I’ve been exploring a little in the documentary space, and watching some things that I normally wouldn’t class as documentary in order to try and understand more nuances to the genre. To that end, I watched an episode of the show Australian Story, and would like to talk about it a little here.
The specific episode that I watched was called “The Bridge” and centred around Donna Thistlethwaite. More specifically, it centred around a single event in her life which occurred on Sunday the 12th of August, 2012. That day, she climbed over the railing of Brisbane’s Story Bridge and jumped into the river below in an attempt to commit suicide.
While the show begins with the reporter type voice of Caroline Jones introducing the person and situation which is about to be viewed, it then shifts into appearing to be a more documentary style production that television interview, and so excludes the this influence of the interviewer from that point forwards. The audience never hears the interviewer ask a question, or appear in front of the camera at any point. Instead, the modality appears to be very comfortably within the realm of expository documentary.
So this begs the question, what really is the difference between broadcast TV and documentaries? Why is this episode of a television series not thought of a a documentary, but films of a similar length covering similar subject matter could be thought of in this way? Well the simple form of the answer seems to be that broadcast TV is shot to be seen by as many people as possible, while documentaries are shot to pass on a message with nuance (“What is the difference between documentary and broadcast?”, n.d.). This increase in audience is usually thought of as a loss in subtlety and layered meaning, or as put by former journalist and now documentarian Tim Hetherington “You can present something on network news that has clarity but doesn’t necessarily have nuance” (Kasson, 2010). The other primary difference is that while documentaries are able to use distinct and unique styles in their presentation, editing and interviews, shows like Australian Story are designed to have a recognisable style and look which is consistent from episode to episode (Chapman & Kinsey, 2009). This style dictates how interviews will look, the style of the general editing as well as the type of overlay used along with how it is used.
As this particular episode of Australian Story was about a woman who had survived her suicidal jump off the Story Bridge, the majority of the overlay was showcasing Donna, alone when describing the lead up to and the suicide attempt, but with her family when describing how she has bounced back. However, the bridge itself had a large visual presence in the story, as did the river and examples of the ferry that pulled her out of the water. While very literal, this overlay enhanced the story by giving additional context to the story being verbally told.
The verbal story being told was the heart of the show, however, and the emotional core and genuine feelings of Donna was the compelling part of this show. The highlighting and focus on the issue of an actual suicide attempt by someone who you would not associate with being suicidal creates an interest in the audience to understand this person and how they have grown since the attempt. In this way, the show is very effective as I was engaged throughout the whole 28 minute running time.
Bibliography
Chapman, J., & Kinsey, M. (2009). Broadcast Journalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.
So over the past several weeks, I’ve been involved with the creation of the short documentary and it is nearing completion. It’s been a long process with many ups and downs, but Got Sole is nearly ready for release. Got Sole is a short documentary about the community surrounding sneakers and some of the people who have taken this passion and turned it into a career.
The biggest problem that we struggled with throughout the edit was that we did not enter into the documentary process with a really clear idea of what exact story we wanted to tell. This meant that the whole way through the process, from the script writing to the interviews to the cutting room, we were constantly searching the interview subjects and their answers for a cohesive story which tied all the interviewees together. Finding the story in the edit is never advisable because of the exact danger that we ran headfirst into: we didn’t really find it. Rather than a single cohesive story, we came up several different unrelated vignettes. While each of the vignettes was enjoyable to watch, the 3 separate stories didn’t really flow together very well and made the documentary overall feel less satisfying to watch. However, we are still active in this process and have since found a more complete story which ties the interviewees together a lot more than any edit we have had previously.
While we were struggling with story in our interviews, the overlay that we captured was not a serious problem. Our film was never lacking for style or visuals, as you would expect from a documentary focusing on a topic which is literally designed to look as good as it can. As such, the overlay that we captured fit very easily into the documentary and proved to be usable in quite a few different ways. Furthermore, the overlay sequences got across a sense of what the interview subjects actually did, freeing us up from hugely expositional segments and making the explanations that were given a lot less dry.
The issue that we had with our sound design throughout this process was that we wanted each different person being interviewed to have a distinct feel and tone, created primarily through music. However, we experimented with a great many music tracks and found that many would not work together, changing the tone of key too much, disrupting the flow of the documentary. Finding all this music, which was royalty free, consistent but also distinct, proved to be quite a mammoth task. This also had to be done early on in the edit, as the overlay was then editing according to the beat and music cues.
Music cues are edits where the timing of the cut is dictated by the beat and flow of the music: i.e. the music gives the cues of when to cut. Our short documentary is full of them, as the music is an incredibly key component of the overall film. These are most clearly seen in the montages used as introductions to different sessions, which are cut to the beat of the music as a stylistic choice. This is a very strong choice, I think, because it totally draws the attention of the audience and hooks them into the story world. It gets people invested enough to watch the rest of the short documentary, even if they don’t really care about shoes going in.
Despite all of these problems, we ultimately ended up with a project that came together with a slick visual flair and style, aspects that we were and are very happy with. While the issues did certainly mean that our project has not yet reached its full potential, this is something that we are continuing to work at and improve. Overall, the visual flair and slick presentation coupled with strong music keep the film interesting to watch. However, the fractured story cobbled together in the edit held us back from what we really were trying to do and lets the film down. Who would have guessed that “fix it in post” didn’t turn out our strongest result?
Over the past week or so, I have been planning and also filming and editing a short, experimental film together in a group of four. From conceptualisation to screening, the entire process took place over the course of 7 days, which is a fast turnaround and doesn’t give a huge amount of flexibility in the ability to do pickups, nor leave a huge amount of time for post production. The film went from being nothing but a concept in my head to having a rough cut within a single day, taking about 7 hours in total. The day felt a lot longer than that up until the point were rushing through trying to get a finished project uploaded, where it felt like we hadn’t had any time at all. I loved every minute of it. A stressful day to be certain, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. This was my directorial debut, the first media to ever come out with me listed as the director, and was, as such, a project incomparable for me.
Before I get into a lot of behind the scene type talk and so you understand the context, watch the 2-minute film:
Being the director of this project and being in charge of the whole production was easily both at once my favourite and least favourite position on a film that I’ve ever held, and it’s all for the same reason: as director, it all ultimately falls to me. The director is in control of the production and the ultimate arbiter of taste, meaning the final product is an expression of the director’s. This is especially true for me in the case of this film because in addition to being the director and teller of the story, I also did all the cinematography and lighting as well as crafting the story of the film with help from the others in my crew. Despite all this responsibility, I loved it and greatly enjoyed directing, and will pursue directing again. The biggest trouble I have directing is that sometimes there is a translation issue from what’s in my head to what gets communicated to others. While I love the control and ability to tell the story my way that directing gives me, all the clear and yet concise communication required is something I think that I’m particularly adept at yet. I seem to struggle the most communicating specifics of my wants and wishes with others, but generalities are easy. Again, this problem could be more closely tied to this specific film than to my directing in general, as the entirety of this film is relating abstract concepts to specific objects, and I have no other directing experience of my own to compare to. The director needs to have the vision of the piece (which I did) and to guide the rest of the crew through the creation of this vision (which is where I fell down a little). Some of this is down to practice, certainly, but I also think that there are things I can do to try and improve outside of set as well.
Because this project was an experimental film, I got a glimpse behind the curtain of what the creative process for these less ‘standard’ films could be like. The conversations we were having about this project during its creation were totally different to the conversations I’ve had in any of my other projects. Creative conversations about more traditional narrative films revolve around the characters, their internal motivations and how to get this across on-screen, and around the beats of the story, the arcs involved. Every conversation is about “How does this help the story?” This is not a negative in any way, this is the way it has to be. But with this experimental film, where the story was told entirely symbolically, the conversations were all about “Does this show what we are trying to show?”, along with the ever present fearful “Does our meaning come across at all?” This is something I haven’t really appreciated before, as the projects I have been a part of before this one had fairly literal stories. The transfer from the question of “How can we best tell this story?” to “Can we tell this story?” is not an insignificant one, and I think one that will become more and more important to carefully consider as I work on more and more complicated stories and methods of telling them. Happily though, in this case, I firmly believe we succeeded in telling the story we set out to. Backing this up, all the feedback that we have received so far on this film has been overwhelmingly positive, and the meaning we were trying to express has been picked up by the audience without feeling forced or overbearing.
The main point that I picked up on from this process is that even when the style of film is changed, and the literal is ignored in favour of the symbolic, audiences are still capable of picking up on the meanings intrinsic to the film. That even though the style of the film may be fluid and unusual compared to what the audience is used to seeing, that doesn’t automatically make the film impossible to watch, enjoy or understand. Style is something that can be messed around with and does not have to be secondary to narrative in all respects. Narrative is not the be-all and end-all of all films. The other key point which I had driven home to me is that an audience is intelligent enough to understand symbolism within films and can be trusted to make an interpretation of what they have seen. Maybe this is just the cynic in me, but this was not something I took for granted, and so throughout the whole planning and filming process, I was worried that our meaning would be far too abstract for the audience to catch on. This project showed me that the things that are most important to a director (in this case the symbolism involved in the film and the metaphor itself) will shine through, as they are the things that most time and effort are put into.
There were quite a few films, both feature-length and short, that inspired me in the creation of this short film and influenced the ideas generated, but I’ll list some of the standouts. Primary amongst my inspirations was French new wave cinema (or my generalised understanding of it) especially the films of Jean Luc Godard, the filmmaker of that era whom I have seen the most work of, from which I took a lot of inspiration for the editing style, pacing and tone, which in turn influenced how I believed the story should be told. ‘The Alphabet’ by David Lynch was another inspiration, from which I took the potential power of using pure symbolism in the film, and experiencing the hold that had. Despite the meaning wasn’t clear upon first viewing in Lynch’s short film did not in any way dissuade the viewer from the knowledge that there was meaning hidden within the piece, and that it was okay to have to decipher the film. The meaning didn’t have to be literal; a very freeing concept once embraced. Finally, Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, particularly the pre-man and post-Jupiter segments, the less narrative sections, which proved that meaning could be understandable upon first viewing without detracting from the quality of the work. That is, making something indecipherable was not automatically the same as making something worthwhile.
Some of these inspirations come across in simple ways: I think that the editing is reminiscent of the editing of French New Wave cinema, even if the style of film is vastly different. The film is entirely symbolic in order to get across a meaning without being blatantly obvious with the message. The lack of literal elements within the film makes the meaning less clear, but the meaning shines through clearly enough that the audiences we have shown the film to have grasped the meaning without an intense analysis or breakdown required. Additionally, I made the choice to use champagne as the liquid the objects are dropping into as champagne has the air of high class about it. By that, I mean that champagne is seen as a sophisticated drink which is consumed by the successful, who is the prime target of the meaning of the film.
However, despite all of this positive feedback and things I think we did well, it is far from a perfect film, and there are things I believe we could have done better. The objects which we dropped into the champagne could have been more specifically chosen rather than being whatever we had to hand, and so could have been used to add another layer to the story by creating a profile of the person that owned the objects. This is something we tried to take into consideration with the objects that we had, but unfortunately thought of this too late and had to make do with what was available to us, and so it seemed more like trying to shape what we had rather than an intentional element. Additionally, while I like the edit that was presented, I do think that is still some tightening that we could do to really enhance what we have and improve it in a minor way. Finally, while there was reasoning and consideration put into the choice of liquid used, the meaning of using champagne specifically didn’t really come across. While this didn’t stop the whole meaning from translating to the audience, it is a detail that could be pushed to add a further layer to the film as a whole.
Despite these possible improvements, I am very pleased with what we produced in this film, especially considering the limited timeframe involved. As an added bonus, I greatly enjoyed participating in this project and am going to try and use it as a springboard for future projects as well as a learning exercise to use to improve my practice overall, and my directing specifically. For something that seems so simple, it is amazing the amount of depth that could be incorporated into it, and I certainly learned a lot from it.
I got in a discussion with a friend the other day about various different films we had each seen, and the various pros and cons each film had going for and against them, when the argument was raised whether more modern films relied more on flashy effects that a solid story with compelling characters. While neither of us really thought it was true, equally neither of us totally disagreed with the statement either.
The problem with the argument is that it assumes that the two areas, spectacle and narrative, are causally linked when they are not. There is no guarantee that a benefit to one will be a detriment to the other. This means that it is more about the individual film than the age that the film is made in (shock!). Now, modern technology, particularly computers and consequently CGI have created an environment where any visuals can be emphasised above story elements, but I think that audiences are wise to this and don’t stand for it. Audiences seem to be absolutely open to a film that has average visuals accompanying an excellent story, but should a film have a sub-par story it seems to be generally rejected no matter how pretty the visuals are. An example of this is Jupiter Ascending (2015): really pretty visuals, incomprehensible story, largely rejected by audiences. Obviously, though, the best films have spectacular visuals joined to a fantastic narrative and plot.
A breakdown of some of the visual effects (CGI) used in Deadpool (2016). You should watch the full video: vimeo.com/159011768.
I think a lesson can be drawn here with regards to the visuals, and it reinforces something that I firmly believe in. Story is king in film making, which is pretty simple when you realise film making is just visual storytelling. Visual should always support the story, and if they do not, they have no place in the film. Any technology can be used in a film, and used to great effect, but it must serve the story and the aesthetic of the film. If it feels out of place or in disrupts the viewing experience unnecessarily, that’s when problems and audience backlash arise. CGI is an incredible powerful tool, but I think that it is important to remember that it is just a tool, not the be all and end all of the creation. It is certainly possible to create a film without CGI. I’m not so sure it’s possible to create a film without a story.
Euan's Learning Film! 