Stuff we have done

We found this great site on Bourke street, the old half of myer was being are torn down but the certain structures were still required by the Heritage Register to be present, according to the builders we talked to.

                                                                        Photos taken off Shushan's phone

We also did our first interview with Mike. Unfortunately, Lorna wasn't present and so we only had the opportunity to speak to him.

As discussed in the last post, we were going for a more emotional approach to our documentary. However, as Shushan was interviewing Mike, I realised that his answers to her questions were very technical. Even when she tried to explore something that couldn't be explained technically, he still gave a very textbook answer. Yet at the same time, he was asking us what we wanted him to say...

It was an example of how hard an interview could go. It was really hard directing and steering him in the right direction.

As I was struggling with the boom mike, I was hoping he would speed up his answers and get to the good bits!!

Well, not to fret, we still have Lorna! We met her briefly and she seems to be more emotive. Hopefully we will go better when we interview her!

First shoot at Westwyck

We had our first glimpse inside Westwyck.

The old primary school campus was so big that half our group was on one end, and the other half was on the other and we were rather lost as all of us thought that we were at the front end of the school. Turns out, we were on the end where it was still the old primary school without any work having been done, and the other half of our team was on the end of the newly constructed eco village!

the old end we were on on victoria street

Mike Hill with a map of Westwyck

To be honest, it was pretty intimidating meeting with Mike in the first place as he was very in charge of the situation and he has seen so many people come and go who have interviewed him, or like us, want to make a short documentary about the place.

He questioned our angle, and if the idea of sustainable reuse was too broad. I think we all agreed with him when we heard what he had to say.

The problems we faced when thinking of an angle was that we didn't want it to be a promotional video for Westwyck if we went for that angle. We already that bad experience when it came to filming Taka and him giving us what he wanted to be on tape rather than what we wanted, despite our efforts to provoke and probe.

Also, as Mike said, if we did the sustainable angle, it could be really general, and also, be too much of a kind of environmentally friendly promotional video, and as much of a good thing being environmentally friendly is, we didn't want our doco to be so general without an interesting angle.

After much brainstorming, I think we all agreed that the history of Westwyck, and the fact that it went from a primary school to a totally different thing was amazing. And in a way, that was using the sustainable reuse angle, but from more of an emotive angle and less of a promotive one.

Talking to Liam was great as well, as he gave us a really good idea of using the concept of 'ghosts' in a  place. Meaning, a place has so much history. This place where these residents are staying used to be classrooms where children ran up and down playing and screaming.

All of us loved that, and so we decided to go with it.

Louis Theroux

Louis Theroux is a somewhat popular documentary maker with the BBC. Having caught some of his work on free-to-air TV on SBS, I thought it would be apt to mention him on this blog.

Theroux largely covers a large range of what is deemed as socially controversial issues, such as the lives
of prostitutes behind closed doors, asian catalogue brides, racist families, and more.
Here's an example of the one about Thai Brides.

His documentaries can be categorised as 'participatory documentaries', as the audience can see how he is in them, and the way he affects his subjects or interviewees. On the same note, this other documentary is on the similar topic of Thai Brides, but has much more of an expository style, with one side being shown, and a voice narrating the story to the audience.

We had to think about whether or not we wanted a narrator, or even an interviewer present in the span of our documentary on Westwyck.

However, it was more unanimous to go with a more observational style for the documentary as we wanted to tell a story of adaptive reuse, using Westwyck, but without any sense of us being in it.

Change of doco idea

So, our Taka idea turned out to be heading to a dead end so we had no choice but to go with a different idea for our documentary. Shushan, our director, had been on a field trip to East Gippsland recently for a school field trip where they were helping the farmers plant some trees around their farmland.

While they were at that, she happened to have a chat with some of the farmers who were involved in this movement called LandCare. From there, I think the idea of shooting a documentary based on the idea of sustainable living came up. We brainstormed on how we could go from here. At first, we were considering driving up to East Gippsland but soon realised that with our time restraint, as well as our lack of access to a car, as the producer, I felt that we were better off shooting something within the proximity of public transport.

That is where Westwyck Village comes in. Owned by owners Mike and Lorna, Westwyck is an eco friendly village in Brunswick. It used to be an old primary school but the owners have turned in into sustainable housing for the public.

It would be interesting to see where we go from here!

Week 7 Lecture

This week's lecture was surrounding the ethics of making a documentary.
Liam highlighted the problem of signed release forms which I thought was very useful.

He showed us a sneak peek of the film 'Titicut Follies' by Federick Wiseman which was about a  Massachusetts institution for the criminally insane. It revealed the horrific conditions behind closed doors that the patients were subjected to, and though he had all release forms signed, the documentary was still banned for quite some time upon its release. Although all appropriate release forms were signed, it was maintained that the patients were not in their right state of mind when they had signed them.
However, the ban was lifted after the deaths of some of the patients who's' relatives made a claim was avoidable had the film been allowed to air.

This example shows a couple of things. The power of a documentary, the ethics and dilemmas the person making the documentary faces in the editing process, and the grey area of release forms.

I think that this also reflects upon how much more creative freedom and options a documentary film maker has over a film maker of drama as we did in tv1, who has to follow a rigid storyboard and shooting style in order to get it 'right'.

Cutaways

When we edited the footage that we took in class of an activity/observational shooting, we understood the importance of cutaways.
We were supposed to film and edit to make a 5 minute footage of the progression of an activity.
We decided on filming a student's process of queuing up to heat up his lunch, waiting for it to finish microwaving, and then eating it.
However, when editing it, we found we didn't have much footage to make a 5 minute clip, and the footage we had was pretty much boring or didn't have continuity. We realised that many of these problems could be solved had we taken cutaways of other people waiting, eating, etc that could help with continuity as well as making the final result less mundane.

Point to note for our doco!

Soundscape- bringing the film to life

Last week, we talked about sound and the importance of sound setting the mood for the documentary.

We practiced with an in class exercise in filming and editing an interview and using music and cutting funny shots, we created this short, lighthearted interview with Adrian.

Another example is the Mongreloid by George Kuchar, an example that was mentioned during the lecture.






You can see how the music in the background brings out the mood of this film, which is eccentric, disturbing and slightly creepy.

Another example comes from the digital dossier, Drinking for England.
I really liked this documentary as an an example of a good one.
The sound brought out the seriousness of the documentary.
I also loved the opening shots, which was also used throughout the film, which zoomed in and was slightly out of focus, as though the audience could picture what it was like to be the woman who had been drinking too much.
Then it zooms out a bit to show the woman from the front drinking, which was still a close up, and confronting shot as the camera was just in front of her face as she was doing so.

Then, the colour becomes lighter to give a mid shot of the woman's actions and so we could focus on her and what she was saying and doing.

I loved the way this film was shot and the progression of its story, from her drinking, to showing her being taken away to rehab in the car, and ending with a shot of her mother walking back into the house after saying goodbye to her.

Sound would be essential in building up our film's mood and tone in accordance with the story that we are trying to tell.