My documentary was produced with the idea that it would be shown on a TV format rather than a film, this may be within a series involving the idea of 'Freedom' in which this episode would look at 'Freedom' within India. The rest of the series could look at other parts of the world and show contrast between different cultures and ways of living. I did some research into the TV documentary industry looking at the types of documentary we have today and which channels prefer which genres of documentary.
The BBC is one of the front runners in airing documentary programs in the UK. It generally deals with serious and thoughtful topics. This suggests the target audience could be educated and informed people, however they are well known for producing and distributing a huge variety of documentary programs ranging from David Attenborough nature documentaries to programs like Panorama or Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe.
History of BBC
John Reith (1889-1971) was the founder of the BBC. He was its first General Director when it was set up as the British Broadcasting Company in 1922 and he was its first Director General when it became a public corporation in 1927. Reith fought off the politicians' attempts to influence the BBC, while offering the British people programmes to educate, inform and entertain.
This idea to educate, inform and entertain is one that is very important in particular with my documentary film as I want it to educate and inform the audience to what this concept of 'Freedom" means to the people in India but also to entertain them so that they are drawn into the story and want to continue watching and don't change channel to something else.
As an ancillary task for my documentary project I had to produce a magazine article/extract on my final product. In the run up to this I did some online research to find out about some of the existing documentary magazines out there.
DOX - European Documentary Magazine
DOX is the leading European magazine focusing on documentary film.
DOX gives you insight into the latest developments in the international documentary scene and includes:
Critiques of the latest interesting documentaries
Features on new developments in the genre
Interviews with leading documentary professionals
Reports and updates from important events
Personal essays & POV articles
In the spring 2013 issue there were a number of different articles including:
Extracts taken from http://dox.mono.net/9305/Current%20issue WHY POVERTY?: THE DOCS
In whose interest is it to maintain poverty? DOX looks at three films from the new Why Poverty? series that are meant to make us question and discuss poverty.
CPH:DOX - ART:FILM A new international platform for art and film. Works of this nature must be careful not to develop into a metaphysical morass, a soupy incomprehensible mess, to the point of total disengagement.
THE BEST OF 2012 Tue Steen Müller shares his list of 11 docs.
DOK LEIPZIG: THE HUMAN CONDITION
Creative documentaries that push the envelope, which feel like movies and could easily "pass for fiction films". Strong political content with a distinct artistic vision and creative storytelling.
ANIMADOCS: A NEW GENERATION At DOK Leipzig: Today more creative techniques like comics, drawings, puppet animation, photographs, graphic novels and paintings, indicate the growing recognition of animation as an art form.
ESSAY-FILM: CRAIG BALDWIN The high priest of found footage free association has made a three decade career of imploding the very notion of the documentary form. We get the California-born iconoclast to reveal the imaginative method behind his chaotic collage creation.
http://dox.mono.net/9305/Current%20issue
From looking at these articles I found inspiration on how to address my project and the concept behind it. Modern documentaries tackle very hard hitting and difficult subjects so you have to make sure the write up and products surrounding it match the content for the film to have its desired effect.
The style you select to tell your story could be based on one of the following documentary genres...
1. Personal
- A ‘first person’ account of personal experiences. The narrative relates to you, the
storyteller and focuses on a significant event, issue, premise or memory.
2. Biographical
- An account of a significant person’s life, or focusing on particular aspects, occasions, occurrences or highlights in a person’s life.
3. Historical
- An account of a significant event that happened in the past. Archive materials such as
video, photos and documents can be used.
4. Analytical
- An account of a specific event or investigation or issue that is analysed and clarified.
5. Compare and Contrast
- Where the narrator compares the similarities or contrasts the differences between two subjects.
6. Cause and Effect
- Where the narrator gives an opinion on the reasons for something significant happening and reflects on the resulting changes.
7. Persuasive / Advocacy
- An account of a specific investigation or issue where the narrator tries to
influence the viewer by taking a particular stance or position by using supporting facts, or by considering an opposing point of view. 8. Eye-witness (as a participant)
- An account of a specific investigation or event where the storyteller is an actual participant. Often referred to as Cinema Vérité when the film-maker becomes involved in the story
9. Observational (fly on the wall)
- An account of a specific investigation or event where the storyteller is an observer. This is other referred to as ‘direct cinema’ and is an unbiased approach. The audience draws their own conclusions.
10. Doco-drama (re-enactment)
– The re-enactment of a particular even where actors play various dramatic parts.
As an ancillary task for this documentary film I produced a potential radio advert. This would be used as a resource to give out information about the film and to access a large number of people to advertise the documentary to the target audience. In order for the radio advert to be effective I needed to ensure that it grabbed the audience's attention in a short period of time. I did this by using short questions that related to the topics within the film.
There is a broad range of choices for type and length of radio adverts. With changes in the radio industry and better production technologies, the mode of commercial presentation has changed, and commercial advertisements can take on a wide range of forms. The two primary types of radio ads are 'live reads' and 'produced spots'.
Cousin to the ad-libbed commercial, 'live reads' refers to when a DJ reads an advertiser's spot on the air, delivered from a script, fact sheet or personal knowledge.
'Produced spots' appear to be more common. A spot is 'produced' if the radio station or an advertising agency record it for the client. Produced commercial formats include: straight read with sound effects or background music, dialogue, monologue (where the voice talent portrays a character, as opposed to an announcer), jingles, and combinations of these. Studies show that the quality of the commercials is as important to listeners, generally, as the number of ads they hear.
Anecdotal evidence shows that people generally think listening to commercials in exchange for free radio is a "fair deal". Thus, radio advertising can be an effective, low-cost medium through which a business can reach their target audience. Studies show that radio ads create emotional reactions in listeners.In turn, consumers perceive the ads as more relevant to them personally, which can lead to increased market awareness and sales for businesses running ad schedules.
Broadcasting my short advert out to the country on a radio station such as BBC Radio 4 would allow me to access a large number of people and give information about my documentary film for example topic and viewing times and platforms.
B-roll is the supplemental footage that provides greater flexibility when editing video. Think of the footage used to cut away from an interview or news report to help tell the story. That's B-roll. When filming something static, like an interview or a news anchor reporting on-location, having shots of the environment makes the end-product more interesting to watch.
B-roll is also referred to as "safety footage" — and for good reason! If you've got moments that work for audio but not video — perhaps something distracting in the background or a necessary jump-cut— B-roll can help save the project by covering up these edits.
Here are a few tips for shooting B-roll:
• The most important thing is to capture as much variety as possible! Cover your bases by filming a good selection of wide shots and closeups, and try out some interesting angles, such as below the subject, or maybe a bird's-eye view of an event.
• Don't be afraid to move! Using only static shots can slow down the pace of the video.
• It's better to shoot more than is needed — you don't want to be left without enough to edit.
• Don't forget to capture B-roll of the person you are interviewing. Switching from an interview to a voice-over with footage of the person going about their business can help connect your audience with your subject.
• Make sure to get some B-roll on location after the interview; there may have been details mentioned that will inspire footage. For example, if you're interviewing a mother and she mentions her children, get some shots of those kiddos in the backyard, or of their photos around the house.
And remember, although the industry term is "B-roll," this all-important footage shouldn't be dismissed as "B-list." B-roll can be creative and beautiful, and truly helps to produce a more well-rounded, engaging final piece.
Here is a short interview with famous director Martin Scorsese on the history of Documentary films.
Documentary Film History
Throughout history, documentary film has encompassed a broad category of visual expression that is based on the attempt, in one fashion or another, to "document" reality. Although "documentary film" originally referred to movies shot on film stock, it has expanded to include video and digital productions that can be either direct-to-video or made for a television series. Documentary, as it applies here, works to identify a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries.
Scorsese begins his interview by mentioning the first evidence of 'documentary' style film from pre-1900s France in which they would film single shot pieces of footage of trains coming into a station or factory workers leaving work they would document everyday acts and this was called "actuality" filming at the time as the word "documentary" wasn't brought into place until 1926.
Between 1900-1920s Travelogue films were very popular in the early part of the 20th century. They were often referred to by distributors as "scenics." Scenics were among the most popular sort of films at the time. Pathé is the best-known global manufacturer of such films of the early 20th century. A vivid example is Moscow clad in snow (1909). Also during this period Frank Hurley's documentary film, South (1919), about the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was released. It documented the failed Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in 1914, to some people this was the very first proper "documentary' film. The city symphony The continental, or realist, tradition focused on humans within human-made environments, and included the so-called "city symphony" films such as Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a City, Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures, and Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera. These films tend to feature people as products of their environment, and lean towards the avant-garde.
Kino-Pravda
Dziga Vertov was central to the Soviet Kino-Pravda (literally, "cinematic truth") newsreel series of the 1920s. Vertov believed the camera — with its varied lenses, shot-counter shot editing, time-lapse, ability to slow motion, stop motion and fast-motion — could render reality more accurately than the human eye, and made a film philosophy out of it.
Newsreel tradition
The newsreel tradition is important in documentary film; newsreels were also sometimes staged but were usually re-enactments of events that had already happened, not attempts to steer events as they were in the process of happening. For instance, much of the battle footage from the early 20th century was staged; the cameramen would usually arrive on site after a major battle and re-enact scenes to film them.
Between 1920s-1940s the Documentary genre of filmmaking turned into propaganda for Nazi Germany where films made with the explicit purpose of persuading an audience of a point. In Britain, a number of different filmmakers came together under John Grierson. They became known as the Documentary Film Movement. Grierson, Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Basil Wright, and Humphrey Jennings amongst others succeeded in blending propaganda, information, and education with a more poetic aesthetic approach to documentary.
Between 1950-1970 Cinéma vérité (or the closely related direct cinema) was dependent on some technical advances in order to exist: light, quiet and reliable cameras, and portable sync sound.
Cinéma vérité and similar documentary traditions can thus be seen, in a broader perspective, as a reaction against studio-based film production constraints. Shooting on location, with smaller crews, would also happen in the French New Wave, the filmmakers taking advantage of advances in technology allowing smaller, handheld cameras and synchronized sound to film events on location as they unfolded.
Modern Documentaries
Compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets which makes them attractive to film companies because even a limited theatrical release can be highly profitable.
The nature of documentary films has expanded in the past 20 years from the cinema verité style introduced in the 1960s in which the use of portable camera and sound equipment allowed an intimate relationship between filmmaker and subject. The line blurs between documentary and narrative and some works are very personal.
Modern documentaries have some overlap with television forms, with the development of "reality television" that occasionally verges on the documentary but more often veers to the fictional or staged. The making-of documentary shows how a movie or a computer game was produced. Usually made for promotional purposes, it is closer to an advertisement than a classic documentary.
Films in the documentary form without words have been made since 1982, the Qatsi trilogy and the similar Baraka could be described as visual tone poems, with music related to the images, but no spoken content. Koyaanisqatsi (part of the Qatsi trilogy) consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States.
For my documentary I am researching various types of shots that can be used so that I am able to capture the images desired for my final product. The cinematography behind an artistic piece such as a documentary or a music video is a well thought out process so that you can produce the product to how the filmmaker wishes it to look. The beauty of filmmaking is that each individual filmmaker will use certain shots more than others or will capture certain images, maybe landscapes or movement. It comes down to what you want to send across to the audience watching. Here are some examples of creative shots or techniques used to capture certain images.
1- Tracking or dolly shot where the camera is placed on a mobile platform or in this case a person on a skateboard to capture a fluid image and for smooth panning when capturing movement.
Timelapse Timelapse photography is a technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured (the frame rate) is much lower than that used to view the sequence. When played at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. For example, an image of a scene may be captured once every second, then played back at 30 frames per second. The result is an apparent 30-times speed increase. Time-lapse photography can be considered the opposite of high speed photography or slow motion. Here is an example of professional Timelapse photography.
Slow Motion Slow motion is an effect in film-making whereby time appears to be slowed down.Typically this style is achieved when each film frame is captured at a rate much faster than it will be played back. When replayed at normal speed, time appears to be moving more slowly. Slow motion is used a lot in modern filmmaking. It is used by a wide range of directors to achieve diverse effects. Some classic subjects of slow motion include:
Athletic activities of all kinds, to demonstrate skill and style.
To recapture a key moment in an athletic game, typically shown as a replay.
Natural phenomena, such as a drop of water hitting a glass.
Here is a example of slow motion photography in the industry.
Point of view shot (POV)
Point of view shot: (Often abbreviated as 'POV'). A shot which shows the scene from the specific point of view of one of the characters.
It is usually established by being positioned between a shot of a character looking at something, and a shot showing the character's reaction. The technique of POV is one of the foundations of film editing.
A POV shot need not be the strict point-of-view of an actual single character in a film. Sometimes the point-of-view shot is taken over the shoulder of the character (third person), who remains visible on the screen.
Here is a compilation of POV shots in the TV series Breaking Bad.
The BBC is one of the front runners in airing documentary programs in the UK. It generally deals with serious and thoughtful topics. This suggests the target audience could be educated and informed people, however they are well known for producing and distributing a huge variety of documentary programs ranging from David Attenborough nature documentaries to programs like Panorama or Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe.
