Sunday, December 10, 2023

Make It Happen - Documentary Research

Hey guys, in these next few posts, I will be discussing a project that I have recently completed where we had to produce our own 5-7 minute documentary. Let me begin by saying that this project was very fun to produce. I really enjoyed the entire process from beginning to end I am very excited to share it with you guys.

Today, we will be discussing the research aspect of a project and how I decided to begin this project. My group and I began brainstorming ideas that would be best fit for this assignment. We started off by looking back into past watched documentaries to get inspiration for our topic. The first one that I watched was called American Promise

This documentary followed the subjects Idris and Sean throughout their schooling journey. This piece had a ton of well executed technical aspects that really inspired our project. For one, the use of indirect interviews helped achieve a sense of realism making the documentary more relatable and personal to the viewer. This was something that we felt would make our documentary a lot better and mentally bookmarked it for future use. 

The next documentary that we watched was an episodic documentary called Abstract. This documentary can be found on Netflix and is split into episodes, hence the name 'episodic documentary. This series focused on different forms of art and designers that have perfected it. This was a very interesting documentary and the most important idea that I took from this was how important b-roll is. This documentary has AMAZING b-roll, which, for those of you who don't know, is all the footage that isn't the main action and what is used to help develop the background for the film. This really opened my eyes to the importance of b-roll in documentary productions and my group and I decided right away that we would need to include amazing b-roll in order to make our work was well executed. 


The last documentary I wanted was an opinion documentary called Oasis. These documentary types are typically short pieces that portray a deeper message beneath. This documentary was a subtle but powerful film about the bonds between twin brothers — one with developmental disabilities — as they come of age.  As their teenage years were before them, the connection between the twins Raphaël and Rémi begins to weaken. But for one last summer, time seems to stand still. This was a beautiful piece and did amazing in the background music aspect. The music appealed to me emotionally and made me feel sad, which is what it was intended to do. When looking back to this, I knew that the music was one of the most important things and we needed to incorporate good music at the right times in order to appeal to the viewers emotions. 


Well guys, I hope you are enjoying the progression so far and i'll catch you on the next one!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Critical Reflection

Our episodic documentary 'Make It Happen' works to develop the idea of the immigrant experience of establishing a company in the US....