“A story is the narrative, or telling, of an event or a series of events, crafted in a way to interest the audience members, whether they are readers, listeners or viewers” (Sheila Curran Bernard 2011, 15)
After contemplating the idea of story, I wondered how to incorporate a story line into my film. The title of my short film, From Bean to Bin, in a sense is a story line. It highlights that my film will focus on a bean but will end up in a bin, if the audience thinks literally. Stories have beginning, middles and ends. I think finding the middle part of your story is one of the most challenging aspects of documentaries. Ensuring that your audience stays interested for the lapse of the film.
I don’t particularly have any characters. I want to make the protagonist, although inanimate, the coffee cup. After watching Plastic Bag by Gigantic Studios (link), I gained inspiration for the ways in which I can give inanimate objects life and character. Through voice over, I would be able to tell a story, however I have to maintain the idea of documentary and information.
After reading the Kino-Eye “Four approaches to structuring micro-documentaries” article, I categorised my film as attempting to give an impression.
“If you want to convey an impression rather than tell a story or convey a message in a conventional manner, you can take the viewer on an audiovisual journey crafted with a sequence and/or collage of images based your observation of a single place, a specific event, or a particular process, without a central character to drive the story, yet tied together by a unified theme.”
My unified theme is the impact of single use coffee cups against the world. Through animating and giving a coffee cup characteristics, I hopefully will achieve the idea that single use coffee cups contribute to a lot of harm. Through use of materiality, and conveying my impression through audio, I hope to achieve this specific storyline.
References:
Bernard, Sheila Curran. Documentary Storytelling, 2nd Edition. 2nd ed. Focal, 2013.
Tames, D., 2020. Four Approaches To Structuring Micro-Documentaries.
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