounds was on and it was interesting to see how they put it together. They had the introduction of their struggle from day to day life with sad music being played over the top and a deep american voiceover deep voice over. They then showed the 680 pound woman having weigh loss surgery which I thought was like ‘Act 2’ and continuing from that, her struggles to even lose weight after the surgery. Act 3, I could notice quite clearly was when she hit a turning point with her boyfriend who finally agreed to help cook healthy food and she lost heaps of weight (resolution). I am starting to pick up on all these structural things now in order to create my own mini documentary.