After Gina did the voice-over and we put it into the cut originally I thought it would be alright, however when I got home I realised that it totally killed the mood of our entire documentary turning way too current affairsy. Luckily over night I had another idea to creatively use text to get the message across even stronger.
When Gina and I looked through the footage yesterday we realised there were so manygreat shots of Maggie’s emotion when she doesn’t speak, that convey a lot of raw emotion and make Maggie more three dimensional. I thought, with some inspiration from Tarnation that we could intermingle text with footage of Maggie’s interview. One of the things that Liam pointed out was that there was not a lot of movement from Maggie and I think in a way this gives Maggie more movement as we show her outside, standing up and looking directly at the camera. We also added some overlays later on that shows her curiously looking around the room as we set up. I think these add little moments of reflexivity and help make our documentary more sophisticated.
Today, I also found a really great track to put to the text sequence that Sarah and I worked to cut the sequence with the music to make it stronger. I was really glad Sarah came in and gave this idea as it makes the opening section of our documentary much stronger. We have also used the text quite dynamically by allowing it to cut in over the image and then the image to go away and have the text on black. Using text in this way makes it more than just text, but makes it a visual component as well, which I think is really important. It also makes a more substantial beginning to our documentary and gives it more life.
Yesterday, we got some feedback from a few co-media students who said that we need to break it up. We need to have a break from her talking and we need it to linger longer. Gina and I thought that perhaps we were too keen to cut Maggie’s running monologues down and making them precise. However, now after we got this feedback I realised that perhaps we need to have more space, allow for space, especially since Maggies speaks very quickly and therefore give the audience time to catch up and think, yet also linger with Maggie.
After I’d done the beginning section we really are on our finishing touches, which include colour correction and audio mix. Sarah and Meenal were set to finish the colour correction today and Gina and everyone that is there on Monday will do the audio mix. I do really think that it’s coming together really nicely. A huge leap has been taken since our rough cut.
Today, we went on a filming expedition to film some much needed cutaways for our documentary. Like Liam said in his feedback to us we can afford to make our cutaways quite literal since Maggie is quite difficult to understand at times. We went as literal as we could and went driving around Melbourne’s inner suburbs on a search for street signs, milkbars and cigarettes. Along the way we filmed houses so we could do some tracking shots. These ended up being fantastic as the broke away from the very interior and stillness of Maggie’s interview and also provided a much needed break into the outside bright world, a world that Maggie is missing to some extent. We also wanted to make her cigarettes and gun story much more visual because she speaks quite visually about it so we filmed two milkbars that were closed down, which Sarah led us to. These milkbars were great because they were old-styled and had a lot of really good advertisements and decour, which provide a visual lift to our documentary in providing colour and light, especially since today was so sunny and bright. While we filmed most of these shots we got audio as well to create a more dynamic soundscape to our documentary, because we felt that a lot of the songs didn’t fit as well as we would like so we thought some atmos would be quite nice to add some change. We also filmed some interior shots of staircases because Maggie brings back staircases quite a lot through her story so we thought it would be a needed addition to our documentary. We filmed these at uni in building 2 and captured a more darkened aesthetic, which I think works really well in the context of her story. At 1:30 we went in to capture and begin editing this new footage. Unfortunately we had another break in the time code, which made capturing a bit of a pain, but we managed to get through it.
We then started to piece together our documentary with our new footage and found that it was much more visually intriguing, where these new visuals really break up Maggie’s interview and also give context. We used the drive-by footage quite extensively to break up each of the different stories Maggie tells. We also thought it would convey more strongly that Maggie was homeless in the sense of moving from one place to another, which is also highlighted through the street signs. I thought of this idea from a film that a really like called Down By Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986), in which the film opens really strongly by tracking through the town in which the beginning of the film is set. Originally I thought we could use it only as an opening sequence, however I really like it embedded throughout to move the audience along with Maggie from not just one place to another but from one point in her life to another. It helps create a flow to the story without Maggie’s story needing to be told by her structurally.
We all agreed that because Maggie doesn’t explicitly talk about moving we thought that we needed to address this in the voice-over, which I am finding very difficult to write. However, I think I have come up with something both reflexive and informative, without over-sentimentalising Maggie’s cause.
Women’s homelessness is commonly caused by relationship breakdowns and domestic violence. We put this documentary together because we wanted to show a woman, whose experiences of homelessness break the common perception of people living on the streets. Maggie was homeless, but her homelessness was confined to insecure housing, places that didn’t represent a home or somewhere safe. She now lives in a home with 10 other women. Nearly half of the homeless population are women, yet they are hidden as images of homelessness.
Overall, I’m really happy with how our documentary is coming along as I think there is a lot of charm in its simplicitly.
We have recently decided that we wanted to have a voice-over in our documentary to contextualise and clarify our story. However, I think we need to be very careful in the use of our voice-over to ensure it is not presenting a ‘voice-of-god’ narrative position. Therefore, I think it is important to look at how voice over can be used in a constructive and creative way without assuming the position of knowing everything. When thinking about this I found myself at a bit of a dead end and thought it might be good to look up how different documentaries use voice-over in different ways.
When doing True Lies there was a really great book by Stella Bruzzi called New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, which has a section on how different documentaries used narration and voice-pver specifically. I thought I would go back and read this section or skim through it to an extent to find a dynamic way to use voice-over in a following blog post I will look at some clips from the digital dossier to analyse voice-over myself and find how we can apply these to our own documentary.
- Voice-of-God narration claims to inform the audience and is usually used to re-tell historical events. The idea Bruzzi suggests comes from ‘an elitist conception of the role of the media’ (pg. 44)- I think this is almost the opposite of what we want to achieve with our documentary because it is obvious that we as media students at university have any idea of what Maggie has been through, even though we can sympathise and understand her circumstances and realise how well she’s done to get through it I don’t think we can take the stance of knowing all. Even though we can present statistics I think we need to show and present our position in terms of Maggie.
- Ironic Narration:
a narrator who is not in some way suspect, who is not in some way open to ironic scrutiny, is what the modern temper finds least bearable.
(pg. 51)
Instead of the voice-over matching the images and informing as in the ‘voice-of-God’ style this type of narration doubts the reality of the image and shows reflexively that this images presented are representations and therefore the voice-over juxtaposes the images presented. A narration that:
both draws the audience into sympathising for the image and sets them critically back from it.
(pg. 52)
It is a more subtle voice-over, which does not provide
explicit commentary and criticism, but rather creates the space in which such interpretations can occur.
(pg. 53)
I think that this form of voice-over could work very well in our documentary especially considering that Maggie’s story isn’t typically one of homelessness. Therefore, if we use our voice-over to present facts about homelessness and what homeless women experience it provides a critical distance from Maggie’s individual story while still providing context, where the audience has to work to see how the voice-over is connecting to Maggie’s story. I think this is important because we don’t want to tell Maggie’s story for her.
3. The Woman’s Voice
‘the closer the text is to the image, the less it seems to connote it’ (Barthes 1977: 26), that an image’s connotative function…is reduced by the literalness of any accompanying text.
(pg. 57)
This voice is highly reflexive and questions everything from the filmmaking to the event to the way words are constructed and by being feminine takes away the ‘voice-of-God’ aspect to the narration due to the fact that it is a woman talking. The main film Bruzzi uses in this section is a film called Sunless, where she describes it in reference to voice-over as:
it offers up images that fluctuate between the domains of the personal or the mundane… and the historical or generally recognisable… which are in turn juxtaposed against a transgressive and ambiguous voice-over that only sporadically collides with them.
(pg. 63)
The voice-over is representative of no one but is a fictional constuct of the documentary itself that is aware of its own formings and place within the documentary.
I think that there are parts of this that will work for our documentary and parts that will not due to the rest of the structure of the documentary. If we use this style of voice-over it will contrast greatly with the rest of the film, which is quite generic in form, well not generic but simple. This voice-over works because it questions its own validity and therefore is unpretentious an non-dominating, which I think is especially important in our documentary. The voice-over cannot seem superior to Maggie it cannot be seen as presenting Maggie’s story because Maggie is unable to articulate her story herself. Therefore I think this voice-over will work well in conveying how we filmed Maggie, what we considered and to give insight to know Maggie better and her relation to the filming process. However, a lot of our feedback came from the fact that Maggie’s story was too ambiguous and that we really needed factual contextualisation that stated clearly the Maggie is homeless, and that we need to say this directly, and be obvious with our images and voice-over because Maggie is not that obvious. Therefore, I think there is room to be reflexive, but also we need to recognise our own distance from Maggie’s life and how she did not open up to us completely and how that relates to her story of being scared of the outside world. Yet, I feel we need to be slightly expository and factual in saying that she has experienced homelessness, so then the audience can immedialety know that this is a story of a homeless woman. Yet, I think we need to refrain from categorising her neatly into this bracket as we need to present her as complex she is not just a homeless woman, she is a mother and a grandmother and more simply a woman, a human being and we need to present her in that way to show that she is multi-faceted.
Reference:
Bruzzi, Stella 2000, “Narration: the film and its voice”, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, London, pp. 40-67, http://books.google.com.au/books?id=A-w-YxAnM4EC&pg=PA40&dq=voice+over+in+documentary&hl=en&ei=Uqq7TOLLGIecvgOFiIX5DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=voice%20over%20in%20documentary&f=false
In the blurb on the digital dossier disc, it explains how this documentary series shows an excellent example of what Paul Kriwaczek describes as the only documentary worth making: the conflict between intention and obstruction. From what I saw from the snippet in the digital dossier is that it is epitomic of this idea, you can already see this lining up. Through the voice over this is achieved, we meet two different homeless men and the voice over gives a brief outline of their issues. For example, the first man selling the BIG ISSUE is described as being addicted to drugs and alcohol and served time for manslaughter, whilst the second man’s predicament is that he relies on the support of the state and has for all his adult life. It is obvious that these two men struggle, and with struggle comes this sense of intention for a better life, yet riddled with the constant drawbacks of their own addictions and problems, which resulted from their homelessness that forms into this sense obstruction. Therefore, what I would say is that there is two levels of intention/obstruction in this film one that forms around the participants and the choir and the intention of forming a choir with the homeless and the inevitable obstruction that comes from certain facets of being homeless and having to commit to something. On a second level is the personal intentions and obstuctions of the homeless men and women themselves. This multi-layered format ensures depth within the documentary and forces it to be the epitome of Paul Kriwaczek’s documentary.
In the blurb prior to the film on the digi doss was to think about the voice over and asks two questions: Is it necessary? In your view does it add or subtract from the emotional power of the work? In my opinion I think that the voice over is mis-used and wrong within the documentary. I feel like it puts this rather strange hierarchy of power within the work that is unfitting to the content of the documentary. The voice is extremely formal and feels to me rather pretentious, which is completely bizaar, it talks about the different issues of the men and women with no emotion, which I feel draws away from the human side of the documentary. I also thought that what the voice over said didn’t really need to be said, or could be said differently. For instance, I don’t think it is necessary for the voice over to say this man suffers from alcoholism and drug addiction. For me this is unnecessary and again puts the voice over above the people in the hierarchy of knowledge. Also I want to feel this information not as a fact, but as representative of this person’s predicament. The issue is not that this person is an alcoholic and addicted to drugs but how we got here in the first place, why has this person turned to these measures, that’s the issue. For me the snippet that I saw was too factual and I felt it was completely detached from the homeless people, maybe this is what it was going for, but I didn’t feel close enough to feel sympathy or to feel what these people are going through and I think this was largely due to the voice over.
In terms of our documentary I think it will be completely unnecessary to have a voice over, because I feel nothing is fact and nothing should be told as a fact by us whoreally are no ‘experts’ on the issue. These women will know a hell of a lot more about being homeless than we ever will. We want to leave the story with them and do our best to compliment their story with images that correlate imaginatively to create a dynamically beautiful, humanistic, political story about this hidden aspect of homeless women. However, in terms of what Paul Kriwaczek claims as this conflict between intention and obstruction is inevitable, I think we will get this without even looking for it because over the few weeks that I’ve been there you see how these women rise and fall on a daily basis, so I’m sure their lives will be filled with more dramatic moments of these.
References:
Paul Kriwaczek, Documentary for the Small Screen, Oxford: Focus Press, 2007.
Jason Stephens, Fremantle Media Australia, Choir of Hard Knocks, Made for RMIT University.
