Tomorrow’s shoot is going to be a filling gaps interview as well as capturing all our cutaways. This blog post is more or less an organisational tool that I can use tomorrow to make sure that we cover all the areas that we’ve missed.
Today I went through some of our footage and started to insert markers for some of our longer takes to make editing easier and found some great things that really correlate to our new structure being from desperate Maggie to a Maggie that is able to face the world full on. She says these great things that metaphorically translate into the rythym of our entire documentary such as the ability to walk downstairs and the simple gesture of someone asking her to come down the stairs changed her world, but as she says later on “only one step at a time.” Tomorrow, in my interview I want to focus on different areas of Maggie’s life where there are gaps. Meenal and Sarah pointed out an issue with our story being that in order to know that she has improved we need to know what happened before. These are the holes that Maggie has left in her story. To fill these in I will ask questions that refer to things that she’s already told us to get a better sense of coherence, questions:
- Last week you told us that you had a big medical appointment this week, how did that go yesterday?
- Could you please run us through your life and the different places you’ve lived over the course of your life?
- Questions that run from this: last week you told us that you lived and worked at the Abbottsford Convent what type of work did you do there?
- How long were you there for and from what age?
- Last week you told us that you had made yourself a better person and that you had made some mistakes. What mistakes did you make that you have now gotten over?
- You told us that “everyone makes mistakes” and that some of the people in your past have made mistakes directed towards you? What mistakes have they made?
- You told us that when living in Fitzroy you were too scared to leave the house and go out into the world. Have there been other instances of this in your life?
I think this approach will bring Maggie to focus on certain areas and help us to visualise a timeline of her life. Even though we don’t necessarily want our film to go in chronological order we want to have a sense of where everything she told us last week fits into her life so we can depict her as accurately as possible.
Visual things we need to capture:
- Maggie’s hats: We will also ask her the significance of some of her hats and get her to show them to us and go through them. Meenal, however will focus on capture the hats more than Maggie to use as overlay.
- Maggie’s photos: We may be able to scope out a few things through her photos and therefore will get us to talk about her photos while Meenal focuses on the photos on her photoboard to get a glimpse visually of Maggie’s past life.
- Exterior shots: Maggie talks about venturing into the outside world, however we need to be able to visualise this. We will ask Maggie to perhaps walk outside or take some exterior shots of Maggie experiencing a world that she shares with other people.
- Door numbers: One of the problems that we had was that it wasn’t clear where Maggie was now. We can express this visually through showing the different door numbers in her house or by showing an exterior shot of her room that contextualises it as a room to herself rather than a house. This could be further emphasised by other shots of the place in which Maggie lives such as shots of the outside sharing area.
- Maggie doing something: This could be something simple like her filling up her water bottle or making a cup of tea, we just need to show how Maggie can look after herself and live more independantly in the world.
I think this will really fill the gaps in our film and make it more visual where we can use the visuals to contrast with what Maggie is saying or match what Maggie is saying and therefore bring these things into the editing room to suss out. I think it’s so important to really analyse what Maggie is saying not just her words but her body language and to really see what she’s saying on both a literal and metaphoric level. How do the things in her life now reflect her wider life story?
I also think that if we have time we do some reflexive stuff such as ask Maggie what she would like to have in the documentary and why she wanted to be in our documentary? This might just add a bigger textual level to our doco.
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: documentary, editing, group, interview, structure
Today Gina and I spent three hours logging and capturing all our footage from Maggie’s interview and to be completely honest thank god I did this after the lecture on Monday because it allowed Gina and I to log and capture in a really efficient way. Due to the fact that I got there earlier I finished logging the clips, leaving the name as the clip as the question and within the logging notes, put what stood out to me in what Maggie said so I would find written references within the Final Cut project. When Gina arrived we began capturing the footage, where Gina was able to transcribe the whole of our interview so we got super organised straight away and discussed some key points in the interview and what other footage we needed to get on our next shoot on Thursday to fill some gaps.
What Gina and I talked about were moments in her story that correlated beyond her story but into the wider context of her life. For instance, Maggie talks about having to go through medical appointments and explains how she is always waiting for answers as they take more blood and do more test in this kind of repetitous manner I thought that this really correlated to her overall story of moving from place to place and having to wait inside and never get this form of conclusion from staying still.
Once, Meenal and Sarah arrived for the tutorial we discussed some major issues that we needed to resolve in terms of where do we go next? Meenal wrote some excellent notes to convey our change of structure that came from a realisation that the hats that she collects and holds so dearly convey more than this. They convey Maggie’s movement from place to place that contradicts the very interior life Maggie has lived. Overall, there is a large contradiction in Maggie’s story being that as much as she has moved from this place to the next there is this sense right through of her being imprisoned to a certain extent and scared to face the realities of the real world. Her hats convey her movement that she has found recently going to Apollo Bay and other places that she talks about in her story. We discussed this with Liam and came up with a solid structural idea that avoids this sense of conclusion that Maggie herself doesn’t give us. Meenal explains this quite well:
As Maggie talks alot about being locked up/scared to face the
world , we thought we could use that as our starting place to portray that sense
of fear she has from moving anywhere . As sound and image goes hand in hand we
thought we could have a overlay of her collection of hats that she loves and are
from different places ( denotes movement again) to play while there is a voice
over of Maggie as she contradicts this movement. “I was stuck in the house for a
month . Some one always did my shopping”.
This lies as a contradiction between what Maggie is saying and what is being revealed and also foreshadows the ending of the film, which will reveal how Maggie has managed to get over this and walk down the stairs, go outside pay her bills, where at one point she claims that “this opened the door for her.” The ending will be the conclusion of the foreshadowing that the hats implied and we hope to capture some overlays of Maggie outside and experiencing the world in a way that she never felt possible. I feel as this is a very literary way to structure our film and reminds me of studying literature in year twelve where you look for different things within a text, labelled by the abreviation MILCSCON- mood, images, links, context, structure and narration. I can’t remember what the ‘O’ standed for. As I looked back through our interview footage I was trying to pick up on certain things especially metaphorical, pithy moments that correlate to a wider sense of Maggie’s life and the links that bring these moments together. In a sense it’s like sitting back and objectifying your work, analysing and searching for moments that are not only good but create a rythym of that person’s life.
I feel that looking at our footage and now stepping forward to do some more filming has really made us grasp what we’re looking for in our next interview and what images we need to capture. Obviously, we need to capture Maggie’s hats in detail as she looks through them and capture hats what show different places that correlate to her life. We also what to get some overlays of Maggie moving to get a sense of the things that she can achieve now as little as they might be, where at one point Maggie does say herself, “it’s step by step.” As Liam said we need to see our subject succeeding or not succeeding but the fact is that we need to see them doing rather than just saying. In conjunction, we want to get a further feel that this is not Maggie’s home in the normal sense of the word “home” and that we thought we could convey this visually by showing room numbers and exterior shots of the way the house is set up to visually show that Maggie is sharing with other people. She still hasn’t gotten to the point where she can live independently. This is how we’ve decided to end our film, by highlighting what Maggie still has to overcome and the ambiguity of what’s around the corner, especially with her health issues.
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: documentary, interview, production, reflection, shoot
Well our shoot was pretty good. However, we need to do another one and have scheduled that for next Thursday. Technically speaking we had some sound issues that were rather strange and Gina called Robin to talk her through fixing the problem, unfortunately this did take some time. While this was being fixed I talked to Maggie and talked to her while Meenal got some great visuals of Maggie and her surroundings. This was the first time Maggie had ever been in front of a camera so I can imagine it was a bit of a daunting experience. Therefore I made sure that she was feeling alright and informed her of the sound difficulties we were having.
In terms of our actual shoot it went pretty well and we got some great stories from Maggie, however what I realised is that she would reply straight to me question without contextualising each fragment. Therefore next week I am going to ask questions that being with How, Why or What and avoid using Do because Do leads to yes or no answers with little contextualisation if my voice is cut out. I also found that Maggie would avoid talking about the bad things that had happened to her or would go into a story and then abruptly stop at moments and then say a comment like ‘that’s in the past…’ and when I would ask her she didn’t want to tell me. Even though these moments are interesting in themselves we need to get contextualisation for some of the things Maggie has said. For example, she focuses a lot on how she has improved and is able to do things that she never thought possible. Yet, we and the audience have little to compare that to as she is scared or feels that the past should be left in the past. Even though we have snippets of her previous life such as robbing a milk bar and a few family members and friends exploiting her and taking her money they are only brushed over. I was thinking of ways in which next week I could aim my questions to get around these points because sometimes she would answer the question if it was phrased in a different manner. Yet, would this be a form of exploitation on my part. What my solution for the moment is to tell her that in order to grasp how well Maggie is doing now the audience needs an idea of what has happened previously and this will help to get her message across stronger, as this is something she is really trying to convey. I will then proceed to ask her more open ended questions such as:
- can you go through like a timeline the different places you have lived through your life? What I established was that Maggie has never suffered primary homelessness, so was never on the streets but is a more secondary homelessness where she has had to live under different organisations, family that mistreated her and friends and for the last 10 years she has lived at Bethlehem. What I think will be helpful is to get a sense of how hard it’s been and how much she has had to move.
- Tell her to tell us about her photos. Maggie has a photo board on her wall that has photos from different aspects of her life from childhood to now. Maggie’s biggest avoidance was her childhood where she only really claimed it was a shambles and that she never went to highschool. I know slightly more than this but feel that she needs to tell the camera. I think that maybe if she talks about some of the photos when she was little we will get a better sense of this and also she will be more accustomed to the cameras.
What I found truly inspirational about Maggie was that she could feel lucky in comparison to others when her life has been fraught with sickness and constant exploitation along with being a mother to her son Rodney that she had when she was 24 and who got taken off her. She still feels that she has a lot to live for, yet still a lot to overcome. However, I also found a contradiction within this where even though she says she’s beyond it and doesn’t think about it she finds it extremely difficult to talk about things she can’t laugh about. There were moments when she went into these moments and her talking really slowed and you could see that she still has to deal with the past. I also thought it was enlightening that even the simple tasks that we take for granted such as walking down the street were daunting prospects for her, where once she was too scared to go outside that she didn’t leave her room for a whole month. I also found it incredible that she wasn’t angry at the people that exploited her she just sees it as mistakes, where she at one point claims that everyone makes mistakes.
Overall, I am really excited about seeing the footage and getting a sense of structure from it because I think there is a lot in there. I also want to look for those moments of contradiction and any moments that reveal so much about her character. Meenal told me that visually she saw a lot of contradictions between what Maggie said and her facial expression and more explicitly there is a photo in her room of her step-father that was a horrible man and her son in a frame that says friends.
I think with next week’s footage we will have a great combination of happy and sad that will bring our documentary together to create something that is truly meaningful. I learnt so much about the process and believe that our next interview will be even better.
Interview Exercise from Hannah Brasier on Vimeo.
My reflections on this exercise can be found here.
Sorts of research that was done:
You can assume the questions that were asked, questions they already knew the answers too. You need to be open to flexibility.
Research into what questions will lead to getting the answers that you want. Research into finding the right people. Research into aesthetics, watching other films, the form of the film.
Interviews:
The idea that documentary is just what occurs spontanously is a misperception. Something has to be planned, even if it’s just a knowing between the group members of simply what you are going for. Research helps you understand what you’re trying to say. Why we’re attracted to certain people? or the topic.
Documentary Filmmakers Speak.
The planning you need to do: who the person is? research that gives you a solid definition of what’s normal, most importantly to discover what is abnormal.
What do we want to say? Is the first question. What does it tap into, on a more universal contextual level.
Therefore defines what we’re looking for, what type of people we want to get.
Look for things that the person does/says that is abnormal and pick up something from it, and drive that towards the next question. Draw conclusions from these abnormal behaviour, and then this will lead to more questions that stem from the conclusion that you’ve made. Is the conclusion that you’ve made true/false, the key is to explore these conclusions.
Chase things down certain corridors. You need to have the confidence and the knowledge to ask the right questions and also carry something down a different line. Find the central core chase something to the central core, find something more. Chase something up. Anticipate answers and look for something that you don’t anticipate.
Think more about aesthetic research, contextualising and adding meaning to your doco. Think about the look you want and research that aesthetic, find out about technical things you want to achieve.
Think about post-production, and different ways you can cut your doco together.
Yeah so I couldn’t really think of an imaginative name. There were two things we did in today’s tute/lab/whatever that I think are worth mentioning. 1. We watched a shot doco from the digital dossier called ‘Now’ (Santiago Alvarez 1966) 2. we did the interview exercise.
Firstly, I was really captivated by the documentary ‘Now’ especially in terms of aesthetics. I thought that even though it was using still photographic images it was filmed in a way that was filled with movement. The camera dance along the different photographs, from pans to zoom outs to zoom ins to a montage-like effect. It felt like the documentary really worked on putting movement into these photos. This was emphasised even more strongly with the musical score, which added sound and in a sense dialogue to the photos giving the photos more weight in terms of content. In a sense it was a music video clip formed around the photographs. What I learnt from this is how easy, well not really how easy, but how you can make a documentary without the use of any form of video recording, without interview, without footage. How you can use something simple like photos and music and create a dynamically interesting documentary. It is one that is rythmically dynamic and shows how you can make your documentary rythmically interesting through the use of music.
In the interview exercise the first thing that happened was we came across the same issue that we had last tute, that I outlined here. We discovered the actual problem today, which we are blaming entirely on Paul, we realised that the problem was that we had set the sound output into the microphones to the RIGHT rather than RETURN. We blame Paul because he told us to put it on ‘R.’ Anywho we realise now the exact settings we need to get good sound. Or really to get sound. After this technical mishap we got started on interviewing Gina. The first thing I realised was that it’s a lot harder to start with an opening question than I expected. However, once you’ve asked the first question you can really get on a role. You really have to listen. Yet, you never interupt, and therefore you have to keep track of different things that they say and pick out things that will stem into the next question. This was an effective interviewing technique because it meant that Gina was not disorientated by the question and was able to easily answer the question because she skimmed across it in the previous question.
We tried different positions for Gina to sit in relating to her story, making her uncomfortable when she felt uncomfortable in her story. We were lucky with Gina because she was an interesting interviewee using hand gestures to convey her point. Therefore it was visually interesting. After we finished the interview we filmed a semi-reinactment by putting the camera on a wheely chair and pointing it up at the lights to mimic Gina’s hospital bed moving through the hospital.
In our meeting last week I wanted to know a little bit about Gina’s story in order to set up the interview in terms of thinking about location. I asked her to give us a sort of list of words that would describe her car crash story. I wanted to use these words similarly to our first video exercise where we were given a word we had to capture. I did this because I wanted to start thinking about where we would film Gina’s interview. She described her car crash as:
suprising, scary, shock, nobody screamed, 12 hour hospital, uncomfortable, painful, angry-mad, got over it, swearing, disorientated, wasn’t allowed to move.
When she was discussing these different emotions she put a lot of emphasis on the hospital and being uncomfortable as she was not allowed to move. We started talking about the interview and we decided to film it in a white space and film the interview very uncomfortably, so the audience feels Gina’s discomfort. We decided on the white space because it mimicked a hospital environment. I want to film the interview on weird disturbing angles, yet keep the camera quite static, or perhaps have it moving the whole time. The emphasis will be on making the audience feel high levels of discomfort. If this doesn’t work I was thinking of putting Gina in an uncomfortable position, or making her move a lot when she is talking. This technique reminds me of a documentary I saw over the break called Man On Wire (James Marsh, 2008) which was about the tiperope walker that walked on a tiperope between the twin towers. In some of his interviews he moved around re-inacting bits of the adventure of sneaking into the Twin Towers, he was constantly moving and re-living the excitement of being there very animatedly through his interviews. I think that this could work for Gina’s story as well, and will do something that Paul suggested in class- throw the rule book out and see what happens. Who puts rules in place like three point lighting? Why does our interviewee have to be sitting down? He also suggested that we add overlay to our interview, things that poetically relate to the interviewees story. We will think about this after the interview.
