There
are many elements to the film I believe worked very well, first and foremost is
the constant visual style we managed to achieve throughout. During our research
stage we took great inspiration from Sean Dunne’s documentary work, primarily The Archive. Dunne’s made a series of
short films and what initially grabbed my attention about them was his striking
cinematography. He uses a good balance of strong dialogue and strong images to
tell the various stories and it was this method that I feel we successfully
adopted. Due to the subject matter, it was more poignant we represented the
Castle Market visually, rather than relying too heavily on the stories of the
people who work there. Considering this, we did a good job in capturing the
feel of the market. Part of this success was utilizing camera movement, through
this we were able to both create a varied pace as well as better immersing the
audience in the hustle and bustle of the market.
Through capturing a lot of strong footage of
the market we were able to rely on this when it came to cutting up the
contributors, too much dialogue and the audience begin to get weighed down by
all the importation. We took the approach of stripping down any talking heads
thus giving the piece as much ‘space’ as we felt possible. During the rough
edit stage there were times where we worried that potentially there was too much space and that audiences may
start to get bored of the repetition of similar images. However, as the edit
progressed and we layered on atmos and occasionally music tracks, images that
once seemed dull came to life. Throughout the editing process what we found to
be most difficult was selecting what dialogue to include in the film then once
that was decided what order to put it so as we achieved somewhat of a narrative
arch. I’m pleased with the end result however and I now believe this aspect to
be a big strength of the film. I’ve come to this conclusion from the fact that
when the film is shown to an audience, a majority of them admit to forming some
level of an emotional attachment with the contributors. From the outset this
was our ambition however we knew that in a film of less than ten minutes it
would be a challenge, no doubt some of the credit is due to our four
contributors however I’d like to take some of the credit due to the sheer
amount of time we sent revising the edit, picking out and chopping up dialogue
in order for it to fit the our intended purpose.
A third element that I feel adds
strength to the film is the time we spent ensuring the theme of the fifties
came through in the documentary. Due to this being its heyday, we thought it
would be a nice touch to include elements of the era and also make the fact it’s
soon to close more poignant. The archive photographs at the beginning work
really well to set the scene, introducing both the subject matter and enforcing
a sense of the historic side of the market, suggesting there’s more to the
place aside commercialism. One criticism of the still images is that despite
using key frames to give them movement, essentially the film opens with images
that don’t give rise to as much excitement or intrigue that perhaps one of the
busy tracking shots do. This being said however, due to the shortness of the
film I feel I can justify using them at the beginning by way of introducing the
subject however, if the piece was longer I would have liked to include them
later on once the film has been better established. The second and final
elements that went towards establishing the fifties theme were the titles and
music, both work really well within the film and help to give it life and
pace.
The process of production of the film
has been a steep learning curve. Firstly, I’ve learnt how hard it is to edit a
short documentary; given the amount of material we collected the hardest part
of the whole process was getting it in a manageable order so that we could
produce the film we set out to. By this I mean using the content in such a way
that resulted in a film similar to the ones we’d looked at for inspiration. The
edit process in general has opened my eyes to how much a documentary can be
shaped during post. I now realise there’s is as much skill required in terms of
one’s editing ability as there is in one’s ability to technically record image
and sound.
People skills are also a crucial
element what it comes to making the sort of film we did. Before I began making
the film I had some hesitations when it came to the idea of spending a lot of
time in Castle Market alongside a large amount of film equipment. I was
pleasantly surprised however; a few strange looks and questions aside the
people of Castle market were overwhelmingly friendly. Having the confidence to
talk to someone you’ve never met, especially when the subject is quite personal
was something I had to become comfortable with very quickly. Not to mention
simultaneously correctly setting up equipment, trying to be as professional as
possible and general multi-tasking while under the pressure of trying to be as
inconspicuous as possible was something else I had to learn and get good at very
quickly.
This was the first time I was in sole
control of a DSLR too, being that I was working in a pair, my partner was on
sound and I was on camera. I soon became very technically competent with the
camera. In this sense I also learned how useful it is to know what you’re doing
in terms of setting up a shot, especially with documentary as your subject
doesn’t always wait for you to say you’re ready. To be slow with your shooting,
setting exposure, composing the shot, pulling focus etc. has the potential to
put you at a great disadvantage.
Lastly, before producing this
documentary I had always over looked the importance of sound within
documentaries. This I found out the hard way as the deadline rapidly approached
and I was desperately battling to balance atmos with dialogue and music.
As I’ve
previously mentioned for this project I was working in a partnership. This had
its advantages and its disadvantages. Personally I much prefer working in small
groups, there’s less chance for disagreement and generally I’ve found that no
matter how many people are in your crew it tends to be just one or two that do
the majority of the work. The major drawback is the fact that rather than being
able to split up the roles you both end up having to do everything. In the case
of this project, this way of working was absolutely fine. I picked my partner
on the basis that I knew we worked well together, as well as actually living
with him, this made the whole process much easier as any discussion about the
project could and would occur at any hour we were home at the same time.
I’ve
said already that we did everything together rather than strictly splitting up
the roles. In terms of the production I was essentially cinematographer, my partner
being in charge of sound recording. In post production we were both equally
involved, always being in the edit suite simultaneously, working off the same
mac, bouncing ideas betweens up in order to come up with the best possible edit
structure. Once the rough cut was formulated, my partner, being much better
skilled on Photoshop produced the titles while I worked on Soundtrack Pro
creating the soundtrack for the film.
We
never encountered any problems in terms of working as a team, other than sometimes
feeling the stress of having to a lot between us. If I were to produce a
similar film again I would have no problem working in much the same way. I feel
that next time around we’d know what to expect and already have the basic
skills down required making another film of a similar quality. In this way
despite being low in terms of numbers, it would be easier due to our growing
experience of both working on this kind of project and each other’s physical
working habits.
In order to complete an evaluation
of my work I must compare and place it within a theoretical context. For this I
must look at two people whose contribution toward the discussion of documentary
as a genre is greatly esteemed, Bill Nichols and Stella Bruzzi. From
researching Nichols’s published works, Representing
Reality and An Introduction of
Documentary, it is understood that there are potentially six discernible ‘modes’ of documentary,
poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive and performative.
The problem with these six definitions, as Bruzzi points out, is that “all
types of documentary have existed at different times and have often mixed
styles” (Bruzzi, 2000). Essentially, the work I’ve produced
has breached a number of conventions laid out by Nichols, hence made it
impossible to simply label it as one of the six modes. It has elements of observatory;
many of the cutaways are fly-on-the-wall, discreetly recording the uninterrupted
day to day activities of the traders. On the other hand there contains aspects
of expository film making, moments where the documentary speaks directly to the
audience, done not through Nichols’s conventional ‘voice of god’ narration, but
through set up interviews.
The visual style of the film was approached
as being poetic. Due to our initial brief being to produce a two minute poetic
film on the same subject, we felt it would benefit the final film to
incorporate elements of this initial approach. The main reasoning behind this
was down to the subject matter. The cinematic potential of the Castle Market
was such that we knew it was as important in getting our story across to an
audience through impressive imagery as it was through the actual stories of
those we would interview. After looking at
Sea Change, a short poetic documentary by Rosie Pedlow and Joe King we were
inspired to make use of a track to better represent the space in which we would
be documenting. We felt that in order for the film to be a success, the
building its self needed to be treated as a separate character, not to be over
looked and disregarded once we had more ‘human’ material. A convention of
poetic documentation is to create a pace, a metaphoric rhythm of a written
poem. We attempted this through the use of the track, using intermittent camera
movement to break up the film, creating space and implementing our effort at
changing pacing.
One element of expository documentary that we
knew we wanted to avoid was the use of a narrator. We wanted the film to be the
story of those people we were interviewing and it was felt that to use an
outside source to carry the narrative would take away from the microcosm aesthetic
we wanted to achieve. This had to be considered when partaking in the interviews;
we knew that all the content needed to seem contributor generated rather than a
series of obvious responses to questions being asked off screen. In this sense
we were sure about not wanting to produce a participatory documentary, going
back to the idea that we wanted to represent the market as a small world within
a world, the use of a presenter would distract from this. The length of the
film was also taken into consideration, we felt that in under ten minutes there
is little need for a Theroux
character for the audience to look for to inspire a vibrancy or drive the
narrative.
Bibliography:
Bruzzi, S. (2000). New Documentary. (1st ed.). Oxon, Uk: Routledge Ltd.
Burton, A. (2007, November 16). Documentary form. Retrieved from
Nichols, B. (2010). Introduction to Documentary. (2nd ed.). Indiana, USA: Indiana University
Press.
Sea Change, 2005. Film.
Directed by Rosie PEDLOW & Joe KING. UK: Folk Projects.
