After an incredibly unlucky start with both our host and back-up host both being sick I think our seminar went rather well, our guests were great and I really learnt a lot about documentary practice. It was great to get a different perspective from people who actually work within the documentary industry in Australia and have incredible insight into the process of documentary production and what documentaries are made up of.
Our seminar was good because our guests had a lot to say which was awesome, the worst thing would have been if our hosts got up and had nothing to say, it was almost that our guests had too much to say, which was also good as they were willing to go into a lot of detail about the documentary process. I also think there was good chemistry between our guests, especially Dennis and Steve because they had a lot of the same opinions about documentary and therefore could feed off each other throughout the seminar and create a conversation. Sometimes it was hard to include Natalie in conversation but Candice did a great job at focusing questions at Natalie to create a larger discussion through all three guests. I give Candice massive applause because she had to take the hosting job at such late notice and she managed to do a great job, even though some of her questions weren’t fantastically executed the guests were able to draw from the questions and we covered all the topics we wanted to cover in our notes.
Some feedback from after the presentation was that the skype meeting with Matt Bate was too long and I have to agree as it sucked up the time we wanted to spend on funding and the production side of documentary filmmaking. It also sucked up the time we wanted to spend on the Q&A, where I think we will lose marks on in the peer assessment I don’t think we really gave our audience enough time to ask questions, which was a shame as I think people were still keen to ask questions when it all wrapped up. I think if they skype meeting was perhaps 5-7 minutes it would have been better shortening the longer answers and keeping it snappy.
In terms of the content I really got a lot out of the seminar, especially in terms of this whole idea of ‘shape,’ where a documentary can really be interestingly about anything, yet what makes it interesting is how it is shaped and what part of the story is grasped and what is at the core of the story. I think this made documentaries really poetic and made me feel really confident about making documentaries. In fact, the overall experience of the seminar was really optimistic, in terms of both developing ideas and funding. I was really inspired by Natalie’s story because she literally scrapped money together and got funding right at the end and has made a documentary that has had a lot of success, so that’s pretty awesome. Another thing that I thought was really intriguing was how you get your subject to open up to you and different techniques to use, such as getting someone else to ask the questions, acting dumb or just taking your subject aside and getting them to open up like that. I think that getting ideas of tangible things to do is really good because having a really good subject is one thing and having them open up in front of a camera is another, so I thought that was really interesting.
Overall, under the world being against us circumstances our seminar went really well and Candice did really well at last-minute hosting and that’s super awesome. Next time I would have made sure that every person in our group knew the guests so that it didn’t seem so rushed, and that we could all confidently take on hosting.
