Blog 15 - Finished Product and Reflection

https://vimeo.com/145249305

Well at the end of the class, I must say that I really enjoyed this class. I had no idea about documentaries except for a very limited amount of examples before this class and my attitude about the whole thing has changed drastically.  I’ve always been interested in making documentaries and this has solidified my love for them. My goal now is to find more projects that I can undertake in the coming months. Once I get back to America, one of my goals is going to be making more films and posting them online as a sort of hobby but also a reel that I can use for resume’s and what not.

I think this class has really helped me build my skills and given me new ideas of what documentaries are and what constitutes a documentary film. I’ve learned that the distinction is very broad and that a great many things can be considered documentaries. With my film I wanted to show life in a single afternoon, a single moment in time like preserving a moment in a frame. With my film I hope I have conveyed how I feel about the beach and how I see it when I’m there.

Overall I’m really happy with this class and I think Pete did a great job showing us all kinds of different films so that we could go out and make the film that we wanted to make. It’s a strange job but making these films is always interesting and doing them is something that I have great passion for. I hope you all like the film I’ve made and that maybe it shows you something interesting. It’s been a great time working with this class and I am really excited to see what the future has in store for all of you.

Blog 14 - Voice Over

I wanted to really focus my voice over on the context of humanity’s relationship with the beach. It is a relationship I often think about and wonder how exactly it came about. The idea that we have a special relationship with the ocean is a fascinating to me and so I tried to channel that fascination into my work. I came up with this:

I’ve always been fascinated by the beach. To me it’s a kind of enchanted location where two worlds collide. In many ways the beach is the end of the earth. From the sand to the water, one environment shifts gradually into another. In one world there are the terrestrial beings and in the other, the creatures of the deep.

No line so divides the world like that of the shoreline. No barrier so obvious. What we see at the beach is a joining of worlds.

            Why are we drawn here? As humans, the beach is regarded as a place of leisure. We engage in activity, sport, recreation, all in one place. Is it the water? The sand? No one can be sure but it is true that we are drawn to it.

The congregation of people reminds me of days long passed. Days without technology or endless distractions. It was in these days that we had to create new ways to entertain ourselves. I suppose it would always end back on the beach.

It’s a slow place. The pace of runners is muffled by the sand. The struggle of bodies against the waves is like watching fight in slow motion. Those who lay in the sand are still in a landscape that has not been painted. Figures in an unchanged picture.

It is a hypnotic place. The beating of the waves comes in regular, soothing intervals, the sand makes for a soft cushion of ground. The mind cannot help but feel at ease along the sandy shore.

If the great skyscrapers and technology are monuments to man’s progress, then the beach stands in opposition to it all. The beach tells us that we are small and that nature’s monuments are somehow greater, more pure, longer lasting.

The beach is as it has been for millions of years. Since the waters formed the ocean and the ocean eroded away the rocks into sand. It was here before we were. It may well be here long after we are gone.

Humans are just borrowing it.

That text with edits for space, worked pretty nicely with the video and I think all that’s left is to put some finishing touches on the whole thing. 

Blog 13 - Music Part Two

After last week’s song, I wanted to make something that was a little bit more comfortable for the audience so I decided to go with an acoustic guitar track with a soft arpeggio chord progression that will hopefully be put at the end of the film or somewhere around there. The sound is very peaceful and will mesh nicely with the serene imagery of the late afternoon sun from the day I shot. The chord progression is standard with some alteration to the major chords but I think it comes off really well with the film.

My idea behind this was to have a nice scene with this playing around the end of the video after the voiceover so that the scenery and the music can be observed in full here. This will be more of the wrapping up point for the film. I hope it will leave an impression on the audience in general. My thoughts are to have it end right before the last long shot of the girl and the dog, which I have placed at the end of the film as the final moments. I think it would be good to have this end so that the total focus of the audience will be on this scene.

One of the problems I had with this one was finding an acoustic guitar. I didn’t pack mine with me so I had to borrow one from one of the people living in my dorm. It was a trick but it really paid off because the song works pretty well with the visuals. Next week I’ll be focusing on the voiceover and what to put in to make it all tie together. Hopefully with a good voice over, the context of all of this will come into focus and the film will look and sound great.

Blog 12 - Music Part One

This week, I am focusing on one of the songs for the film, specifically the first song, which I think I will be going for a more electronic, “ocean deep” feel to it. I drew inspiration from the original song for this one while making it have a little bit more of an eerie feel to it that I think will sound really good in contrast to the sounds of the ocean which I have decided to leave into the final cut. I originally had left this out in lieu of the music, but my friend suggested I keep it in as the sound is iconic. This song has a slow tempo and the lead instrument is somewhat similar to crystal glass reverberations. I matched it up with the original cut and I think it sounds pretty great.

My idea going into this was to make a song that contrasts slightly with the nature of the video. While both are relatively quiet scenes, the music has a touch of uneasiness to it that I hope will play well with the voice over that has yet to be recorded. My goal is to have something that the audience takes an interest in and is not just something that sits totally in the background but also doesn’t distract from the content of the film. That balance is certainly tricky but I think I have found something that fits the criteria

Next week I will be working on something a little bit different and I hope that will serve to bring the film to its close in a neat and nice wrap up. After that song, I just have to record the voice over which I have partially written and then I will have my finished product. So far, so good with this film.

Blog 11 - New Edits

After looking over everything, I think a lot of the base footage for the original cut was really solid. I think the pacing of it all is just a little rough and a lot of that went with the music being long and repetitive. I have started work on new music but this week I’m just working on getting those edits to really work for me. A lot of this really goes on feel because m any of these shots are really long but have a lot of moving elements. It really all depends on how long the shot needs to be to convey what it needs to. I honestly think I did a pretty good job of this on the first run but going back there were a few minor tweaks that had to be done, just to give a better look of it all.

I included a few extra shots to give a closer look at the water, which was somewhat limited before and also changed around the length of certain shots to make room for what I felt, were more interesting shots. This ultimately gives me a really good looking cut with the footage I have and now all that remains is getting that extra stuff to fit into place.

Next week I will be working on more music to put in and hopefully that will really match the tone of the film even better. The first song was made for something else and proved to be over-long but this time I’m going to make music that fits the mold a little better. Notably, I’ll be making two songs rather than one. After that it will be time to work on the voice-over work and then the final touches. Overall it’s going pretty well as of now.

Blog 10 - After Feedback

Showed what I had in class today and got about the response I imagined. I think my original cut runs a little slow with the repetitive music and I think the interspersed cuts of the stormy day were not totally within my vision. That being said, showing it in front of others showed me things about the film that I needed to see. I think getting caught in the editing room all day makes for a somewhat sterile product and showing it can really help to breathe life into it.

Pete had the suggestion to go for a more rhythmic style documentary but I’m not sure that really fits the idea of it all, he also mentioned that the long lurid shots were effective but that the effect was cut a bit short with other shots. Looking at it, I totally agree. I’m going to cut the short shots out of it and hopefully that will help the audience really fall into the frame of the film. The goal is to paint landscapes with video after all. I think my film can be effective in this regard but I will have to make it more interesting to watch.

Fixing the music will be a big part of this an I have some ideas, splitting the video into two songs that are shorter but have similar feelings to them will be effective. I think music is one of the more important characters in this film. Also I think putting a voice over in will help make the point of the film a bit more obvious. I don’t want the film to be over but having the audience know what I’m talking about is important. Writing the voice over will take a bit of consideration but it will probably be one of the last things I do.

Blog 9 - Edits

Editing everything together is one of my favorite processes when it comes to video production and I am going to have a lot of fun with this one before I get feedback. I’m going throw an experimental style out there first and see how it sticks with the class when I get feedback. The idea is to merge two separate days of filming together to show an extreme contrast between the nice weather of one day and the cloudy stormy day that follows.

Footage on the second day was tricky. The weather was very stormy so I didn’t want to be out there too long. That being said I think it really turned out ok and now I edited it so that the “bad day” only takes up very short segments. The idea is to have them so short that they are surprising to the audience and they don’t see this coming. The idea is based on my preference for wanting the viewers’ attention and trying to show something that the person watching will find interesting. I think this will work but I have never attempted to make anything like this before and so there may be issues that I don’t see.

Before I go to feedback, I have made a song on my computer that I think will work pretty well with the film so I am going to put it in to accompany the visuals while I show it in class. It’s not completely finished but I think it will work for the purposes of what I need it for. I will see how the song goes after I show it to the class and make changes accordingly.

So far everything is going along nicely. I have all the footage I need, I think, so going forward is all in editing and voice over, etc.

Blog 8 - Nice Day for a shoot

Went out yesterday and got some raw footage to piece together. I think this will work pretty well because the footage turned out really well. I didn't have any issue with the equipment and all of my locations proved to have a great deal of interesting subjects.

I found that I want to shoot on two or more days with very different weather to try an get a true sense of the beach as not only a place but an entire environment as all as an ecosystem in and of itself. Under these different circumstances, the beach comes alive with a different sort of personality. At times it may come across that the beach is one of the more emotive pieces of environment that we inhabit. When it rains, it feels sad.  This works well with the style that I am trying to convey because one of the important themes of the doc is the nature of people and of how they respond and react to the environment and how the environment itself acts. I’m eager to see just how this process works in piecing together a very loose narrative and if I will use it at all. This is really an experiment and I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do once it is all finished.

Once I have the footage from both shoots together, I’m going to piece them together how I see fit and what comes of that I will show in class to get some feedback on how everything fits together and all. I have a hunch that after I get feedback I will have to go back to the drawing board to fit everything in a more compact scope. Also, I will have to make some music for the film which is a potential challenge.

Blog 7 - Sous les pavés, la plage!

How does the beach have a social context? That's something I aim to find out. This doc will be reflexive as well as poetic. I want the audience to come along with the process.

The title: Under the Paving Stones, comes from a translation of: Sous les pavés, la plage! Which comes from graffiti during the May 1968 period of unrest in France. The idea of this is that beneath all of the constructs of daily life, there lies a more peaceful life.

The idea of the doc is simple. The beach and what that entails. I aim to narrow this view down over the course of shooting and piece together a film complete with a good deal of voice over and shots. With not much time, this actually helps because the idea is limited and clear and with a shorter run time I can focus more on the subject.

The idea was also posed to have the doc shot in one continuous shot and to have the subject this big set. This is a good idea and I may pursue it. Potential problems with this would be the practicality of shooting ten minutes straight with no interruptions. I think the idea is worth a shot and I will attempt to do this first before pursuing other options.

My plan is to shoot today after class out at fairy meadow beach. What I am going to do is map out my shots when I get to the beach and then shoot. If everything goes according to plan I will have all the shots I need and then I can get to editing.

After this comes the voice over, which has to be poetic. I am working on several things to read for the voice over. I think I will open with a literal poem and then speak more about the subjects as the film continues.

Blog 6 - Production Ideas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5Iny61GVw8
I want to focus my project on nature in some way, as well as incorporating poetic elements into the documentary. My ideas all focus around the way people interact with nature.

My first idea is to shoot all of my footage at the beach. The reason for this is that I think it will offer an interesting image of daily life. I think the beach is a special place for a lot of people because the focus is mostly on leisure. Beaches and enjoyment often go hand in hand and so taking a look at the literal and philosophical nature of the beach. This would include shots of people interacting with the environment.

Another idea would be to document my trip to Uluru over spring break. This would have to be done without a lot of equipment and possibly shot with a smart phone camera. That being said I think this would also provide a great deal of good shots and nice imagery as well as a very participatory mode of filmmaking.

I think this might be a good idea and I am going to look into both of these different film, probably shooting a lot of both of them just to be safe and then I will come back to this at a later point to decide which I like and which I want to pursue more I the coming months. I think in total I will just try to make a film that I can enjoy making as well as cultivate an interest.

I will have to see where all of this takes me because I am new to the craft but I have some exciting ideas and I think with a little bit of thought, I can make them work pretty well in the end. I will just have to keep my eyes open.

Blog 5 - Reflection

In the last five weeks we have learned a multitude of things about New Documentary and I know I have taken a lot from this class as a whole. For the most part it has really opened my eyes up to all the facets of documentary filmmaking that before I had been pretty ignorant about. For one thing, I had no idea there were so many different styles of documentaries. It seems that I had always seen a particular type of documentary, notably the styles of David Attenborough and Michael Moore, and I hadn’t noticed that you can really put art into these films in a way that is both engaging to the audience and effective in its delivery of the point it is trying to get across.

This course so far has showed me that the word Documentary has a much more complicated definition than I previously thought. Just like the age old debate of “what is art?” the idea that documentary can be nailed down to one clear cut definition is not very accurate to the bigger picture. Documentaries incorporate many different aspects of filmmaking that sometimes are reserved mostly for feature films, effects, camera tricks, dramatization, recreation, and while some of these things are frowned upon in the trade, it can be used to make a more powerful and enriching point.

I’ve learned that one of the basic tenants of documentary filmmaking is to have a point. It really isn’t a documentary without expressing a point of view. Even the most simple nature docs or Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera are saying something about the point of nature they explore. It is important and necessary not to only document, which is something simple that a security camera could do, but to also show a greater meaning to the images and words you capture.

Also the nature of documentary can be that of an activist. We saw in Lovely Andrea that the work had strong feminist overtones throughout, starting with a simple narrative but quickly branching out into all sorts of different forms of storytelling.

Also I learned that the line between fact and fiction is often very muddy. This is best exemplified in Close Up, which really clearly blurs the lines between fact and fiction, and in doing so, makes the audience question the very notion of truth and artifice.

Blog 4 - Close Up and docufiction.

This week we discussed the concept of docufiction and watched an example of one in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up. The nature of this genre is an interesting look into the very complexity of the medium of the documentary and on a closer look, I find that it says more about documentaries then some actual documentaries do.

Kiarostami set out to make the movie after reading an article written by the journalist portrayed in the first moments of the film. He was then given permission to film the court proceedings of Hossain Sabzian, who was being accused of fraud in an attempt to impersonate Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

This film is considered a classic and a masterpiece of world cinema. I think it plays a very important look at the inner workings of documentary as well as the complexity of truth itself.

In the film we see a man who is impersonating another man, all the while the film is impersonating a documentary. It has many scenes ripped straight out of reality while also reconstructing past scenes, with people playing themselves. This to me is an expert move in the central theme of artifice. I think the film shows truth by obscuring it. The entire point is to lean back and think “wait a minute, was that real?” and by doing that you do the same thing to the world beyond that. I think documentary serves to have a point and build evidence around it. Is it bad documentary making to include dramatizations? To have a title sequence? To put the director in the event, therefore changing it? The nature of the documentary is to use reality as your paintbrush, and I think Close Up does a really good job of this.

            The style of this film helps put ourselves in the place of Hossain and his fraud. Watching this we are compelled to think that, just like him, we impersonate every day, whether it be someone else or others reflection of ourselves. The style of this film lends itself very clearly to that.

Blog 3 - The Wonder Ring - Nature on Campus

https://vimeo.com/135933174 Nature on Campus

This week we shot a small video on campus reflecting the natural life of the area. This task helped us get acquainted with the cameras while also making a piece of work in itself. The nature piece was meant to showcase the natural environment in a way that had a sort of narrative of and within itself. Our video was meant as an example of how we see nature often through reflections, and how seeing images on top of images can be damaging to the scene but also beautiful in some ways. We conveyed this by filming the reflective glass doors right up next to the shot of overlaid images of nature, edited to give a transparent attribute to the first.

            Stan Brakhage’s Avant garde film making is influential in the way that he tampers with film, rearranges frames, and paints on frames and scratches into film. The methods he practiced are considered to be staples of the craft

This could be compared to the Wonder Ring in that it serves as a visual memento and it says a lot without any dialogue and little sound. Stan Brakhage shows the train route in the beautiful 5 minute film that serves to document something that is no longer there. The film conveys a powerful message without saying anything. Michael Renov discusses this film as ‘lyrical’ and offers that it is subjective and powerful because it puts the viewer in a position where they are seeing things as he saw them. The Wonder Ring served to give Brekhage a visual memento to something that is gone.

            Our film, Votive to Progress. Is meant to convey the title in that, nature is the votive, or sacrifice, when progress is sought. It is a trade-off. This is why interspersed with nature, we see images of buildings and a few people walking by without noticing it.

I think that one of the core tenants of documentary is to have a point. One could hardly say that Brekhage is a documentarian, and yet, many of his films do exibit techniques used by the documentarian. One could say that his subjectivity, especially in regards to Wonder Ring disqualifies him form such a title but I think subjectivity is at the core of all documentary. I would say that his films are art films and not documentary because they do not lend themselves to a narrative.

Blog 2 - Early Doc - Man with the Movie Camera - Nanook of the North - Ethics in Documentary

This week we explored the world of early documentaries.

Looking at examples of early documentary it is clear to see that there is less of a distinction between objective truth and artful interpretation. In Nanook of the north we see one of the first, best examples of a fleshed out feature length documentary. Robert J. Flaherty is a pioneer of documentary filmmaking and Nanook is considered a milestone in the craft. Looking back, the practices displayed in the film would probably be considered abhorrent by today’s standards. At this point, the medium was just finding its feet and the film is still largely praised.

                For different reasons, the Man with the Movie Camera is seen as a staple of documentary filmmaking and filmmaking in general. Dziga Vertov showcases a brand new style of filmmaking that combines documentary as well as heavy influences of art film. The movie on the surface is just the goings on of 1929 Soviet Russia, but the way in which this is conveyed is artful and unique. Vertov sought out to capture a world “caught unawares.” This can be seen as a foray into the Poetic mode of documentary, similar to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. Vertov employs a number of camera, editing, and post production techniques like splicing, split-frame and quick cuts and ultimately uses them to portray the life and energy of the world he inhabited.

                These films along with the other films we sampled like The Blood of the Beasts, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, The River, and Night Mail all show an example of work that manipulates the reality of the situation for the purposes of enhancing the film. This practice has certainly been drawn back in recent years with an emphasis on the objective truth of the moment. It could be seen that at the time these movies were not made to show exactly what happened but rather to reflect the overall ideas of the situations. They were working on a limited set of tools and they made the movies that conveyed their point of view.

One thing to be said about these films is that although they may not be necesarily "ethically sound," they have a message and use the means that they have to convey them. You could say that documentary can only depict true events and I think that is true, but it is not unusual for a filmmaker to make the truth suit his or her needs to fit the narrative. I would say the level of manipulation is important to moniter and varies by case.

Blog - 1 Lovely Andrea-Yung Jake-Defining Documentary

This week we really explored what a documentary film really is. We opened with a discussion on the nature of what exactly makes a film a documentary.

The article Defining Documentary puts things into a broader perspective, looking at all the suggested definitions and reconstructs a definition from all of that. The article brings up the argument that a documentary is a portrayal of the facts. While this is true, a documentary also has to have other things and cannot simply be something as blank as say, security camera footage. The article mentions the need for realism but also the conventions of film, as well as the need to teach or express and illuminate a certain point of view.

Lovely Andrea is a really interesting documentary because it seems to create conventions while still fitting comfortably within the scope of a documentary. The film manages to convey several messages without telling the audience what to think. By clear expository, very raw filmmaking, the film manages to showcase a variety of issues like feminism, sexuality, past vs. present, freedom and bondage, as well as independence in the modern word.  It does all of this in a mixed up, non-linear fashion, intercutting music and clips from cartoons, music videos and movie clips.

Yung Jake’s e.m-bed.de/d really stretches the lines of what you could call a documentary, possibly even to the point of absurdity. The video shows something that certainly conveys and idea and does so in an interesting way, using open windows to show a cumulative rise to fame of the artist. The video shows just how fame spreads on the internet, gathering fame slowly until it takes off and then showing just how quickly something can go viral in the modern world. It is an exploration and possibly a critique of modern fame and the internet and how it enters our life. The problem that I have with calling it a doc is that it is presented as a fictional story and does not truthfully track any real person.