Reading notes: Rabiger 'what is documentary?'

Below are notes from a reading by Rabiger called 'What is Documentary'. These notes will help me over the course of my project as I keep in mind what documentaries, especially successful ones, consist of.

-Documentary is a rare medium in which the common person takes on large, important issues and shakes up society
-Directing a documentary involves handling a certain amount of power which brings ethical issues and moral responsibility to the director
-The notions of documentaries explore the mysteries of actual people in actual situations
-Documentary always seems concerned with uncovering further dimensions to actuality and at the same time implying social criticism
-Concern for quality and justice of human life lifts the documentary from a factual world and attempts to put emphasis on moral and ethical issues, scrutinizing organisation of human life and developing a humane conscience in its audience
-Successful documentaries tell a good story, have engaging characters, narrative tension and an integrated point of view (much like fiction) whilst still displaying real life
-Successful documentaries also seem to centre around some aspect of human development, no matter how minimal, this is done to leave audiences with some degree of hope
-Filmmaking is a series of significant choices: 1) What to shoot? 2) How to shoot it 3)What to use in the film? 4)How most effectively to use it

Introduction to the camera

In week 2 of the course I was put into a group and given a Sony X70 camera to use as this is the camera we are most likely going to use for our documentaries. We were told to go and shoot some footage of whatever we chose using a range of different camera angles so that we could adapt to the camera. My group and I chose to shoot a conversation between two people and used a range of angles such as over the shoulder, mid shots, close ups and many others. At first using the settings on the camera such as the white balance setting was confusing but after trying a few buttons I seemed to adapt to the camera very quickly. We were also shown different interviewing techniques when shooting peoples answers that we then put into practice, for example, standing next to the camera and making eye contact when asking questions so that they are not distracted by the camera but still looking in the same direction. We were also given a microphone to use that was clipped to each subject interviewed so that we could hear their answers to 'What was your first day at Sussex like?'. We were also told to try left to right shooting when interviewing different subjects in the same area, this is where you have one subject standing on one side of the camera when answering and then have the following subject being on the opposite side.

Introduction to the course

In the first workshop of the course I was informed what was going to be taken place over the following weeks, shown examples of existing work and was introduced to camera angles that would be suitable for my project. It was explained that over the course I would be creating a short documentary of less than 4 minutes in a group of me a three others, consisting of either a theme of a specific place or person. I was also informed that the documentary had to be either an observational or participatory styled piece. As I haven't studied documentaries before, I was unfamiliar with these terms. However, the terms were explained in class before I was shown examples of short documentaries that fell under these genres. An observational documentary is where the camera is an 'invisible' observer  whereas a participatory documentary refers to a camera silent observer but its presence is evident to the film viewer. The examples of documentaries shown were also used to give me knowledge of camera angles that work well in documentaries and what ones don't. For example, when doing a shot of interviewing always make sure to get their whole face, as in one of the documentaries there is a shot of the subject talking and it is so close up that his chin is cut off the shot. Also, I learned that when doing an interview shot that the subject should be looking as close to the camera as possible without it looking forced or them focusing on the fact that the camera is there, in order to avoid this, when asking questions to the subject I should stand next to the camera to allow them to make eye contact with me- drawing their eyes away from being directly at the camera which could cause them to be nervous.