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.
I always find the feedback process a really daunting experience because it’s thoroughly terrifying to have anyone look at your work, especially when it is at its roughest and others are a lot more polished. I thought it was great to have forms to fill out because it gave you tangible ways to make your story better, even if some of them can be contradicting. I think the thing with documentary is that you are never going to get it right for everyone, because people like different things. You are never going to please everyone and therefore in some sense it becomes more about pleasing yourself, and making sure you can do the best that you can do, in consideration of wider feedback. This in fact was the case with our short drama last semester, where Christine hated one of our actors and Paul liked him, sometimes it is simply up to personal taste. Therefore, when you get feedback for films I would say that half of it is tangible things and technical things that you can fix and half of it is opinions relating to things such as style and subject and often things you need to negotiate with.
Our feedback came with one general consensus great character, needs a better structure, or more a clearer structure and more escape to the outside, as in more cutaways.
These are things that we considered extensively when coming into our rough screening and are making positive steps to solving these problems. One of our solutions is through voice-over, which will contextualise the story, one of the feedback’s was ‘we don’t even know her name’ and to ‘contextualise this to the point of ridiculousness’ or something along those lines. Liam also said the same thing with visuals, that we can afford to be quite literal. When thinking about this I total agree because of the nature of Maggie and her rambling quality, where it would be clearer in terms of her stories to give the audience a visual aid to guide them and listen more carefully. I was extremely happy to see that one person in their feedback said ‘it’s great that she’s not completely clear, because it makes you really listen and be involved.’
To be honest, I am a big fan of subtlety and I think there is a lot of room for it in a documentary, especially one like ours, where maybe it’s not a documentary you watch once but one you come back to and discover more because you have to listen just that little bit closer. However, I think by juxtaposing the not-so-obvious in Maggie’s stories and bluntly obvious pictures will give a nice contradiction and make the audience come away with something the first time the watch it and leave an impression.
In terms of structure, we have already worked really hard at this over the past few days in consolidating the stories we’ve already chosen and giving them more emotional weight. I think that you have to go though each story and give every word weight by giving words time to breathe and resonate. I found when watching out rough cut that some bits were rushed and I wanted to slow things down and give Maggie’s words more resonance without becoming overally draining. It’s almost like proof reading an essay and thinking if these moments ‘say anything’ because if they do it is worthwhile keeping them. I also think it’s important to look for moments that reoccur because they can become motifs and then create structure. I found this come through with the use of staircases in Maggie’s stories, which is a very visual motif that can be expressed more clearly.
Making a documentary is not simply about carrying it from beginning to end chronologically but by looking at each moment and finding how that links into a bigger picture that says something that extends beyond Maggie’s existence to something universal.
I found the feedback I got from my synopsis in credibly helpful and really exactly what I needed to make my script more dynamic and more dramatically interesting, rather than just concluding a full rounded film. Here is the feedback I got:
- make the wife more spiteful, build up the tension further and further- Christine suggested that by the wife simply just selling the records it concludes the drama and there is nothing to take it any further, she suggested that I make the wife more malicious, by giving him some type of task, like a deadline- you can’t finish the collection of that artist. Ruby added to this further by saying that perhaps the wife wants something from Ryan and wont let him buy a record until he does that for her. I really need to think about this because I think stopping Ryan from doing something will really send him crazy and heighten the drama.
- Christine also suggested that I could have an open ending, which because of all this talk about resolution I thought I really needed to tie up the ending. Christine however said that my film sounded too much like Act One, where the rest of the film Ryan would be trying to win her back. She suggested that perhaps it ends with the wife in the process of leaving Ryan, but has not actually left yet. I’m imagining the ending being them still in tension sitting next to each other on a couch, her with divorce papers in her hands and him with a record. There is no conclusion, but it is at the verge of a conclusion.
- I also got some feedback when Christine said to another person in the class that she could tell that my approach to my film was an Engligh, Frenchy approach, which I had not taken into much consideration. I like films about relationships because I think they’re really interesting, especially about love and marriage and things like that, which come up a lot in French and English films, they are bounded by relationships. Relationships drive the film. In thinking about my film I want to make it quirkier, especially through Ryan there is something quite quirky about people that are obsessed with collecting things and I want my short film to almost be a battle between his wife and him. He has to make a choice, because she has forced him too. Therefore there is also a pyschological battle going on in Ryan’s head, do his record’s mean more than his marriage?
- Another bit of feedback I got from Christine when she was talking to someone else concerned consequences, what is at stake? This is easy for Ryan, he has two things at stake- his record collection and his marriage. However, it is more than that when people collect things it is nostalgic, it reminds them of something and keeps reminding them of something that they really enjoy and get a lot of happiness from. I want their marriage to be at breaking point, I want my film to capture a moment of crisis. He will come home with a record instead of some petty bit of furniture, which sends his wife into a spiteful rage, in which she declares that she won’t allow him to buy any more records, until he does some type of huge favour for her, or something like that. This leads to termoil because Ryan has bought atleast one record a week for his whole life, and now she has cracked and said no more. This puts Ryan into a world he hasn’t been in before and as he attempts to do his wife a favour all he can think about is records, and therefore avoids doing the favour as he is completely lost in his own self pity and his wife feels no sympathy towards him, in fact she quite enjoys it. When Ryan cracks and buys a record instead of the favour his wife almost pyschotically starts signing divorce papers, the last scene ends with her with divorce papers and him with a record sitting and staring at one another.
However, I want neither of these characters to be that strong in character they are quirky, but they’re not brave and they do things instinctively. Therefore her rage is almost out of nowhere, because she is so fed up. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the lamp. I need to keep thinking and really establish the core of the conflict. However, I kinda want the whole thing to be kinda petty.
