Documentary Research

    Welcome to the first part in the trilogy + 1 of posts(which is apparently called a tetralogy) which I will be making about the documentary project we have recently finished working on. 

The Research

I Think This is the Closest to How the Footage Looked (2012)

    I Think This is the Closest to How the Footage Looked was first documentary we viewed in class as we started our unit on documentaries. This film completely changed my views on what documentaries could be. If you had showed this piece to me before, I wouldn't had even called it a documentary. Before I had the impression that all documentaries were long informative pieces with interviews that tell you about a topic, but that's obviously not true. As we were told in class, a documentary is something that illustrates a "slice of life". They can take on so many different shapes and forms, and it got me really excited for this project. 

    If you haven't watched this piece, stop reading right now and go watch it here.

    This short little nine minute documentary is absolutely soul crushing, and it perfectly shows how a documentary is just a "slice of life". 

American Promise (2013)

    American Promise was the first actual full length documentary we watched, with a runtime of almost two and a half hours compared to the nine minutes of the first one. This was much more of the typical kind of documentary you would expect, showing the life of two boys from the first grade all the way to college. That's right, the documentary spanned the entirety of their time at school and it took over 13 years to create. 

    

    This documentary is about the lives of two African American boys going to one of the most prestigious preparatory schools in the country. The New York school is predominantly white, and the two subjects were given scholarships, as long as they maintain their grades. 
    

    The piece does a masterful job on the aspect of editing, they had well over 800 hours of footage, and they needed to figure out how to turn 13 years of their own children's lives into just two and a half hours. I can't imagine how hard this must have been, as I struggled with cutting out footage with my documentary, and I only had about an hour and a half of interview footage. 

    This documentary did an amazing job of showing different aspects of the subjects' lives. The main focus was about the effect of being some of the only African Americans in the mostly white school, However, it went into a lot of the details of their lives at home, and I actually found myself relating to a lot of it. I thought one of the most interesting aspects shown in this piece was how strict the parents were in how much control they had over their kid's schoolwork. One family had so much involvement that they had literally scheduled out his life down to the minute. Another family was less involved, going with more of a "Go do your homework" approach. 

    

    Both kids struggled a lot while at the prep school, and one of the kids, the one who's parents were less strict, ending up dropping out and going to a public school. The kid that remained at the prep school was aiming for all these highly esteemed colleges such as Stanford, while the other was reaching for less prominent colleges. The kid who was aiming for Stanford only made it into his safety schools, while the other kid made it into his top options. I thought it was interesting how both kid made it into schools of relatively same level, despite the differences in how strict the parents were.

    

    In the end, both kids were happy with where they ended up, and it helped relieve a little stress about what I was currently going through, as I related to the struggle a lot.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)

    By far my favorite documentary we watched in class(and probably my favorite I've ever seen) was Exit Through the Gift Shop. This really surprised me, as it is about street art, a topic I've never really cared too much for, but I think it shows that the topic in a documentary isn't as important as what you do with it. Seriously, I went to go watch the first minute of the film just to remember how it started, and next thing I knew it was twenty minutes later and I was like "Oh wait I'm supposed to be blogging".

    

    It was directed by Banksy, one of the most famous street artists today, and it follows a man named Thierry Guetta, who carries a camera and films everything wherever he goes. He eventually starts becoming fascinated by the world of street art, so he starts devoting his time to filming that. 

    

    That's how the piece starts. The focus of the film completely shifts part of the way through, and takes you on a journey you would never expect. I not going to discuss much of the content here, mostly because this is the sort of thing that you just need to sit down and watch yourself. 

    

    After finishing this documentary in class, we spent about half an hour in what became an almost heated discussion on the question that the film poses, which is "What is art?". People may think that is an obvious kind of question to pose in the world of street art, but what the question is actually asking about is way different from what you're probably thinking. 

    I really fell in love with the style of this documentary, which I think is kind of clear once you view our own doc. It carries such a raw style, and you can tell that it ended off in a completely different way than it was first intended. We really loved the way that the story was told in this piece, and we adopted a similar style, which you will soon learn about. 

As I was writing this blog, I ran into this cat. I've decided to name it Thierry, in honor of Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Abstract: The Art of Design (2017)

    

    Abstract was the example we watched that was an episodic documentary. I'm going to be honest, I didn't love this piece. I'm not really knocking it in anyway, because I think it achieved what it was going for very well, I'm just not the biggest fan of the style. 

    

    I think it has a lot to do with the fact that this was pretty much a 40 minute human interest story each episode. As part of being a in TV Production, I already view and make quite a few of these, so it just didn't feel as unique or special to me. I really enjoyed how most of the other docs we viewed all seemed so unique, so this one didn't leave as much as a mark on me. 

    That being said, the episodes we watched were still very well made. My favorite was the episode on Ruth Carter, who is a costume designer of legendary status. I recognized so much of her work that they showed, and the fact that I had no idea it was all by the same person is honestly a crime. 

    

    Because the entire purpose of the series is on artists and designers, most of the b-roll needed to be staged. Our documentary's b-roll also needed to be staged, so this served as a very good example of how to stage b-roll, and looking back I think we should have taken some more inspiration. 

New York Times Op-Docs

    The New York Times has a place called Op-Docs, where independent filmmakers can submit their own short documentaries, and we each viewed two different ones in class. 

    

    The first one I viewed was called Pickle. It told the story of a couple that takes care of all sorts of animals. Many of the animals are, well, weird, and others have some disabilities that no one else would want to care for. 

    This was another piece that needed a lot of staged b-roll, since so many of the animals they talked about were no longer around. This doc was really creative with some of its b-roll, even using little animations to show how the animals passed away. 

    I thought this documentary was really sweet. It had such a lighthearted tone and I liked the message it had about life and helping animals. It also had two different interviews that it had react with each other, and I used this very technique in our own doc.

    The second one I watched was Roaches' Lullaby, and it was one of the coolest and definitely strangest doc I've ever seen. It interviews three different ordinary people in New York City as they talk about their roach infestations. Aside from just normal sit-downs, it follows the people around their homes as they explain their roach-killing routine. 

    The thing that makes this so cool is the fact that this was made in 1972. It feels like a little time capsule, taking us right back to 1970s New York City. You can tell people back then were... a little less sanitary, but really they were just the same as us: people who hate roaches. Honestly, this piece feels like something way weirder than you would expect from this time, and I think that's one of the reasons I really liked it. 

    The interviews in the documentary shift from talking about how they kill roaches, to how they hate roaches, to then asking the question, "Are humans the roaches of the universe?", which was a moment of existentiality I wasn't expecting. And yes, there is an actual lullaby about roaches included.

    I really did go on and on about these docs that I watched, to the point that people saw how much I had written and gave me really judging looks. I think that fact that these documentaries can drive people to have so many thoughts and opinions on different topics is what I found most interesting about this unit, and I think it was a driving factor on the topic we ended up choosing for our own doc, which I cannot wait to get into in the next post.