Food On Film – Week 4
Long form documentary normally has three-act narrative structures: establish characters, develop conflicts and reveal background story. Micro-documentary comparing with the long-form documentary, it doesn’t have that much time to do those steps, instead, it （the argument in a micro documentary） should be very straightforward. Because of time limitation, it used to be 2 to 3 minutes, sometimes it can be even 9 minutes. Therefore, Micro documentary structure will often depend on the object and the participants in each documentary.
There are several examples I found that I feel very useful to analyze mico-documentary structures and also those examples could help me to develop my idea of my own project.
- Dieorama is ten minutes directed by Kevin Staake. This is a personal profile editorial framework, it talks about Abigail Goldman who is a public defender’s office in Washington state, the job can often involve hours of staring at crime scene photos or even observing autopsies as they take place, so what does she do to relax and escape at night?
The beginning of the documentary, it shows the powerful and interesting sculpture works which let me continue watching it. It is a character-led film, Staake has created a relatable and entertaining piece which appeals to our fascination with death. He shows why and how does Goldman create those pieces of Dieorama, and there are many close-ups of the Dieorama which make me feel immersed in Goldman’s artwork. I think I can take the way Staake used close-ups to get participates attention into my work too. The texture of food could defiantly create a sense of enjoyment for my audiences. Also, it allows me to think about when should I change the frame from a close up to the full shot of the character? This micro-documentary not only target the audiences who know Goldman well but also create values to invite audiences who didn’t know Goldman before.
- Skip Day is a 17 minutes documentary made by Patrick Bresnan and Ivete Lucas. This documentary wins the prestigious Illy best short film award at the 2018 Cannes festival. Skip Day talks about a group of High School Seniors as they skip school the day after prom for a rites-of-passage journey to an upscale beach 60 miles from their home. This has a natural structuring device and I can follow and experience those teenagers over the day.
In the class, we watched The Rabbit Hunt, it quite surprises me that those two micro-documentaries have the same director and some similarities I’ve been noticed from those two documentaries. Both of them give me a sense of experience my own thought through them. By this I mean both of them in the way that creates a feeling of joy and sadness in equal measure and it allows me to decide which part I want to explore and notice more. Skip Day is an experimental documentary, it requires me watching it and I learned a little something about a community. Whether it is about the issue of racism or teenage identity. And I learned a little something about yourself as well. It gives me an idea of how documentary helps audiences to use their own perspective to reflect the issue or the event that a filmmaker wants to explain.
- Lonely is a poetic documentary, it doesn’t make an explicit argument about the subject directly. Instead, it seems more allusive and use ‘associative’ editing to capture a feeling of lonely.
I think Heinrich is trying to produce an impression of Melbourne in his short film. He collects some footages of individuals, it doesn’t have a central character to drive the story, but I can defiantly feel the connection of each footage. The location of each footage is in Melbourne, and most of them are to be shooting an individual is doing something, which connects with the topic Lonely. This structure is more about evoking a mood or an impression rather than explaining which is really interested me.
Reference
Tames D 2104, KINO EYE, DOCUMENTARY, NEW MEDIA, VIDEO ARTS…FOUR APPROACHES TO STRUCTURING MICRO-DOCUMENTARIES, viewed by 1 April 2019, <https://kino-eye.com/2014/11/17/structuring-micro-docs/>
Fox B 2017, Documentary Media : History, Theory, Practice. 2nd ed., Routledge.
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