☼彡 Documentary Research, Planning (ii)

02

Research

    The research that I did for this project focused on the editing of the film since it was my role as the editor to understand the conventions of what we are working with (documentary). Since two of the major components are the interview(s) and the B-roll footage, I wanted to find at least two references for these particular components. 

    

    After watching a few documentaries on YouTube, I chose two documentaries that I thought could work the best as references for this particular project, considering the tone we have for our project. I considered tone, especially for the interview reference, but for the B-roll, I chose the one that I found compiled the most interesting B-roll while not being too over the top or flashy.

 

    "John Butler" is the first documentary I referenced as I mainly studied this for its structure of the interview shots and audio. I noticed that there are quite a few pauses in and between the questions, giving the audience a bit of time to both process the information given and observe the surroundings of the subject. I particularly like the tone that was presented by this documentary.

    The second documentary is "He Spent 40 Years Alone in the Woods, and Now Scientists Love Him". I used this documentary as a reference to how I would structure the B-roll footage since I really liked how the B-roll footage was ordered.

Planning

    I think that planning our time for this project was quite tricky. With both of my two other group members having little time to record, the time to gather the footage was a bit constrained. Especially as one of the group members is one of the subjects of the documentary, being a student with a part-time job. It's almost a bit funny to me since the entire idea of the documentary is centered around full-time students with part-time jobs who do not have flexible schedules to do anything aside from work and be at school. 

    

    Even in this case, it seemed to be difficult to find the time to film her day, especially with the constraints of her job. Nevertheless, our planning sheet still included shots we wanted to shoot, much of which I don't think we can incorporate, like the tracking shots. Maybe we can film the shots at home (getting ready) can be filmed by another person so at least we can put in some other shots so it's more dynamic.

    I think the structure we planned is not too bad, I am just unsure whether or not we can carry out what we have planned.

    We also have three subjects planned as of now: Mia, Sarah, and Evan (or his cousin?).