Pondering the meaning of ‘documentary’ in the Age of Irony

Having just again viewed the film “Exit Through The Gift Shop,” and read the various coverage pondering the question of whether it’s for real, there are some conclusions I have drawn.

First, that much of the film is not real.

Second, that the film is entertaining and points to some basic truths.

Third, that because of the success of this film, that we are going to see a wave of “documentaries” that dispense with fact when convenient.

Fourth, that all of the above are going to be something of a tipping point for documentaries as we have traditionally defined them.

“Exit,” by the British street artist called Banksy (apparently a pseudonym for Robert Banks), premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, where it was listed as a documentary but placed in the “Spotlight” competition rather than in either the U.S. or Word Documentary competitions, where filmmakers such as Sebastian Junger (with Tim Hetherington) and Laura Poitras had traveled far and risked personal safety to report on the War in Afghanistan and Al Queda, respectively. No one at Sundance apparently ran a fact check, or it they did worried about that in listing “Exit” as a doc.

The film focuses on a man named Thierry Guetta, whom the New York Times says “seems to exist.” But the story told about Guetta is, even in the Google age, a blank. Searches through news databases show nothing before 2009, and only in conjunction with the film. A Wikipedia page on Guetta has numerous challenges for factual accuracy, as well as a challenge that the entry “reads like an advertisement.” He may be real, but that doesn’t make the story real.

Guetta, in the film, is entertaining, but in the “truth in stranger than fiction” manner. What if it’s not the truth?

There’s always been a sub-genre of film generally called the “mockumentary.” It’s been a form that works because it allows the filmmaker to package a story with a thread of verisimilitude, and it also allows the film to be made very cheaply. “This is Spinal Tap” had fun with the form, and “The Blair Witch Project” had a success in the late 1990s using the doc form as a way of using low-cost video footage. But these films have always been clearly fictional.

The question may be, has Sundance, through “Exit,” opened a can of worms in which the word  “documentary” no longer clearly defines the film as being fully factual?

There is sure to be a wave of films coming on the heels of “Exit” in which younger filmmakers use the conventions of documentary to tell a story. But in that, will the term “documentary” come to not necessarily be one that speaks of truth, but only of the conventions of the documentary style – shot on video, employing sit-down interviews of subjects, using apparent B-roll (often rough and noisy, as in the Banksy film), overlayed with a narrator’s voice?

One might wonder if in future Sundance competition, or other film festivals, there would be “nonfiction documentary” and “fiction documentary” categories? Banksy isn’t helping, as he’s insisting the film is all true despite even a basic fact-check not supporting that.

But the use of the Guetta “character” allows a Banksy film to publicize Banksy without directly seeming to. The fauxhemian “irony” of the work is what fuels the hipster sensibilities of this world in which Banksy operates. By Banksy playing the hooded rebel, trying to hide his identity, people almost miss the fact he’s as driven for publicity as P.T. Barnum himself – and even uses an elephant in his quest.

The book world has gone through this kind of struggle for a different reason – unlike film, nonfiction books outsell novels ten times over. A spate of pure hoaxes such as James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” have overshadowed and perhaps allowed middle-ground debates about the truthfulness of nonfiction, such as Frank McCourt’s acclaimed “Angela’s Ashes,” in which the writer recounted long stretches of dialogue that happened when he was four years old – an impossibility, but explained by the fact that there was a “basic truth” to the story.

But in the same way, there are basic truths to fiction. “The Hurt Locker” was produced on a budget microscopic for a feature film, but generous for a documentary, and it is representative of the reality of the war in Iraq. Conversely, if we were to find out that “The Cove” created as a fiction the events of the film, we’d be outraged.

A documentary, in my mind, is 100 percent factual. Anything less than that makes it a fiction.

And in the end, I can’t help wonder if “Exit” might have played just as well without the fiction. As a chronicle of Banksy’s street art, and of other artists such as the controversial Shepard Fairey, it would have been good. But to say that is to also miss the point. The buzz about “Exit” is a replication of street art’s challenge to the status quo. Banksy, in my mind, is hardly a renegade at all, but as much a mainstream careerist as the gang up at Goldman Sachs, cleverly manipulating the product for maximum return – the antithesis of the traditional documentarian, who toils for small pay and small audiences, in search of some illuminating truth. The controversy over this film has been its own best public relations campaign, and that, in my mind, is truly a statement of the cynicism that infuses this “documentary.”

Case Study: Getting the Film Look in the Short Documentary, 16 Teeth by Rii Schroer

Cumbria’s last traditional rakemakers (2009), directed by Rii Schroer, England, 2:29 min.
Rii Schroer profiles John and his son Graeme in a short doc shot on a Canon 5D Mark II. April 2009, North of England.

16 TEETH – Cumbria’s last traditional rakemakers from Rii Schroer on Vimeo.

Born and raised in Germany, Rii Schroer followed the more practical route at university: economics and business administration. After getting her degree, she got a business job in Hamburg and moved there. As she worked for about six months she became drawn to Hamburg’s “vibrant photographic scene,” where there were “lots of lectures and exhibitions,” she says in an interview. She saw a presentation by Kent Kobersteen when he was the picture editor at National Geographic, and it changed her life. The lecture included a discussion about how their photographers work on stories. “It somehow clicked,” Schroer remembers distinctly. I decided that evening to become a photographer and went to a secondhand photographic fair a couple of days later to buy my first camera (a Nikon F90x).”

Schroer spent a year studying photojournalism, then moved to London “to work over the summer holidays.” She “was drawn into the amazing photo scene there, and started contacting the local papers to get some work experience and earn my first, although very moderate, money with photography.” Schroer enjoys the “fast pace of news reporting, but also the technical aspects of photography. To work for the national papers doing news, but also work on feature stories, seemed to be a logical next step at that time.”

Although she studied photography and found her passion there, Schroer was “interested in film from an early age, again being exposed to a brilliant cinema in my hometown, which showed all the classics and interesting European and Oversees releases,” she notes. She played around with “little camcorders”, but photography and cinematography didn’t converge until the release of the Canon 5D Mark II. “I often thought some stories I photographed for the papers would be better told with video or as multimedia pieces, so the new technical developments came as a blessing” and provided an “interesting way to tell stories,” she explains.

At that point, “I took filmmaking seriously,” Schroer says. Although she admits that there are “different thought processes and skills needed in doing photography or video,” she finds that “there are more similarities than differences. At the end of the day, you are trying to tell a story, work with visuals, and have the joy of engaging with people from all walks of life, no matter the medium.” So whether she shoots video or photography, the story (and outlet for it), will determine the best way to do it, whether shooting photo, video, or both in combination.

Story

Schroer first saw the story in “a short local newspaper report about John and Graeme.” She called them to see what they were like, and talked “about their work and lives in the remote village of Dufton in Cumbria, England.”  She discovered that “they were great, down-to-earth, characters and the old, dark workshop and working practices he described sounded perfect for shooting this piece with a DSLR camera (Canon 5d2) to make use of its low-light capabilities.”

Once she had the feeling for her characters, she decided that the “initial idea was to get a fresh take on an old tradition and to find those little quirky moments that put a smile on your face.” With that, she had the beginnings of a story concept. Rather than writing a script, she and her assistant to “formulate our interview questions.” After speaking to John on the phone, she was almost ready to shoot.

Preproduction

Before whipping out her camera, Schroer remembered the first lesson in photojournalism: “It is often crucial to be able to build a rapport with the people you meet in a very short amount of time,” she says. This rapport comes easily for Schroer. It’s in her nature. “I love to be with people from all walks of life and enjoy having the opportunity to peek into other people’s lives. Wherever you are, a smile can open lots of doors,” she adds.

And sometimes it does come easy. “John and Graeme gave us a great welcome and made it easy for us,” Schroer explains. “I guess it was a nice change for them, to have us around for a day. And yes, we took our time in the beginning, had some tea and laughter before pulling out the camera. Our preparation was simple. Kind of a ‘shut up and shoot approach.’”

Schroer and Tansy Sibley, her assistant who wrote the article that would accompany the video on vimeo.com (see http://vimeo.com/4231211), defined the questions for the interview. They also made sure the “equipment was in full working order, batteries charged, and so forth”, which gave them the freedom to then “go with the flow.”

After getting to know their subjects and get them relaxed for filming, “We decided that we should start with the sit-down interview first,” Schroer says, “as it gave us a framework for the story and a guide to focus on certain visuals over the day.”

As they talked during the interview, Schroer says she “made mental notes of things that I found interesting for close-up shots, although a lot of them did not make it into the final edit, due to the time-constraints of the piece.” After the interview, she took a series of stills, portrait pictures. Then they just “let them go on with their jobs, following them around. The 5d2 allowed us to keep it small and intimate during the shoot.”

After getting his subjects at ease, Schroer conducts a sitdown interview. She gathers ideas from their stories before she starts shooting action footage to visualize the piece.

By following them around as they worked, Schroer got “a lot of material”, she explains, but “it was pretty clear whilst shooting which bits had the potential to go into the tight, short edit—for example, John talking about his worn shoe, atmospheric shots, such as the silhouette whilst John is working in front of the window, and so forth.”

John Rudd points out his worn shoe in Rii Schroer’s 16 Teeth. 28mm lens was used for camera intimacy, Schroer says. © 2009 Rii Schroer. Used with permission.

Schroer notes how easy it was for her to adapt to the video world. “Working as a press photographer, the camera feels like second nature to me and I have a wide range of lenses available.” However, she hadn’t mastered all the intricacies of the camera until later, such as the picture style. “As this was one of the first video stories being shot on it,” she notes, “I used a standard picture style. I now use a ‘user defined’ picture style (sharpness and contrast all the way down, and saturation down by two notches) and do grading in post production.”

John Rudd passes in front of a window in one of Rii Schroer’s powerful images in 16 Teeth.

The small size of the camera worked to her advantage, as Schroer believes the “5d2 rather than a regular video camera was less intimidating for John and Graeme.” She also feels that the shape and size of the camera helped, as well, in making her subjects comfortable. “The camera looked more like a stills camera than a video one,” she explains.

However, the hardest part for Schroer, was “the lack of decent focusing controls [which made] accurate focusing challenging at times.” Audio was also an issue, so they “decided to record the audio separately on a Marantz audio device, and synced it with the piece in postproduction.” Most of the shots were locked down on a tripod, while moving handheld shots were done with the Merlin Steadicam “to achieve a more vibrant, intimate feel.”

They also decided not to bring any lights, using only “available light only (in contrast to the still pictures taken of them, which were separately lit).” Schroer notes that this also allowed them to “easily go with the flow and also test the camera’s low-light capabilities.”

For Schroer, composition “happens intuitively and is certainly based on my experience as a stills photographer. I make sure to film a good variety of wide, medium, and close up shots, and decide on the spot, which lenses to use, depending on what is happening. For example, the opening shot of the rake was filmed on the 50mm macro lens to make use of the shallow depth of field possibilities. John’s shoe scene was filmed on a wide 28mm lens, being close to him. It was important to us to achieve intimate sequences of them, so the wide angle seemed to be a good choice.”

The opening title shot to 16 Teeth. Schroer says she used the 50mm macro lens in order to “make use of the shallow depth of field possibilities.” Take note of the narrow focal plane along the edge of the rake.

Schroer also had to face dark conditions with automatic exposure—meaning that “most of the shots were automatically shot on the widest open apertures. Now I mostly shoot around f/5.6. It seems to be a good setting for not being too shallow, especially when moving, but gives enough depth of field to not have it look like video. For that reason I used a Nikon 28mm lens with Canon adapter for the steadycam work to be able to select aperture settings at around f5.6 and to be able to move without losing focus,” Schroer explains.

She also likes to carry around zoom lenses, especially “if you don’t want to carry much around and need to be rather flexible. I have found the Canon 24-70mm a reliable workhorse for most situations, with the 50mm macro lens for close-ups in the bag.” But for her beauty shots, she likes to utilize primes: 24mm f/1.4, 85mm f/1.2, and a 100mm macro.

Postproduction

After getting her footage into the computer, Schroer transcoded them into Apple Pro Res. As she edits, Schroer looks “for those little moments I find surprising, fun, and visually entertaining. I have great respect for the craft of editing. As a one man/woman operation though, you go with the flow and a lot of it comes down to intuition and recapturing the fresh thoughts you had” after you left the scene, she explains.

“What did you find surprising or did not know at all, what made you laugh? It is simple questions you try to answer and then put together, to make a piece that feels authentic to your experience,” she notes about her process when editing.

At first Schroer considered showing the story of rake making, but in the end focused on the characters. “We did film all the steps of how the rakes are made, but in terms of the story, we were more interested in showing Graeme and John’s characters and their love of what they do, than for example, creating an informational piece about a dying tradition.”

In the end, the editing choices revolved around their “aim to capture the kudos of Graeme and John, their warm, down-to-earth characters, and their joy and pride in the work they do.”

Aftermath

Rii Schroer loves the adventure and flexibility in shooting with a DSLR camera that can both shoot stills and high quality video. “For my line of work,” she explains, it “opens up amazing possibilities in offering full multimedia packages to clients, shooting stills and full-frame HD video with one device, achieving cinematic quality in a small or one-man/woman team. The system is very adjustable. It can be used small for a ‘fly on the wall approach’ with not more than a tripod or small rig, or used more elaborately on rigs with focus pulling, glidetracks, jib-arms, whatever one can think of.”

Like other 5D DSLR shooters, she found getting accurate focus, “especially in low-light conditions challenging”, as well as the audio issues. But since “there are ways of getting around these challenges to create the story you want to tell,” Schroer feels the quality of the image outweighs the disadvantages.

Technical data: Shot on 5D Mark2 with Canon 24-70mm/2.8, Canon 50mm macro. Merlin Steadycam work with Nikon 28mm and Canon adaptor. Background audio all 5D Mark2, with additional audio with the Marantz Audio device. The work was edited in Final Cut Pro with conversion to Apple Pro Res.

[This article is a draft of a chapter from DSLR Cinema by Kurt Lancaster to be released in the fall by Focal Press.]

Is it journalism or is it cinema? The wrong question being asked

Khalid Mohtaseb produced a work titled “Haiti Earthquake Aftermath Montage”, a Vimeo piece criticized by some as being too cinematic on the DSLR News Shooter blog. Here’s his video:

Haiti Earthquake Aftermath Montage from Khalid Mohtaseb on Vimeo.

He shot it on a Canon 5D Mark II with a Kessler Crane Pocket Dolly, a device that attaches to the top of a tripod and provides smooth dolly/tracking moves.

Khalid Mohtaseb with his Canon 5D Mark II attached to the Kessler Crane Pocket Dolly and tripod.

Many people wrote positive feedback (over 90% on Vimeo) for Mohtaseb’s use of the cinematic quality of the device, but some called his approach “irresponsible” and a “poor attempt at journalism.” Here are two sample comments from DSLR News Shooter, the first written by Andres Aguilo:

“I don’t want to get into a moral debate but for me Khalid video of Haiti was completely irresponsible, there is a time for everything, a travelling [shot] is more than just a camera movement and in an aftermath is disrespectful for the people, why not take advantage and make a post apocalyptic fictional drama, as [G]odard said every shot is a moral question. What really get to me is the fact that this Internet community sees this and just thinks it’s a great video and congratulate the film maker. I just feel sorry for this immature act of being amaze[d] by the ‘exotic’” (26 March 2010 posting).

Mark’s feedback: “As for the footage shown it doesn’t really tell me anything about what happened or how people are coming to terms with it. It[']s just another bunch of pretty pretty shots put together which to be honest given the situation [I] think is a pretty piss poor attempt at journalism. If you want to focus on the people then show us interviews and have real interaction with the people. Not this over color corrected sliding [tracking/dolly shots] rubbish” (26 March 2010).

Dan Chung, on his DSLR Shooter blog — a blog which states “Making the real world look as good as cinema” — reacts to this kind of critique: “I have to admit to being a little surprised by the strength of the reactions to Khalid’s piece from Haiti. Having given it a lot more thought I think the debate around the video actually highlights a complete lack of consensus among pros about what forms visual journalism should take. For me Khalid’s piece did what so many other news videos from Haiti had failed to do — draw me in emotionally.”

I have to agree with Dan Chung. For too long the broadcast news format — that short form news story found local news stations to CNN to FOX where the reporter’s presence stands front and center through heavy narration — has strangled the creative potential of video journalism. Take away the words and many of these video journalism pieces fall apart, since they’re not told visually. Video, in many short form TV news examples, is layered on as an afterthought — a “shoot to script” mentality used to illustrate the narration.

As Chung notes, visual journalism is different, and for web production, styles are wide open. Photojournalists know how to tell a story through a single picture or through photo essays. But so many people are so used to the TV news style, a style that they think defines video journalism, a style that usually entails a TV reporter with a camera person — the videographer picking up shots to illustrate the reporter’s story.

But that shouldn’t be the case — there should be more than one style to present video journalism. Many of my posts on this site advocates a documentary journalism style — one that does grant poetic license to the video journalist.

So when a work utilizes such cinematic techniques as dolly/tracking shot shots, music, and color grading in order to convey the feeling of survivors of the Haiti earthquake, I celebrate such pieces because it is a direct challenge to patriarchal form of typical TV news — a form that needs to be challenged.

One of the cinematic approaches Khalid Mohtaseb takes in his piece that conveys his visual style is color grading. The before image is on the left, while the post-grading process is on the right.

In many ways, this argument is a visual literacy question. Fictional cinema does not own the “cinematic style”. Cinematography means to write in motion, photography means to write with light. The craft of cinematography combines light and shadow, as well as camera movement to convey stories in a potentially powerful way.

Khalid Mohtaseb’s piece follows in the tradition of Danfung Dennis, Rii Schoer, Travis Fox, and especially Dai Sugano, who are creating documentary journalism pieces that do not follow the conventional form of TV news–and their pieces are the better for it.

A fascinating discussion between Philip Bloom, a guru of DSLR shooting, and Mohtaseb can be found on DSLR News Shooter. Shot and edited by Dan Chung at NAB 2010:

Khalid Mohtaseb and Philip Bloom discuss Cinematic journalism and DSLR video from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

The infamous Philip Bloom who spent 17 years as a news cameraman talks with DSLR video shooter Khalid Mohtaseb about the issues around the use of cinematic techniques for news shooting. See the video and debate that started it all here http://www.dslrnewsshooter.com/2010/03/25/into-the-haiti-earthquake-zone-khalid-mohtaseb-covers-the-aftermath-on-5dmkii/

Video for www.dslrnewsshooter.com by Dan Chung, Den Lennie and Scott Karlins of www.fstopacademy.com

Case Study: Film about YouTube becomes a YouTube-distribution pioneer

When Ester Brym decided to make her first documentary, she decided to do it on the subject of YouTube, and when she finished it, she decided to distribute it on YouTube – but not for free.

“Butterflies,” which focuses on some YouTube stars who have built fame and some fortune on the free video-distribution site is now the first feature film to actually be for rental under YouTube’s new pay option.

Charging $4.99 for 24 hours’ access to the 70-minute film, “Butterflies” has gotten (as of April 12) 3,091 views. Under the YouTube arrangement, the filmmaker receives half of that payment.

Brym, a Czech-born, Los Angeles-based film editor, only set out to learn more about a subject that fascinated her. It was always in the back of her mind to shoot a feature, she says, and it made sense to do a documentary because of some of the budget issues there.

“I wasn’t necessarily concentrating on one topic or another for a film,” she says, “and when YouTube came around, I became a big fan, because as an editor I used it to post my videos and my reel, and as I was doing that I discovered the YouTube community.”

This was maybe 2006.  For about a year Ester watched “religiously, all these people, and then later they established a partnership in which they allowed these people to make money.”

It was through trying to explain the phenomenon to others she began work on “Butterflies.”

“Not only was I already interested in these people, but friends would ask me why I watched it so much and what was it all about. I tried over and over to explain this was a community, and that these kids got paid now. When I was explaining it for maybe the 50^th time, I thought, Why don’t I just contact these guys and do interviews with them, because I had all the equipment – I had a camera, I could do the editing, and I knew people in the business.”

At the end of 2007 she began preproduction, calling people who she hoped would be interested in participating, and she began shooting at the beginning of 2008. Working with her producer (and fellow Czech) Tom Duty, she strategized on how to score interviews with some of the better-known faces of YouTube.

“In the beginning I contacted a few YouTubers I was interested in,” she says. “I did sit-down interviews; the people I interviewed were not necessarily big YouTubers but it got the word out. It built the publicity around it. Then, every time an event would happen, I was able to get a press pass and go shoot. The way the trailer was constructed was to cater to the YouTube community – I’m showing bigger YouTubers in the trailer even though the film is more in-depth than that. But obviously the trailer is trying to get as much attention as possible.

She says she interviewed far more people than she knew she could fit into the film. “The six main people I ended up having are all different. There are a couple who are very professional – they have production facilities here in L.A., and then I also had a guy who was just sitting in front of a camera in his attic, just talking about his troubles. I ended up picking a little bit of everything. “

Some of the YouTubers she pursued were so well-known, “they didn’t even bother replying to me. The bigger people are very, very aware of their power, and they’re celebrities, or what I call ‘weblebrities.’ They’re making money and lots of them have their own agents, and they asked for money to even be interviewed. I ended up getting a lot of smaller YouTubers because they were interested in the exposure.”

But as the word got out and the film developed, she says, some of these people actually contacted her and said they wanted to be in the film.

Ester shot at first on a standard-def Panasonic AG-DVC30. It broke after a few months of shooting, so she got a Canon XH-A1, an HDV 1080i camcorder, but kept shooting in standard definition on it because she didn’t want to have big differences in the quality of footage.

The film opened at the Action On Film Festival in Pasadena, California, and went to New Filmmakers in New York and First Glance in Philadelphia, as well as a half-dozen other small festivals.

“We go approached by a few distributors when we were at film festivals, but as an independent filmmaker I’ve heard the horror stories and I just didn’t want to give away the film for free. It was less about making mone as it was about keeping our rights and seeing what we could do with our film. We ended up talking with Journeyman Pictures, which is based in the UK, and they’re great. They only distribute documentaries; I’d heard about them and the films they represent. They were interested, but wanted it shorter for broadcast. So we re-cut the film and sold them the rights for broadcast only. So far they’ve sold it to two TV networks (in New Zealand and Denmark).

“Because I just started shooting it as a few interviews with these kids, I thought I’d do it as a short film and put it on YouTube; I never really had a plan other than just thinking it would be interesting for people to see how things go on YouTube. I thought I’d just put it online, but I think it started getting attention just because of the general attention social media started getting.”

The completion of the film intersected with the new effort by YouTube to create a selling market for filmmakers.

“When the Sundance Film Festival put four Sundance short films on YouTube for rent, that was the first time they ever did it. They tried to get lots of media attention, and there were articles about it in the New York Times and other places, but each of the films only got about 300 rentals. It’s so new, and the majority of people who go to YouTube go there for content that’s free. The people who do wants films and will pay for them, they’ll go somewhere else – to Netflix and Hulu.

“What YouTube is trying to do now is to break into this part of the business. After they posted the Sundance films, our film was already done, but they were not offering the service to outsiders. I started thinking about that. We already had a distributor at that point but we had kept our digital rights. I kept thinking it would be really great if we could launch on YouTube, because this is what the film is about. It’s where our audience is, and we could promote it that way – we could start a new part of history when it comes to digital distribution. I emailed YouTube a few months later to see if this would be a possibility, and they weren’t ready yet, it was a kind of beta thing where they didn’t have everything set up.

“Then (YouTube) decided to put the SXSW films for rent, and I got an email back from them saying Yes, we are ready. That was in February that we launched “Butterflies” on YouTube. If you don’t count the festival films, which were short films, we’re the first feature film doing this.”

Ester says she’s not quite clear if the 3,091 figure on YouTube computes as sales or views (including multiple views by one buyer), but even at that the revenue through YouTube seems to compute to at least $5,000-$6,000 in revenue for the film.

“So far we’re doing well, but only time will tell if this is the new platform, is this where people are going to be watching movies?”

And she says she’s pleased at the number of paid views the film has gotten, because very few people seem to know about the pay option. When I told her I hadn’t even heard of it, she said, “I don’t think it’s that you don’t know about it, honestly nobody knows about it yet.”

Making an IMAX movie in a basement

Stephen van Vuuren was about to be promoted to VP of a Fortune 500 company. But he turned it down in order to pursue his dreams of crafting an IMAX documentary of a “literal single take journey from the moments before the big bang to earth 500,000 years ago to the year 2050 on earth then to Saturn and back to Earth.” (See http://outsideinthemovie.com/)

Outside In Concept Teaser Trailer from stephen v2 on Vimeo. Copyright 2010 by stephen van vuuren, SV2 Studios.

Influenced by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, van Vuuren “dreamed of being an astronaut and actually was accepted (but could not afford to attend) MIT as an astrophysics major,” he explains in an interview. “However, a year later I saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and heard the call to filmmaking.”

Taking his love for space exploration, van Vuuren utilizes hundreds of thousands of NASA spacecraft archive images to take his audience on a journey of sights and sounds, a journey he hopes will provide a perspective on a grand scale, one by which he hopes will allow someone to look from the outside in, and “change how we see ourselves” by “taking the journey [of] these spacecraft and seeing through their eyes.”

But it won’t all be made up of NASA space images. He says the film “ends up being a journey through the transformative archive of human images from cave paintings to our near future. I will end up having images from every era and section of human history in the film.”

Van Vuuren wants his audience to go on this journey through “real photographs, not CGI, so that like a real journey, they are free to take away their own personal experience” and “ponder the big questions and our place in them,” he explains.

Thus the title, Outside In, a Herculean effort cobbled across five computers and 16TB of storage (including backup servers) in his basement. He’s using real images and manipulating motion in those photos.

“Still images have to be sourced (around half a million or more eventually. I’ve got 100,000 or so already) and prepped in Photoshop (some require very minimal work, others like my Saturn’s ring composite take months of work for a single image. Fortunately, more than a dozen other space image compositors have donated their complex images to the film saving me years of work). Once the images are prepped, they are moved into Adobe After Effects for animation. The animation process takes months for minutes” of film.

His dream coalesced when he watched the NASA webstream of Cassini’s arrival to Saturn: “I was blown away by the very first images that came down that night. My very first thought was ‘wow, wouldn’t it be cool to have a film camera there?’”. He attempted a couple of film projects, wrote a script, turned it into a one-act play about two characters debating space exploration. But he was frustrated. He wanted his vision onscreen and considered giving up.

However, van Vuuren explains, “By spring 2006, I realized that Outside In was so close, so passionate to me that I just needed to find another direction for the film, not my life.” Listening to “a Ferry Corsten Remix of ‘Adagio for Strings’ performed by William Orbit”, he envisioned an HD film for planetariums based on the development of “creating motion with still photographs”. Indeed, he’s had a passion for still photography since childhood and sees film as not “moving pictures”, but as “24 still images per second.”

He went to Las Vegas to see a talk by “some NASA people” and approached them with the idea for the film, but they weren’t interested. “But at chance meeting at a lunch table, I met James Hyder, the editor and publisher of LF Examiner, the trade publication of the IMAX industry. He loved the concept and passionately argued for it to be an IMAX film.”

That was the easy part. He mounted tens of thousands of dollars of debt in order to perfect an imaging flight through Saturn’s rings without using CGI. But the IMAX budget was over a million dollars and despite a successful business plan where investors put money “for the full budget on the table”, he turned them down. “They wanted to the change the film, have me give up creative control and copyright and only a small percentage of future profits.  After weeks of agonizing, I said no.”

Despite turning down this opportunity to get out of his development debt, van Vuuren says “I’m very glad I made that decision now. In late 2008 through early 2008, I revamped the film entirely, using my skills of building computers from parts and other geeky innovations to slash the budget to $250,000 ($75,000 of which is music licenses, legal stuff etc.) and turned the film into a non-profit operation via a Fiscal Sponsorship with Fractured Atlas (where it is today).”

He worked on the script again, and decided to go back to “a pure visual narrative structured like a symphony true to the original spirit of my vision for the film.” And he started getting help. “An artist in Argentina donated the current website and I began seeking donations.  By spring 2008, I raised $16,000 in cash and $15,000 in donations of software etc. and began creating some high resolution test shots.”

By September 2008, he presented a two minute test at the International IMAX trade show and received “positive feedback.” Then by last year (spring 2009), “Acer Computers paid for 2 more minutes of better test footage” for the 15/70mm IMAX film format. But he ran into some bugs with Adobe After Affects, which was not resolved until a few weeks ago.

“I can finally, finally, finally, start creating the actual shots in the film,” van Vuuren states. “I’m also hard at work on a new crowd-source funding effort as well as applying for multiple grants.”

The reward for van Vuuren is not money, but the pursuit of a dream. His unrelenting desire to bring this film to IMAX screens inspires other people, as well. The website designer who donated his time “after finding out I had no money”, van Vuuren explains, is one small example. But this artist “was so inspired by my passion he has become a full-time painter. Several other filmmakers have recently told me the reason they are finally pursuing their dream projects” is because of my dedication. “That makes this film already a success in my book and I’m very glad I’ve done it the way I’ve done it, even if it means it’s a slow process.”

As for the time it’s taking him: “I read stories of other filmmakers who spend 5, 7 or even 10+ years getting a labor of love film made, so I’m still midway.” Van Vuuren hopes to have the film completed by November 2011.

Oscar short-doc figurine-wrestling opens the question of ‘who owns the film’

Not a great moment for the documentary world, as an ousted producer jumps on stage during the short-documentary Oscar presentation to “Music by Prudence” and sets off another 24 hours of WTF.

But the battle between director Roger Ross Williams and ousted producer Elinor Burkett makes for good discussion outside the gossip mags that are enjoying the craziness of it. The Williams-Burkett situation is a reminder that the question of who’s in control must start at the beginning of the process. They are both invoking “creative differences” as the reason for their split and the ensuing lawsuit, now settled.

One post, “Choose your collaborators wisely,” describes the collaboration as a desperation move:

Roger Ross Williams hated his job as a television producer. Desperate for something different, he went to the Catskills, N.Y. home of his neighbor, Elinor Burkett, an author and journalist who also has a home in Zimbabwe. “‘Save me,’” Burkett jokingly recalls Williams said to her, to an audience in the Catskills in early 2009

Partnerships on small projects rarely begin with a lawyer-generated contract – the budgets are too small to burn off money on that – but they should begin with some form of agreement with clear understanding of the roles of the participants. Titles only mean as much as the clarity with which responsibilities and controls are laid out. A countersigned letter of agreement can work; emails also serve as a form of “fixation” that create a verifiabe trail.

Alison Bulman, who recorded a podcast of Burkett and Williams in 2009, said,

“Their relationship seemed fun. They seemed cordial to each other. But you’ve heard the podcast. You can definitely hear her mowing him over. She’s a loud, New Yorker-seeming woman, and he’s the soft spoken, creative type.”

What did Burkett think she would get? She apparently suggested the idea to Wiliams, but that does not in any legal way constitute creative ownership of the project. But what if a producer goes out and raises money to fund a very specific idea or approach, and the director decides to take the project in a new direction? The producer may feel a certain obigation to keep investors from feeling as if the money wasn’t put toward the idea they signed on to pay for. Or, if a producer acts in a “mentoring” relationship with a young director that implies a right of control, can it be spelled out? Studios, for example, often reserve the right to have the final edit, and some producers on small projects ask for the same.

When the director enters the deal, what does he/she expect? A producer is often someone who creates an overall business model, or works the preproduction part of the equation to set up interviews, locations and crews. “Producer” is a much less clear title. Producers can be subordinates, or they can be supervisory. On rare occasions they can be equals, but I’d make the cases that true equal creative control really means you have co-directors.

One wonders, looking at the Williams-Burkett dust-up, who thought they were in charge. The interviews Burkett has given in the last news cycle suggests she believes she was the key person in the project, someone who steered a young director who’d “never even heard of Zimbabwe” to a project that has now brought him an Academy Award. Williams, who is now saying “I own the film,” seems to be someone who believes that Burkett was helpful at first but then became an obstacle to his control. Because their lawsuit was settled out of court, one is unlikely to get any details of how they made their deal, but it’s highly likely it was a loose agreement based on an iniital excitement about a project.

Who owns the film? Most often it’s the person who comes up with the money. Louie Psihoyos, the winner in the documentary feature category, went ahead and funded himself. In doing so, he took risk but really simplified the control issue. He is a seasoned pro who went forward not with hopes but with a game plan, and the assumption good work would result.

Few people who start making documentaries, especially shorts, are crazy enough to believe they’ll make any money. But, by the same token, a contract should have very clear agreements about who gets what share. It should also put in clear words who has control over how the film will be distributed, in which film festivals it will be entered, who is responsible for marketing, and how much each party is responsible for the negatives, such as lawsuits. And the question of who owns the copyright is worth exploring.

Contracts should also cover people involved in the production who do “work for hire,” meaning those who are paid (even if deferred payment) but have no copyright ownership or other control. That usually includes editors, camera operators, sound recordists and composers of music. One thing some low-budget productions do is throw the producer title at everybody, to make them feel they have stake in the project. But those people can potentially become a voting body if their roles as so-called producers aren’t clear.

One benefit of the lowered cost of documentary filmmaking is the opportunity for one person to truly “own” a project.” But if there are more involved, who has creative control must be worked out at the very start. For Williams and Burkett, what probably started out with a handshake ended up with a  tug-of-war that went all the way to the big stage.

‘Mito-Kids’ documentary is one family’s going concern

Marc Dole’s documentary, in the beginning, was done on doctor’s orders.

His daughters had been suffering seizures, and the doctors were trying to determine what was causing them. Because Dole was a video professional – his New Hampshire-based Hatchling Studios specializes in animation and postproduction – he had access to video equipment.

“We knew our kids were having medical issues. Seizures, and one of the kids had diabetes, then we found out the twins had diabetes… there was a lot happening, and the doctors had no idea what was going on.

“One of the neurologists said to me, ‘Why don’t you have any videotape of the kids having seizures? I need to see it – every time they come into my office they’re happy, and fine.’ She was very adamant I get these things on tape,” says Dole, whose documentary “Mito-Kids” has grown directly out of that.

The film, which is still an evolving work as the Dole family confronts the medical issues as a family, has also been a work intended to bring awareness of mitochondrial disease, “a chronic, genetic disorder that occurs when the mitochondria of the cell fail to function properly. This is an intimate and personal story that aims to increase the understanding of mitochondrial disease and its connection to epilepsy, diabetes, ALS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Heart Disease and many other neurological disorders.” Dole’s four daughters (Britney, Nikiya, Ashley and Alyssa) are now teenagers. Wanda Dole, their mother, served as producer. A short version of the film took a documentary award at the New Hampshire Film Festival.

“I always had decent cameras and was able to shoot home video on decent stuff,” he says, “So it was just home video for the first five years.”

Dole says when his daughters were mainstreamed in the local schools, “It was a great way for the other kids to understand about kids with special needs. And I decided I’d make a film about the mainstreaming of my second-oldest daughter, Nikiya.”

When he heard of another New Hampshire filmmaker doing a project that was very similar, he decided to drop that approach, “but in 2008, when my oldest daughter began to have dementia issues, I began looking back into mitochondrial disease and was shocked to find out how many different strands of it there were, and how many connections there were to every neurological disease. I decided I needed to start letting everybody know this.

He created a three-minute teaser that’s on YouTube. “I’m a video editor and I had the gear, so it was like editing home movies for a while. I began to find a narrative that was much more like a documentary film. Friends who were beginning to udertsnad said I should really be making a feature-length film so I decided to start working on that.”

“Production” began with a family road trip that went from New Hampshire to St. Louis to Orlando and back home. Dole says the family had to drive for a variety of reasons related to his daughters’ conditions.

“When we got back, I began editing, knowing that I had to make it clear why we had to get in the car, why we couldn’t get on an airplane, and why we had to do things that were totally different than the way anyone else would.” He began editing in footage that created backstory and “realized I was make our feature right here.”

He said there were five possible story lines he could have chosen. He began showing footage to colleagues and friends and getting input “so it wasn’t just 90 minutes of home video stuff.”

The 15-minute short led to fund-raising to shoot in Boston, Pittsburgh and elsewhere. Friends worked for very little pay or none at all. He began to contact foundations that dealt with mitochondrial disease, and sought out production partners, potential distributors and networks. “That’s ongoing right to this day.”

Currently, he says, four volunteers are giving at least 10 hours week, helping to do medical research, or production research, or logging new footage. The project has a website that is as much informational about the condition as the film.

One debate, he says, was whether to make the project a nonprofit organization or consider finding for-profit investors.
“I had someone give me $1,000 and say, ‘Give me a business plan and I’ll give you at least $10,000 more. I was intrigued, and considered the for-profit route. Someone else was at $50,000. We began to get things together, then it turned out these two people no longer had the money. So now we were back looking at the 501(c)(3), and have been able to connect with organizations that can give money to nonprofits. We’ve gotten two $1,500 donations just in the last week.”

The shooting of the project goes all the way back to Dole’s Canon L1 (a Hi-8 format camcorder); currently, home video footage is being done on Flip HD video cameras. The project includes interview footage of various experts, shot on Panasonic HVX200 and Sony Ex1 and Ex3, depending on crews he works with for shooting.

“We have 80 hours of home video, and nine hours of interview footage,” he says.

As for his budget, “I’d tell you what it was, if I knew. When we go on a family vacation, but it’s set up with the film in mind, what do I count that as? And then there are people volunteering or working for very little. If I estimated the budget for the short with deferred payments to everyone, I’d estimate it at $25,000.”

Mitochondrial disease is not a subject the Dole family ever wraps on; likewise, the work goes on. The twins have written a script that a Dole friend and colleague is helping them produce. That, surely, will find its way into the documentary. The Doles and their story go on, but they’re working to push up awareness with the film.

The short is viewable on Facebook, “but we’re trying to get someone to take it in the broadcast side,” he says.

“I’m not even asking for a screening fee,” he says. “We’re just looking for a big-impact airing that will get some viewers. Then we’re always pressing on with the feature.”

Morrie Warshawski on finding money for your documentary

Morrie Warshawski is a money man. He’s just published the third edition of his book on finding funds for independent film making, Shaking the Money Tree. The book has evolved as the art of making films has, and he was kind enough to chat for a few minutes about what he’s seeing, specifically as it goes toward documentary filmmaking.

Morrie has a long history working with both arts groups as well as funding agencies, and he can see both where these connect, and where they don’t. While he has specific advice for those making dramatic films, here are some thoughts he shared about the current climate for documentary filmmakers:

1)    Quit saying “audience,” start saying “community.” The notion of traditional arts has been the one-way model. The artist creates a work that is viewed by an audience, a sort of active-to-passive equation. But really what’s happening is that the documentary filmmaker, with the work, enters a community of people who are already very active when it comes to the area of interest. They may be practitioners, advocates or supporters; they may engage in the area of interest socially, professionally, or both. So the trick to gaining support for one’s projects is often to join the community rather than perceiving oneself as at a distance from that community. That means, often, that support can come to a filmmaker the community sees as furthering the cause, topic or interest. That community may be individuals who may be worthy recipients of crowdfunding appeals, or they may be foundations and funding agencies who see themselves as opinion leaders. In his books, Morrie talks about the “fundraising house party,” which doesn’t always have to be in a house, but is a social and fun gathering of people being brought together through their mutual interests. (in his book on that subject, Morrie suggests that the invitations clearly state that the party is to raise funds – no ambushes – that the guests should be served refreshments and be given a short presentation on the project, and that it often helps for a respected member of that community to be willing to urge support of the project). Here’s a post by Sandra Sims on a fundraising house party that gives her account of how it went.

2)    Think Narrow and Deep. One problem with some documentaries that fail to get funding support is that they operate on the notion that the more people the project appeals to, the more chance for donations or funding. Morrie says “narrow and deep” is a better way to go: When you focus down to a smaller slice of topic matter, you find fewer people directly connected, but many of those people are intense in their interest in getting their topic seen. “When you go narrow, you go deep, and when you’re deep, it’s a niche in which people are nearly rabid,” he says. They may be more willing to write checks for a project that celebrates, publicizes or showcases their topic interest. “It also helps when you can connect with organizations that can give you access to large mailing lists of people who have that interest,” he says. That ist will become a primary marketing tool when the film is ready to sell.

3)    Be aware agencies and foundation still think “film” means “big bucks.” This may be a notion furthered by filmmakers themselves, who pitch giant budgets when they might consider going leaner. Foundations, for the most part, still perceive “film” as a prohibitively expensive medium for which their financial support can often yield little tangible result. Part of the task ahead may be to help educate the foundations that smaller grants can yield bigger results than ever before. “Foundations presume film projects are always going to be exorbitantly expensive,” Morrie says.

4)    The problem is sometimes not finishing the film, but distributing the film. Morrie notes that granting agencies often believe the filmmaker when he/she pledges to finish the film in the proposed time and for the proposed funds, “but many have been burned.” He cites examples in which a $500,000 budget becomes $750,000, and the project goes onto a dusty shelf while the filmmaker seeks other funding, sometimes furtively. Or a project that takes five years instead of the proposed one year. But beyond that, he says, grants organizations can also feel burned if the completed film never really gets out into the world – the failed distribution deal. “Any grant application needs to have a solid distribution plan,” he says, and that can include public screenings, DVD sales, web availability or other self-controllable forms of distribution. If your “plan” depends on a third party distributor to get the work out, it will be harder to justify the grant. Looking at the “hybrid” self-distribution model advocated by people such as Peter Broderick can give donors a nice warm feeling about where they’re throwing their money

5)    Pitch it as a topic, not as a film. Given the reticence of granting agencies to “waste” money on film projects, approach them as someone who will treat the topic well, and use film as the, or a, approach to doing it justice.

6)    You can have both investors and donors. Morrie notes there’s no rule keeping a filmmaker from seeking out both investors who want a return on their money and donors who simply want the topic/subject covered well. He notes some filmmakers who have, at the film’s completion, sent DVDs to the donors as a token of appreciation (I’ll throw in my two cents here, but imagine if the donors get a special or limited-edition package that has something better or nicer than what one would get as a standard purchaser). But, he says, be aware of what each party wants out of the project, and honor those expectations. “Donors and investors are two different animals looking for different outcomes,” he says. “For donors, supporting your documentary has everything to do with values they believe deeply in. A donor hopes you’ll be successful in spreading those values.”

In the end, it will be up to documentary filmmakers, as a community, to build goodwill with both donors and grantmakers. People who pitch extravagant budgets, or who “go Hollywood” on their supporters, or who don’t follow through on promises make it tougher for everyone else. Add to that Morrie’s view that the effect of the economy on foundations and the amount of money they have to hand out “is really something we’re going to see this year.” But the good news is that the cost-effectiveness of technology will allow us to do more with the funds we raise, and compete more fairly for the funds that are available.

Shooting in Haiti: An Interview with the Renaud Brothers

The illustrious American Cinematographer says this about the Renaud Brothers: “The cinema verite label often is misapplied in the film industry, but on the Renauds the tag sticks, reinforcing the notion that content is king” (http://renaudbrothers.com).

The Renaud brothers pose during their award ceremony at the International Documentary Association in 2007 (courtesy renaudbrothers.com).

The award winning filmmakers’ work includes: Warrior Champions, Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later, Taking the Hill, Off to War, and Dope Sick Love. Their most recent work, The Heroes of Children’s Hospital, aired on NBC’s Dateline on Jan. 31, 2010.

They also produce short docs for The New York Times, which have included forays into Juarez, and most recently a trip to Haiti. The interview below was conducted via email after their recent return from Haiti, and it reveals some of their secrets in shaping vision of documentary journalism and documentary filmmaking.

LANCASTER: How did you get your start in the documentary field?

RENAUD: We both started our career working for the documentary filmmaker and former NBC News Correspondent Jon Alpert (Life of Crime, Baghdad ER, Alive Day Memories). From him we learned a lot about the craft, but also about surviving and thriving and coming back with the story in some of the most dangerous places in the World. We started out as editors as I believe all young filmmakers should do. If you can become a good editor first, it is easy to become a good shooter.

LANCASTER: How do you get your work on the Time’s site? Do you pitch an idea or do you send a completed work? What is it like to work with the Time’s staff?

RENAUD: At a time when television news invests less and less in foreign stories, the New York Times has stepped up in a serious way and is leading the field online in producing original foreign news video content for the web. Dave Rummel and Ann Derry at the Times are both veterans of TV news and documentary, and among the best producers we have worked with. This kind of reporting is expensive and requires a lot of resources and the fact that the Times put people like Dave and Ann in place to head up the division shows the commitment they have to the form. We worked a lot with the excellent Discovery/Times channel when it was broadcasting, and it has been a natural fit for us to work at NYtimes.com.

In producing stories, we work together with Dave Rummel in a way that is very similar to that in the television world. We submit a rough cut of our stories and the producers give us notes and it’s a back and forth collaboration. What makes publishing online different is that a story can be “broadcast” twenty four hours a day seven days a week, whenever news is happening, from anywhere in the world. We love that excitement and freedom, but there are challenges. Filing stories from a disaster or war zone can be difficult. Sometimes, as was the case in Haiti, the only means of transmitting our stories is by a portable BGAN satellite system. This is expensive, and the file sizes have to be small. Often there is only one opportunity to send the story, and back and forth editing with a producer in NY is impossible. So being on the same page with the producers on the front end is important. We trust them and they trust us. The best supervising producers are the ones who don’t have an ego in the fight, in other words their only interest in altering a story is to make it better. With Dave we know that when he gets involved in shaping a story, the work will only improve.

LANCASTER: What camera(s) do you shoot on? Have you looked into shooting video on DSLRs?

RENAUD: We shoot on small HDV and digital HD cameras. We don’t use the DSLRs so much, however we have friends who are full time photographers and the DSLRS that shoot video have revolutionized the way they work. These days magazines have an insatiable appetite for web content. If you are a photographer or a writer, you need to be able to provide video as well. With a DSLR a photographer can still do what they do best and take photos, but they can quickly shoot a bit of video without losing their rhythm and carrying separate equipment. Later they can edit their video, photos, and voice into a multi-media piece for the web. The editors love it, and its going to keep a lot of photographers in business. We have used DSLRS a bit for some underwater video, but because our primary medium is video, we still need equipment that is dedicated to shooting it. Equipment that allows monitoring of sound, the input of xlr cables for audio, and a more stable body for handheld shooting.

LANCASTER: For the “Savings Lives” piece and the work you did in Haiti, can you walk us through the process of how you produced the piece–from concept, how you searched out your story, to shooting and editing. Do you both shoot, or does one shoot and another edit?

Saving Lives on the U.S.N.S. Comfort

RENAUD: Haiti had been out of the news for awhile when we requested the Times send us there in November. It seems ironic now, but we wanted to go there to report on the ways in which this country with so tragic a history seemed to be turning a corner. Over the last 40 years, Haiti has experienced one disaster after another–the Aids epidemic, political coups, foreign occupations and emabargoes, and serious criminal gang activity that has paralyzed the country, preventing foreign investment and the development of a tourism industry to match its neighbors in the rest of the Caribbean. Most people were not aware of the fact however, that in 2009 the security situation with the help of a UN peacekeeping force was under control, many of the gang leaders were in jail, and the political environment was relatively stable. UN Envoy Bill Clinton was actively promoting foreign investment, new roads and airports were in the planning stages. This was the kind of underreported story we like and think is important, and The Times agreed to let us report on it. And then, shortly after we returned to the states the earthquake hit, and we knew we had to go back, if nothing else then to update the stories we and just shot, and find out what happened to the Haitian people we had met there.

In our long form documentary work everything is about character. We are more likely to start a project with a character we like rather than an issue or a story. The short form news stories that we produce for the Times are a little different, but not a lot. With these stories often we are starting from a larger concept, like the Drug War in Jaurez, or the earthquake in Haiti, but whereas most news stories are dominated by a correspondent either on camera or in voice-over, we are still looking for characters to drive the story. We do use some voice over in these news pieces because it helps focus and keep the stories short. However we use as little as possible. We believe the look on a child’s face, or a gesture from a politician, uncommented on can sometimes speak worlds more than a an all knowing voiceover.

Both of us shoot, produce, and edit. We are totally interchangeable and you would never know which of us is behind the camera. This allows us to cover a lot of ground at once, multiple characters and story lines.

LANCASTER: What is your process in writing narration?

RENAUD: Most TV news pieces are edited like radio. This is how reporters turn them around so fast. In fact they often call the first pass of a story a radio cut. We learned to make documentaries first, and are still learning about making news stories. We still like to rely on the footage and our characters first, and we write the narration around that. Usually for us the narration is not even so much necessary as it is often repeating what is already said in the story, but by saying it in narration helps us shorten the piece to the appropriate lengths.

LANCASTER: It looks like you traveled on the Comfort, were you given ready access? What was your process in convincing authorities that you wanted to shoot stories on ship?

RENAUD: We are used to working with the military having been embedded for long periods of time in Iraq and having worked with the US Paralympic Military program on a recent project. We were given exclusive documentary access to the USNS Comfort on this trip. We were able to go wherever we wanted anytime we wanted on the ship. This kind of work is our specialty, we know how to get as close as you possibly can and still not disrupt the process. You have to get close, but you can’t get kicked out. It’s a delicate balance. The military no doubt wants press for a mission like this with the USNS Comfort hospital ship, it’s a humanitarian mission that paints them in a good light. So we understand that, we just always try to use the access we are given in a way to tell a unique human interest that brings something new to a larger news story.

LANCASTER: How do you work through the issue of not becoming overwhelmed in the midst of destruction and suffering?

RENAUD: We have spent the last decade working in the toughest parts of the world. Like an ER doctor you get accustomed to the suffering, keeping in perspective that what you are doing is for a greater good. I think we were just born to do this. We don’t get overwhelmed, fear never paralyzes us, and we are able to work through just about anything. This is our job. I don’t think we are adrenaline junkies like some of the war correspondents who we know. We don’t seek out the dangerous assignments. But once we are committed to a story, we are willing to do whatever it takes to tell that story.

LANCASTER: What are some of the things you look for when seeking out a subject to shoot?

RENAUD: We are always looking for characters who we believe provide a unique window into a news story. And of course the access those characters can give you is crucial. In one of our stories for the New York Times we met Alix Sainvil, a Haitian American UN cop who was working inside Cite Soliel, one of the most dangerous slums in the World. What better way to see what is going on there than through the eyes of someone who American audiences can relate to, but who is Haitian and knows the forbidding streets of Cite Soliel as well as anybody. On top of that, he is an emotional, thinking man, he speaks from the heart and not like a spokesperson. That is gold.

Security in an Insecure Land

In covering the drug wars in Jaurez, we focused on the children who have been effected by it most. In particular a boy who’s father was a hitman for one of the cartels and was murdered. When you tell audiences that Juarez is the most dangerous city in the World with executions on the streets in broad daylight common, it is hard for an audience to wrap their heads around that, to really feel what that is like and what it means. But profile a child who is articulate, genuine, and it puts a human face on the issue that audiences can relate to.

Juárez: Children in the Crossfire

LANCASTER: What was one of your most powerful moments in doing your Haiti stories? Was there a particular moment in one of your videos that stood out to you, something that you felt made it worth it all?

RENAUD: We love to tell stories that won’t get told otherwise or at least not in the same way. In one story we produced for the New York Times recently we focused on the young Haitian American Navy Corpsmen aboard the USNS Comfort hospital ship who have been called upon to be translators for victims of the earthquake in Haiti (see image below). With no training at all, these young men and women stepped up and became a lifeline for vulnerable Haitian patients coming aboard the ship, a foreign country really, unfamiliar and scary. The Corpsmen comfort the patients and attend to their needs, letting them know that the United States is here to help. Sometimes they tell the patients that their legs will be amputated, or even that they will soon die. Through the experience of these translators the viewer is given a totally different and interesting look at this crisis. These Corpsmen are national heroes, and had we not profiled them, very few people would have known it. Showing things like this to the world is something that makes us proud.

“These Corpsmen are national heroes, and had we not profiled them, very few people would have known it. Showing things like this to the world is something that makes us proud.”

Whatever the sacrifices, anytime we get to do this kind of work and be a part of history as it unfolds, it is worth it. There are fewer and fewer places where this kind of work can get seen. The New York Times is one of the places picking up the slack right now, and we hope that they can succeed in this mission.

Traveling light: A manifesto

As I’ve been working on my current projects, I’ve been running into the same problem, over and over: It’s the problem with the word “documentary.”
Or, more specifically, what people think of when you’re trying to set up a shoot and they hear the word.
A library I wanted to shoot said they charge $200 an hour for filming.
Another location, an ad agency, said that they’d have to arrange for freight elevators for us to bring our equipment up.
Another ad agency wanted proof of insurance.
A subject I asked to interview worried that the circuit breakers in his house would trip when we got the lighting on.
Then I actually show up. Usually just me, sometimes with my co-producer, if he can get time off his full-time job. Usually a small cart of equipment; sometimes stuff I bring in from the trunk of my car.
Then I get the next reaction: This must not be a “real” documentary.
Even when the Maysles brothers were running and gunning with a 16mm camera and an audio tape deck – 40 years ago ­– and even these days when light-and-mobile filmmakers such as Gary Hustwit and the inimitable Ken Burns and Werner Herzog are doing great work with small equipment packages and two-person shooting, it can be amazing to watch a documentary and then watch the credits at the end list a crew so big it seems crazy, especially if your revenue on a documentary is actually supposed to pay all those people.
So we’ve been more interested here at DocumentaryTech at those minimalists.
In an interview with ID magazine, Hustwit talked about when he was making his first documentary, Helvetica, with DP Luke Geissbuhler.

In London we shot this car wash that had Helvetica all over the place. A couple of guys came out, really pissed because they thought we were filming all their illegal workers. But Luke Geissbuhler, our director of photography, had just finished working on Borat, and after six months with Sasha Baron Cohen, shooting letters on a wall was no big deal. During Helvetica he was also nearly run over a couple of times, because we often shot in the middle of the street. Who knew Helvetica could get you killed?

Matthew Clift shot the documentary Cinderella Children in Uganda alone, and said this:

I once read that if you try to do more than one job in the production process, something will suffer. Although there is no doubt there are many benefits to having a large crew, with today’s equipment, it is more than possible for one person with a limited budget to produce a high quality feature length doco. Before you embark to complete a one-man crew production I will stress though the importance of practice. This is essential as there is a bit of an art to be learnt in simultaneously monitoring audio, checking luminance and ensuring the shot looks aesthetically good at the same time. I have made many mistakes in the past (primarily with audio as it seems to be for many filmmakers too), so you need to know how to get things right first time as often with docos there are no ‘take twos’.

I was recently interviewing a well-known writer in his Upper West Side apartment; when I came through the door he looked and said, “That’s it?” He’d been overrun last year by a crew shooting his apartment for a design segment. “They were here seven hours. They moved all my furniture and brought in all these lights, and spent most of the time standing around talking to each other. They yelled at my dog. And the final segment they put on television was just a few minutes long…”
Goodbye spontaneity and goodwill; goodbye one-on-one conversation. The way the man told the story, by the time they were all set up and ready to interview him, he just wanted them to go away.

After my interview with him, up at Central Park West, I headed on to the New York Public Library. The cart I bring into New York City (pictured here) is my lightest set-up. I drive to a suburban train station, take commuter rail into Grand Central Station, and then take a cab to where I’m interviewing. The kit fits nicely into the trunk of any vehicle.
For me, who does interview-based documentaries, that small kit has helped me get interviews quickly, at low cost, and without the need for freight elevators, fees and blown circuits. I assembled the kit after speaking with people such as NBC News’s backpack journalist Mara Schiavocampo, Pulitzer-Prize-winning still shoot-turned-filmmaker David Leeson, and others. Here at Documentarytech, Kurt Lancaster has posted interviews with filmmakers such as Danfung Dennis, who is shooting in Afghanistan with super-light setups.
Based on that (and budget), here’s what I’ve got:

1) A photo backpack, which contains:
- A Sony PMW-EX1 camcorder. I remove the lens shade and cover the glass with a 77mm skylight filter so it fits in the main case. I don’t have a field monitor, but use peaking function and a loupe to check focus.
- A Sony ECM-66 lavalier microphone.

- A small backup camera in case the EX1 has problems. I’ve carried a Canon HV20 or a DSLR; never had to use them, but happy they squeeze in the case if there’s a disaster.
- A Rode NTG-2 shotgun microphone I can put on the camcorder or lay as a second microphone on a desktop off camera, just to get backup audio in case of clothing rub, poppedP’s, or other problems that come with lavaliers.
- Gaffer tape, a polarizing filter, a Shooter’s Blue white-balance card (I use the green side to give warmth to the subject) and a focus chart.
- A power strip, two 12-foot XLR cables and extra batteries.
2) A hard case, containing:
- A Flolight LED500 light, my workhorse. It’s small (14″ by 8″), bright, doesn’t burn out and takes a beating.
- A 3-in-1 round reflector, which I can set in a chair or elsewhere to kick back some light on the fill side.
3) A tripod case, containing:
- A Libec TH-650 tripod with ball head, which is light and strong enough when using the EX1. I also bought an extra mounting plate, which I have on the bottom of the backup camcorder for easy switches if needed.
- A light stand. The LED500 only weighs 5 pounds so this light stand is the lightest one I can find.
- Sometimes a second light stand with a microphone mount.

That’s the “commuting kit.” When shooting in New York, I generally try to frame tightly and get the basic shots. When I can arrive in a car, I can add equipment.

My “car kit” includes:

1) A Large Pelican case, which includes:
- The EX1 coupled with a Letus Elite adapter
- A set of four Nikon lenses: 17-35, 50, 85 and a 35-80 macro
- The lavalier and shotgun microphones and cords
- AC adapter, various filters for the Nikon lenses
2) A smaller case, which includes:
- The LED500, the reflector, plus two small fresnel lights for lighting background
3) A soft case contain the larger Flolight FL-220, with four daylight-balanced fluoresecent bulbs
4) A heavier Manfrotto tripod with fluid head that’s able to handle the weight of the camera rig.
5) A case with four lightstands (two lightweight and two mediumweight), one microphone stand for mounting the shotgun above the subject’s head

Even there, it’s still a fairly light setup.
The benefits of this are obvious – you can set up quickly, create a somewhat intimate setting, and take up very little space and power. The downside is that you sacrifice perfection that might come from more lights, a heavier camera rig, a beefier tripod and other add-ons. I really try to get “value” footage when I go on shoots in the car; when I’m using the commuter kit I’ll have to keep things simpler, and try to find useful backgrounds.

It also goes toward the business model. By shooting alone, I save travel costs; by using a small setup, the productions costs stay low enough to actually consider making money on the project.

Hustwit, in a post-screening interview at Toronto, spoke of the “credit card budget” his film “Objectified” used, but also noted “hundred of people worked on it.” But the key, one presumes, is that by covering the bulk of the tasks, Hustwit was able to engage those others on a limited, low-cost way.

In fact, the Q&A revealed that “Hustwit says he is learning from Geissbuhler, as he hadn’t done any filming before Helvetica, and Hustwit ended up shooting about 30 percent of Objectified himself.”

It seems, with the further shrinking of the gear, that it’s a way to go.

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