Documentary Director - Documentary unit

Director

Barbera Kopple

Barbara kopple is an American through and through, born in Scarsdale New York, in 1946 she is no stranger to changing times. No doubt she has been recording landmark events on camera throughout her life however her first recognized piece of work was Harlan County, USA which was a documentary on the coal minors strike in Kentucky. Since then she has come out with works such as American Dream, Winter Soldier (my favourite) Fallen Champ: The Untold Story Of Mike Tyson, and Running From Crazy. Watching these stories you get a real sense of the style of filming Kopple likes to use when filming documentaries. It's a sort of fly on the wall cross guerrilla filming with all her crash zooms and holding shots on close ups and extreme close ups (as demonstrated in Winter Soldier) as well as using more mainstream documentary traits such as the filming locations with people on screen who are relevant to the topic. For example in the Mike Tyson documentary the journey isn't shadowing someone with a camera much like a lot of modern ones,it's sort of a following a trail of someone's past that they have left behind. One of the biggest reasons I like this director and chose her for my inspiration is that her signature style of filming is varied, she uses a large arsenal of techniques and filming methods that lead to very interesting documentaries and this is what I hope to do in mine.

Documentary 

Sweet Sixteen: A Transgender Story

The documentary I have chosen to draw comparisons with is the BBC Documentary Sweet Sixteen: A Transgender Story. Something I have drawn from this documentary was a few minutes in when the farther of the transgender son is being interviewed about a sad/ sensitive moment; when he was first told his son wants to become transgender. The farther is recounting something in the past and it is a close up shot to allow the audience to see in great detail the emotions he is experiencing. We will do something similar when our gay teenager Carl tells us about why he went off football including not involving any cut aways at this point as not to break the emotional tension. 

Another similarity between the two documentaries is the use of a sort of "master shot". In the transgender doc the camera keeps returning to her collection of makeup on the side in her bedroom. Which is relevant and keeps reinforcing what the documentary is about, which will also be used in our doc. We will keep cutting to the East End Phoenix team playing football which will remind the viewer that football is the topic of the doc.  

Throughout the documentary about this young person changing their gender, they use the method of spanning the documentary over a period of time. Granted this is over a period of months and ours was a period of days/ weeks, however the principle is the same. By shooting it at different times and making it chronological it creates the sense that the viewer has been on the journey with the presenter/ topic of the doc for a long time therefore forging a stronger emotional bond. 

Finally and most obviously this is not just a documentary about the journey of an individual, but the challenging of stereotypes within society. One documentary is about gender, and one is about sexuality, both incredibly closely bound subjects that have equally abusive stereotypes and treatment however our documentary touches on that slightly more than the transgender doc, however with that doc the main device that transports you along the narrative is the teenagers journey unlike ours which focuses more on the team East End Phoenix and the general topic of homophobia.