Three ways to become a good documentary journalist
Check out Jigar Mehta’s documentary journalism piece, The Recession-Proof Artist, at The New York Times. It reveals another example of how simplicity lends itself to a visually powerful work when the a video journalist avoids the broadcast news style:
It’s not breaking news, a political analysis, nor an unraveling of a crisis, but there are three reasons why I think this is a strong piece, reflecting three elements of strong documentary journalism:
- Gives voice to the subject — to Alexander Conner — a student just out of university, working on a budget ($12,000/year) and creating art on the side. No narration provided by a reporter. No heavy-handed production telling the audience how to think or feel. Just the young man’s voice telling it as he sees it. In an interview with doc filmmaker Ellen Spiro (Body of War 2007), she told me that a lot of broadcast news sets up the classic confrontation of one side versus another side. But she feels there are as many sides to a story as there are people experiencing or witnessing the event — as Akira Kurosawa presented to us in his classic film, Rashomon (1950).
d - Takes us into the personal life-space of the subject. Broadcast news tends to give us a snapshot of either a victim or an overly-cute feel-good subject, as seen on the outside looking in. Documentary filmmakers build trust and take us into a slice of life of their characters. We see Conner create art on his living-room floor, make bread in his kitchen, and smoke as he talks about how he gets by on $12,000 per year. Because the documentary journalist respects Conner, we sense that he respects Mehta by opening up to Mehta’s lens, and for this, we the audience get to share those personal moments by putting us in Conner’s living room. And this is one of the core differences between broadcast news and documentary filmmaking — the building of that trust in order to get the subject to open up.
d - Visually compelling. Rather than shoot to script, shots found to illustrate a story, as typically found in broadcast journalism, Mehta shoots like a photographer — a cinematographer (and no, not a videographer, a term I use with derision — reflecting techies with video cameras shooting to script, and not the visual artist who shoots to show us a story through strong visual composition, lighting, and emotional depth in their shots). We can see the strength of Mehta’s cinematography just in the first five shots, covering the first 35 seconds of his mini-doc. The shots reveal strong composition and sense of lighting:
In the first shot, the background wall is lit, but Conner’s foreground is dark, with back light washing over his right arm as he draws. A cup foregrounds the composition. (Notice there is no wide “establishing shot”, another weak point found in a lot of broadcast news.)
The second shot reveals a strong diagonal, pointing the viewer to Conner’s drawing, highlighting his work process.
In the third, we see a wider shot, revealing his tight work space as he draws cramped on the floor, pieces of art scattered. Notice the strong diagonal of light and shadow on the back wall.
The fourth shot brings the camera around to another tight medium shot, as we see light focus on his blue pen and arms, his face washed in a soft fill light.
And in the fifth shot of the opening sequences, a standard head shot, but slightly askew, Mehta giving us a slight diagonal to lend energy to the shot.
Two of my favorite shots include these (shots 25 and 38):
Mehta is an artist, portraying an artist in his personal space, allows the artist to speak his mind, and does so in a visually compelling way.
“Sousveillance” by doc maker in search of soulmate – on a 30-day Jet Blue pass
James Chen is doing 30 cities in 30 days to go on 30 dates in his project to find a soulmate and get a film out of it.
This doc is reminscent of one I saw a decade ago at the Palm Springs Film Festival, “20 Dates” by Myles Berkowitz, which he called a “date-a-mentary” and got a lot of buzz at that festival, and a distribution deal. Berkowitz spent $60,000 for a crew to film; Chen does not say what he’s spending in this interview.
But the notable trick is that he’s using a Jet Blue “All You Can” pass. He talks about how the pass, which costs $599 for unlimited travel between September 8 and October 8 of this year. He notes he built the idea around the pass and the frantic travel it can provide.
5,000 hours of footage…
The documentary film “We Live in Public” is showing in New York this week at the IFC with upcoming showings in Cambridge, Mass., San Francisco and Austin over the next month.
Today’s New York Times had a review of the film, and the story behind it.
Here’s a synopsis:
Ten years in the making and culled from 5000 hours of footage, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC reveals the effect the web is having on our society, as seen through the eyes of “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of”, artist, futurist and visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director Ondi Timoner (DIG! – which also won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2004 – making Timoner the only director to win that prestigious award twice) documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives.Harris, often called the “Warhol of the Web”, founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous dot-com boom of the 1990s. He also curated and funded the ground breaking project “Quiet” in an underground bunker in NYC where over 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days at the turn of the millennium. With Quiet, Harris proved how we willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire, but with every technological advancement such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, becomes more elusive. Through his experiments, including a six-month stint living with his girlfriend under 24-hour electronic surveillance which led to his mental collapse, Harris demonstrated the price we pay for living in public.
Coming Sept. 1: Sarah Klein’s innovative shooting in “The Good Mother”
HBO to screen Doc on displaced auto workers tonight, Aug. 19
The Associated Press piece is here on the film “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” tonight.
The film was directed and produced by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, the latter a professor at Wright State University in Ohio and the former a grad of that institution. A release with more is here.
Sarah Klein’s “The Good Mother” uses simple but innovative approaches
In the opening moments of Sarah Klein’s The Good Mother, we see a woman applying her makeup as she stares directly into the lens of the camera, talking all the while. Then we see another, followed by snippets of a variety of women fluffing their hair, checking their lipstick and otherwise primping as they talk about the upcoming Mother Of The Year competition, the binding event of Klein’s 70-minute film that explores the notion of motherhood as it is now.
It also breaks the standard subject-talking-to-interviewer interaction so embedded in documentary films. Instead, each subject seems taken up in the task of cosmetics, speaking to someone – maybe even someone behind her, or maybe simply to herself.
The way Klein gets that effect is remarkably simple, and it’s reminiscent of another film in that the low-tech solution can be the best one. I read how in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, the director shot the paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby’s point of view (and its blurred-edged perspective of a man in a hospital bed) by shooting at a 45-degree angle off a mirror (cinematographer Janusz Kaminski also used a bellows lens to play with focus and depth). Klein, to get her arresting effect, shot through a silvered glass, the two-way mirror in which the subject sees only herself while the camera records her actions.
We set up this mirror in our hotel room. We set up lights and we had the camera hidden behind the mirror. We invited a handful of the women to come up and put their makeup on for us. They knew the camera was there, but they couldn’t see it. I didn’t know if this was going to look artificial; I didn’t know if these women were going to relax into it. But the minute they got in front of the mirror, they were in it.
It’s simple but effective, and a way that signals to the viewer that the view on this trip will be a bit different. Klein will eventually let the action unfold at the competition itself, but the buildup to that includes an interview with the Nebraska mother as she sits in a booth in a convenience store/cafe. Klein used the comings and goings of customers and the beeping of the cash register as effects in the woman’s prosaic life, a contrast to the honor the competition seeks to endow.
Indeed, each the featured women is shot in portrait in front of her house. In the background, the husband and child or children are on either side, a kind of triangulation of home, spouse and offspring. Klein did not shoot these herself, but rather hired crews in those locales to shoot them.
I sent five crews out with a production manual. I asked specifically for this shot. I wanted it center-framed, I wanted it right in front of their houses. It didn’t always work out that way because sometimes the shooter thought something else looked better. But the neat thing is that each night after different crews had finished that shot, we got each crew to send emails (with the shot) to the other crews, so each got to see what the other DPs had done. Some people said, “I didn’t get it right; I’m going to do it again, because clearly I see what you guys really want.
Part of that uniformity also came through using similar format, with the primary camera being a Panasonic HVX200, and the look Klein achieved in the film speaks to that camera’s capabilities. Primary colors seem to fit the lives of these mothers.
While the film Klein judiciously avoided making any judgments, Klein had to be mindful that a documentary focusing on a competition can smack of reality-show material if handled poorly. But she wasn’t looking for big moments of conflict, buth rather smaller ones of circumspection and perspective.
These are people who are struggling, who are working hard, who are trying to raise families, and you have to approach it with an open mind and hear what they’re trying to say. I think you can hear it in the interviews.
The film played at the MountainFilm festival in May, and at The Rhode Island International Film Festival in August. Funding for the film, which had a budget of “about $400,000, or maybe the high 300s.” She said she went into the project hoping to raise double that amount.
I think you should always shoot higher. You should go into it believing it’s a big film – that it’s a great topic, that it should get money – “BBC, you should be on board; HBO, you should be on board…” Get that going early. Don’t say, “Oh, I’m going to make it for $150,000 and starve for two years.” I have a camera package and an edit suite, and if I got people together who worked for free, and shot in a more local setting, you can make films for almost nothing. I have some other projects where there are festivals I really like, where I might be doing a short I won’t make money on, just to be part of that.
The financing came from a French company, Compagnie des Phares et Balises.
In the beginning, the interest was “Oh, these crazy American mothers. ” But at the end of the day, I think it’s a portrait of America, and that’s what the commissioning editors saw once they viewed the footage. We’ve actually sold this film in France and Germany and Finland and Belgium and Israel and Greece. It’s crazy. But I haven’t sold it in the U.S.
New England Film Festival moves online
The first film festival I ever attended was the New England Film and Video Festival, held then at Boston University. The festival has a long history, but like many it has had its financial struggles. This year, the festival is going online as the 1st Annual Online New England Film Festival, with submissions capped at 30 minutes and playing only within a six-week window. It may be the wave of the future; we’ll talk with the organizers in the next few weeks, especially as it relates to documentaries.
August 25 webchat on funding documentaries at New England Film
NewEnglandFilm.com had recently scheduled a webchat on doc film funding that ended up being so popular it crashed the system. The good news is that they’re trying again on August 25.
Here’s the announcement:
Documentary filmmakers can join NewEnglandFilm.com on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 1pm for a free one hour online chat with LEF Foundation Program Manager Sara Archambault and Mass Humanities Program Officer Hayley Wood. Sara and Hayley will be discussing how to apply for grants at their organizations, the funding environment for documentaries in the current climate, and more. Save up your questions and join us online to talk directly to these important local funders!
Link is here.
Trailer for “The Good Mother”
The Good Mother – Mountainfilm 2009 Trailer from Mountainfilm in Telluride on Vimeo.
Mara Schiavocampo, NBC News
Mara Schiavocampo: Backpack journalism from Edward Delaney on Vimeo.