Documentary analysis.

As a starting point, in one of the seminars we watched a handfull of documentaries to gather a better understanding on different approaches. I chose two that I liked which I thought would be very inspirational;

Skateistan (2010) Director- Orlando Von Einsiedel

Skateistan directed by Orlando Von Einsiedel is a nine-minute documentary that follows two Skateistan students, Murza and Fazila, through the poverty stricken, war torn streets of Kabul.

This documentary was beautifully shot by Orlando who wanted to make everyone aware of these children. People stereotype and this film shocked many (including mine) ideas of the children of Kabul. We often see areas such as Kabul as a poor, depressing place but through this documentary we see the children free and happy. Orlando juxtaposes these shots with shots of the war torn Kabul so we get a sense of freedom from the children but they narrate that they arent free from whats happening around them. In this documentary the characters narrate the story with no interviewer present. In some shots characters voices are overlaid on top of images of kabul or other characters on the skateboards. I thought this was very powerful and this is why I chose this documentary as inspiration.

Ideas of a century

So I joined in with a four, joining with people I haven’t worked with before. As a five we discussed possible themes we could base our documentary on. Knowing what little information I have on Liverpool, I suggested a football theme (as Liverpool are very passionate about their football team), I also suggested the Hillsborough disaster, but this was a bit of a grey area, and some of public may not want to talk about this. Other suggestions were the making of the city, the architecture or a documentary on Liverpool it’s self.

We talked about the docks as ‘Mark’ (member of the group) lives not far from Liverpool and knows that the docks are quite famous and historical, as the Beatles would often perform gigs at a local pub in the docks area.
We decided to go away and do some research, gathering information on ideas we could document.

Documentary Approaches

Having thoroughly read the brief, I found a part on the possible approaches to a documentary, this interested me and opened my eyes at the actual variety of documentaries there are available, they go as follows,
Observational;-the filmmaker does not intervene but uses the camera to observe the day to day life of the documentary subject-usually requires a contributor highly involved in an interesting task that has a finite time span.
Direct Cinema; - the filmmaker is very much an active participant in the film, interrogating the subject of the film to reveal information.
Educational/informative; - the film usually revolves around exploring a subject in detail and presenting factual or expert information, often with multiple contributions from different contributors.
Poetic; - uses metaphor, visual lyricism and soundscape or music to portray an aspect of life- often with a universal human theme.
Investigative;-usually a journalistic approach exposing information not commonly known, or understood.
Collage; - often combine stills, archive, found footage and moving image and juxtaposes them to shed new light on a subject area.

New Day, New Project

We have conquered Experimental and so forth (but slightly different) comes Documentary (Dramas last which I’m looking forward to).

We were given the brief for this project and I was surprised that the base of this work will take place in Liverpool. Having visited Liverpool once I don’t really know how the city operates, so it will be intriguing to find out more.

The Brief:
Working in groups of 5, we will need to undertake roles in creating a brief documentary on the theme of ‘Liverpool Stories’, we also have to think about our possible approach to this documentary.

So we have to scour newspapers to find out any stories on Liverpool, (best not try The Sun eek)…not having much to do with documentaries and how they function I’m happy to find out more, this project for me will be a learning curve that I’m excited to delve into.

Evaluation

When we were given the brief I did not fully understand what an Experimental Film was. After much research and viewing examples I soon realised what was asked of me through the brief.
I am satisfied with the group I chose as we all played our parts well, often helping each other in stressful times. I believe we researched into our project fully and discussed fairly what we wanted to interpret in our work; we appropriately created a prop list and a call sheet which helped whilst we were filming.
Meshes of the afternoon was a huge inspiration to use in our project and we developed some of our ideas from this. I would say our main disadvantages to our film would have been the cold weather which hindered our project. I would also say that we did not gather enough footage, this also being down to the weather. I also think that we did not fully portray the meaning of the storyline of our film and more scenes would have been useful so the audience would fully understand, however we have taken this into account for the next projects. Our main advantage to our project was good communication through out. The roles were swapped about a lot but this was done to help eachother, we did not want to leave any members to stuggle.
Overall, I am satisfied with our work, I have learnt much through the new techniques of editing, helped through workshops and individual teaching. This project has also introduced me to Experimental films.

Editing

Eventhough I was not in charge of the editing process, I did attend to oversee and give my input in the development of our work. We wanted to use the editing process of cropping numerous frames into one (much like the scene with the women being seen around the table all at once in the film Meshes of the afternoon) and so we experimented with this. We also decided to use black and white scenes to insinuate the actors sub-conscious mind, and colour scenes to insinuate his conscious mind.

In these images we tried to show the cutting up and piecing together images. We also wanted to show the effects and levels we added to numerous clips.

Hyperthermia!

When we completed the filming we were satisfied that it all went as planned.
However, we did not take the weather into account and it was absolutely freezing! Even though we planned to film a few more shots we decided to call it a day as all our clothing was wet through and we were on the brink of hyperthermia, we also wanted to keep the actor comfortable when clearly he wasn’t. Our hands were numb so we couldn’t pick up any of the items.
While we wanted to enjoy the experience of filming and directing our project we were slightly miffed that some of the project was ruined by this annoying cold weather.