Mr.M Film - Lost & Learning

Documentary Genre

Unit 27 LO2 – Documentary Genre – Help

Expository

Expository Documentaries, is a nonfiction film that emphasizes verbal commentary and argumentative logic. Expository documentaries use a voice of God narration, for example: As narrator, Queen Latifah is the voice of authority for Arctic Tale. Direct presentation of facts

Can include all kinds of evidence

An Inconvenient Truth is an example of an expository documentary because it relies on verbal commentary and argumentative logic to make a strong case for prevention of global warming.

Observational

Observational style documentaries have, No narration, minimal voiceover, sometimes not even interviews - just scene after scene of raw footage strung together in long takes, real time, synch-sound, in which the characters and their often-turbulent lives drive the film. You will almost never see or hear the filmmakers.

Armadillo is a purist observational masterpiece, the story of some young Danish soldiers and their platoon deployed on a tour of Afghanistan, no voiceover, no narration, not even any interviews.

Interactive

Interactive documentaries are often a personal project, a good example of this is ‘’Bear 71’ a documentary made by the executive producer of Bear 71. His name is Loc Dao, and he is the narrator throughout the documentary, this documentary is the 2012 interactive National Film Board of Canada web documentary. The Documentary is about a Grizzly bear in Banff National Park, who was collared at the age of three and was watched her whole life via trail cameras in the park.

Essayistic

An essayistic documentary is made very simply; it is simple because it is as easy as documenting on an essay. Uses ‘first person’ address, these documentaries include personal opinions and stories from a personal viewpoint. These documentaries sometimes can be objective towards a subject but does not try to be. A good example of this is, ‘The Forgotten Space’, it follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalized by the global transport system. This Documentary uses descriptive documenting, interviews, archive stills and footage, clips from old movies. The result is an essayistic, visual documentary about one of the most important processes s that affects us today

Experimental

Experimental documentaries are usually made from a personal account; the filmmakers are experimenting with different forms of media to get a different ‘unique’ style of documentary for the audience. Also an experimental documentary is an artistic practice . Experimental documentaries have no limits at all they can be about anything, so there are a huge variety of experimental documentaries. One documentary ‘Mayhem’ by Abigail Child is about social order and how sexuality flows in an atmosphere of sexual tension, danger, violence, and glamour. Its is clearly a experimental documentary because of its vastly odd topic.

Performative

Performative documentaries are a mix of drama and documentary, they rely on recreations to assist the story behind the documentary.  A good example of this is, ‘Touching The Void’, the true story of two climbers and their perilous journey up the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985. All the footage is reenacted and there is a little bit of narration with the footage this also assists the storyline.

Robert Welland Interview with Perry

Questions for Interview - P.Dabbs

Questions for Interview with Perry Dabb’s

•Hi Perry, I know your interest is EXPO, please tell the viewers and me what EXPO is?

•What’s good about EXPO?

•What was it likes to meet Ben 10’s voice actor?

•I know you also have met Mike Tyson, was that at EXPO as well?

•You’re an avid film buff right? Well what’s your favorite film, and why?

•You’ve met Warwick Davis, did he inspire you think about him?

Interview Research

Interviews

This is a guide on how to set up your equipment, to make an effective, insightful and powerful interview.

Lighting

Firstly, we’ll start off with the lighting of the interview, lighting will dramatically affectthe look of the interview, and three-point lighting is the best way to light your interviewer & interviewee. This will give a much more professional and satisfying look to the interview, so it will be aesthetically pleasing to the audience.

Mise-en-scene

Mise-en-scene is very important; this is because it refers toeverything we see in front of the camera or within the frame. This includes people so the interviewee & maybe theinterviewer, costumes, props, sets or locations. So in aninterview you will want to have the interviewee on the camera,you will position them to the side of your frame, this is tocreate theillusion of space, sothen youcan have abackgroundpromotingand newalbum orfilm,nevertheless

Robert Welland

you could just have a scenic location.Framing & Compositionuses ‘The Rule of Thirds’this guideline proposes thatan image should beimagined as divided intonine equal parts by twoequally-spaced horizontallines and two equally-spaced vertical lines.Filming people, it iscommon to line the body upwith a vertical line, andhaving the person's eyes inline with a horizontal one. If filming a moving subject, the samepattern is often followed, with the majority of the extra roombeing in front of the person (the way they are moving). Thistechnique claims that aligning a subject with these pointscreates more tension, energy and interest in the compositionthan simply centering the subject would.Which ones would you use fordifferent set ups?If the interview is indoors, I will use full three-point lighting and

Robert Welland

I will follow the rule of thirds so that it creates the illusion of space, if the interview is for promotion purposes, then formise-en-scene I would have a poster to the right or left of theperson on camera, (the picture above, is a example).Interviews outdoors I would not use a lot of lighting, if not anythis is because the natural light would do a fine job of lightingthe face, but you might need a little fill light to take anyshadows away from the face. Because the interview isoutdoors let the audience see that, so use the rule of thirds buthas a nice scenic background.

Robert Welland

Documentarys

DocumentariesFirstly, what is a documentary? It is a film or TV program thatfocuses on real life (non-fiction) and includes footage of events as they happened. A documentary style movie about 911 & the war in Iraq might feature actors for re-enactment scenes, real or fictional, in thewar scenes recreating certain battles or events. In comparison to this,a documentary film about 911 & the war in Iraq might predominantly feature news reel footage of real fighting, with commentary from experts and veterans who were in the war 

, ‘Fahrenheit 911’ used this

approach, personally I feel this is the best way to do so, because it getsa better reaction from the audience.It is this attention on documenting on reality, drama or a fictionalthat typically separates these movies from summer blockbusters andother popular films.Secondly, the history of documentaries is vast; the first films ever made were documentaries

,

they were single-shot moments captured onfilm, for example; a train entering a station, a boat docking, or factory workers leaving work. These short films were called "actuality" films;the term "documentary" was not used until 1926.

The first feature length documentary ever made was ‘Nanook of TheNorth’ by Rober 

t Flaherty; it is a silent documentary where Flaherty captured the struggles of the Inuk Nanook and his family inthe Canadian Arctic. Robert Flaherty has been criticized for stagingseveral sequences in the documentary and thereby distorting thereality of his subjects' lives

, this means it didn’t comply with

Cinémavérité

which means ‘Truthful cinema’

. Cinéma vérité is a styleof documentary filmmaking, using naturalistic techniques combinedwith stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects.

Robert Drew’s chronicle of the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary campaign of 

John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey is widely considered to be the founding film of American cinema verité. It was the first documentary in which the synchronized soundcamera moved freely with characters through a breaking story. "At that time I was proposingthat we make a new kind of history of the Presidency," recalls Drew, "that we would see andfeel all the things that bore on the presidency at a given time -- the expressions on faces, themood of the country, the tensions in the room, so that future presidents could look back atthis and see and learn." Paragraph from: 

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/reellife/verite.htm 

 

Robert Welland

As I’ve previously mentioned documentaries are about real life, and

one of my most favourite

documentaries is called ‘Dark Days’ itshows the gritty, ‘hard up’ side of life, it follows the lives of the New 

York homeless. It was made by Marc Singer and he was daring

enough to document on homeless ‘community’ which live underground

in the subway tunnels, I particularly enjoy this documentary becausehe portrayed homeless people in a way, that makes them seem likeany other family and they are humanised instead of put down. There

isn’t a narrator in this, the audio comes from the films footage.

 

In a complete contrast to ‘Dark Days’, I’ve also previously watched a documentary on Paul

Smith a English fashion designer, this shows Paul Smith talking about his life from when hestarted out to present day, he is in front of the camera for most of it telling the audience about

his creative and playful world. There is a big difference between this documentary and ‘Dark Days’, but also there are similarities, the main and only similarity really is that they are to

inform, nevertheless they have completely different themes; Dark Days is gritty andemotional, Paul smiths is informative, factual and upbeat. I should also add that another similar implement is that they are both shot in a very artistic style, Dark Days is black andwhite and every object seems to reflect rays of light, which gives a satisfying look to thedocumentary, and also Paul Smiths is very artistic as well, it is shot in colour and there isfrequent use of manual focus to draw attention to certain objects or people.