A Slice of Reality - Shots
A slice of reality is a three and a half minute short documentary about a modern art pice made by sculptist Richard Wilson. I had seen this documentary previously before this unit had started and i remembered it because of how nicely shot it was. The documentary starts with shots of the river Thames, lots of slow motion movement and some very intimate close ups of the sculptist himself when he introduces himslef.
The shots then progress from the sculptist to the topic of his convorsation which is his piece called " A slice of reality". He explains it took two years to plan and that it is a section of a large ship that was removed and placed on the banks of the river Thames. As he is explaining this there are lots of great shots covering different angles of the ship. I think what makes them so appealing are the combination of focus pulls and the fact that the shots are so fluid.
There is very rarely if any at all a shot (especially of the ship) that is static. This creates a sense of cinematic purpose, we are moving for a reason, we are on a journey and the conclusion of the documentary is the destination.
In the shots above you can see a wide shot or arguably an establishing shot of the sculpture in question. This shot is one of the first shots you see of the ship and it seems like they may have attained this shot from being on a boat on the river Thames however they must have also used a gimbal due to how stabilsed the shot was. Couple the stabalisation and the smooth movement and keeping the ship framed up well this shot turns into something mesmurising because it doesn't feel like a human holding a camera could create this. I have a theory that when you create shots with no shake and no hint of error or that a person is operating the camera you fall completely into the suspension of disbelief. You dont ask yourself "how did they get that shot" you as basically an animal are mesmerised by this moving image and seeing something in a view that you wouldnt normally see it.
Following the wide shot from the river is this relitively fast pull out from the ships windows revealing more and more of the interior. Not only does this give you a strange feeling like the ship is gettimg bigger and bigger but it is in keeping with the fluid structure of the filming so far. After this shot however when the Sculptist starts talking about how long it took to physically cut the ship and why he chose to present his piece this way and what it symbolises, there is a barage of short lasting shots of the sculpture and its creator.
After this quick succession of shots the pace of cutting then slows down and things seem to become very calm and almost somber. This slow and grey tone is introduced by a time laps of the sculpture however there is a key difference with this shot that i have never seen in any other time laps. Not only does the camera record the time laps and obtain that cool effect of an object standing still while the world around it wizzes by, but it also pans to the right whilst doing so.
As a viewer you get a sense that the journey is heading to its end and this seems to be his fairwell speech, an almost "you're watching this documentary because..." type of tone. It ends on him talking about lots of ships being surplus to requirement and how in 1936 on the coronation of King George 1000 ships passed the point in which his sculpture now stands. The doc ends on another time laps with the sun going down and the sculpture fading into darkness.
One of the biggest things to take from this extremely short doc would be the music. It compliments the shots perfectly with each note occuring with the change of a shot. It also has a serious tone without beeing gloomy or too dramatised/ over the top. To me it is the perfect example of what a short doc should look and sound like.
The Dissapearance of Madeline McCan - Interviews
When i was watching this documentary, what struck me the most was two things; one was how much drone footage they used (and reused) but also how thier interviews looked. Through out the documentary there are a lot of people interviewed, either specialists in the field that is being discussed or people who have had direct contact or experiance with the McCans. However they are all shot differently. Some are shot central, some use the rule of thirds, some have everything in focus and some have a shallow field of depth (blurred background and focus on the foreground). They even appear to have diffent tones and colour grades.
The man above is called Jim Gamble, he was a senior police officer who had worked at the child exploitation and online protectoin centre. He is shot in the classic interview style framing, using the rule of thirds and keeping his eyeline just to the side of the camera. He is also being interviewed in an office enviroment wearing a suit which is standard practise for "professional" who is being interviewed for something.
Robert Hall - Senior Correspondant BBC
Robert Hall is shot slightly differently, it has very low key lighting with dark wood desk and background. Not only this but there is a lot more desk between the camera and subject, this creates a lack of intimacey with the interviewee unless you cut to a close up. They do adopt a widely used technique when framing and staging for an interview which is putting a visible source of light in the background. This adds to the enviroment of the location but also gives a pleasing aesthetic to the overall picture.
Sandra Felgueiras - Portugese Journalist
There are actually several locations that Sandra is interviewed on but this is the most cut to and the style we like the most. This type of raming offers a close up intimite style of interview with more severe eyelines that means when they say something very impactful or talk about something that would cause you to feel uncomfortable, you don't because she is not making eye contact with you therefore you hear and understand what she says without having the emotional impact as badly. We also admire the look that having a background out of focus has, not only does it look really nice but it allows you to mentally and visually focus on her as there is no detail for your brain to pick out from the background.
Goncalo Amaral - Head of Polícia Judiciária
With this interview some may argue his positioning is strange as he is almost slap bang in the middle of the frame but this arguement can be counter argued with a point that didn't seem apparent to me at first. Even though they have blurred the background (cinematic) Goncalo doesn't speak english so he has subtitles that appear as he talks. Therefore, it doesn't matter too much how he is framed because you are intently reading (and following with your eyes) every subtitled word as it appears so you won't actually be paying to much attention to his appearance.
Julian Peribanez - private detective
Julian isn't introduced to the viewers until later on in the series, about episode 5 or 6 as he was hired by wealthy business owner Brian Kennedy who decided to support the McCans, to search for Madeliene back in Portugal. Here you can see he is centre of frame and unlike Goncalo he speaks english, and, he looks directly into the camera. This is usually a BIG no no in the industry but clearly they made a creative decision to shoot it this way. Maybe they thought that what he had to say was imperitive and they wanted to grab the viewers attention by placing him in an unfamilliar position and making direct eye contact.
Time: The Kalief Browder Story - Intimate feel
With the documentary Time: The Kalief Browder Story it opens with a very cinematic metophorical title sequence in which you see all the inner working parts of a clock. This then fades to a camera man following Kalief around the city in his red and black leather jacket.
As the camera follows him around the shots vary from medium side shots to medium shots of him stationary to close ups of him sat in a doorway. This shaky cam style of filming coupled with someone out of frame speaking directly to kalief making jokes and casual convorsation gives you a real sense that this was filmed "in the moment". It becomes very grounded in reality and as the viewer you feel as though you are there with them, sitting in on the interview sat on the city streets.
We had originally planed to replicate this on the streets of London when filming Liam Allan. They are both young men who have suffered at the hands of the criminal justice system and have had the media spotlight shone on them. We loved how real and gritty it felt watching this casual but harrowing interview as kalief recalls his experiances. However filming rights differ slightly in the UK to the USA and after some thought we decided we wanted the doc to look more clean cut and professional.
The Innocent Man - Cinematic
The documentary The Innocent Man is an American true crime documentary television series based on John Grisham's 2006 book The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town. The six-episode first season debuted on Netflix on December 14, 2018. Like Grisham's nonfiction book, the series follows two murder cases in Ada, Oklahoma, between 1982 and 1984.The cases examine the potential false confessions of Ron Williamson, Dennis Fritz, Tommy Ward, and Karl Fontenot.
Firstly i love the trailer to bits! I felt it really captures exactly the same tone as we wanted to with our first trailer. Moody and dramatic/ cinematic with lots of dark tones and tense/ dramatic music, quick cuts and a clear message from the get go. If i could give one example of a trailer that we wanted our trailer to look like it would be this.
However after our first meeting with Beth (a lady helping who was an outsourced industry proffessional) she warned us after seeing our trailor that we should try to steer away from sensationalism (for more info see my post on sensationialism) if we could. She did say if that is what we were going for then no problem but if we wanted it to be more grounded and have more wieght behind it as a factual programme then we should try not to dramatise too many things. She said the biggest thing to look at was the music, as this can completely change the tone of a project.
Innocence Ignored - Access/ GV's
When watching this docu-series made by VICE i noticed one resounding thing that all the series had in common, heaps and heaps of access and GV's to cut to. Now i don't know if they are just stock footage or staged to look like the real thing or the crew have actually managed to gain access to these places but all i know is there is an abundance of things they have to cut to and it really helps things progress through the story of the doc. One particular episode i watched was about a man called Ray Krone or affectionately known as the "snaggletooth killer". This episode went into detail about what his case was and what went wrong/ was proven wrong and lead to his release from death row but what struck me was the amount of great looking GV's they had to introduce the topic for the episode in the first two minutes, here are just some of them:
Labs are possible to film in but you either need to have a connection to the university in which the lab resides or know somone in a position of authority that works at a lab. However scenes of crime and courtrooms are completely different kettles of fish in the UK. We spent 3 months trying to secure a court room to film some GV's in but still had no success. With scenes of crime i guess if you are in the right place at the right time (excuse the expression) and something happens near you and you happen to have the camera on you and you keep your distance and you are not filming any private property then legally you are in the clear. BUT morally it is a question of repect. If that was a family member of yours that had just been stabbed or injured etc and someone was filming the forensic team around their body how would you feel?
Either way this is the kind of GV coverage that we aspired for, to be able to get shots of ambulances, prisoners, police cars, crimes scenes etc however in reality, on a near £0 budget and with just Right to Film laws for public services we had to take the best we could get.
David and Me - Similarities
Filmmakers Ray Klonsky and Marc Lamy set out to help their friend David McCallum, who was forced to confess to a 1985 murder he didn’t commit as a teenager, prove his innocence. The friendship between Klonsky and McCallum began over a decade ago, when McCallum contacted Klonsky’s father after reading an article he wrote about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a former boxer and exoneree who became a strong advocate for the wrongly convicted. (Innocense Project)
As this synopsis states the origin of this documentary stemmed from one person contacting another due to seeing a news headline. This resonates with our story of how our documentary started out. We were looking through news stories on the BBC website when we came across one that really caught our eye because of the topic. It was Liam Allan and the story told us about how he had been waiting on remand for 2 years and then 3 days into court evidence was found that the prosecution knew they had all along and the case was dropped. So we went off and did some research into this kind of thing and how often it happens and it turned out that it happens more often than you think!
Armed with this information we decided to try and contact this person Liam Allan however we knew this would be a bit of a stuggle as (especially when they are this high profile in the news) there tends to be a confidentiality issue and anyone who has spoken to him can not share his details. We phoned a few companies/ organisations and people he has been seen speaking to on the news or involved with however they all had a similar answer which is they can't disclose any personal details. So we decided to decend to social media, first we looked at facebook but we couldn't find anything of any real use there, however we did learn that he had started his own organisation called the innovation of justice. We looked on twitter for this "Innovation of Justice" and found it quite easily, possibly due to it having quite a few followers but through this account we were able to find Liam's Twitter. We decided to message him on my account as i had barely used it since it was set up therefore it could seem a bit more proffesional than say someone who had football stuff plastered all over thiers. Any way we messaged him with little hope that he would reply as it is such a big social media platform and he probably gets hundreds of messages a day, but within a short period of time we got a reply!
From there on well the rest is history but when i heard about this doc David and Me although Liam and George and I aren't life long friends there is still that similarity in how the documentary was born.
Abused By My Girlfriend - Recounting memories/ personal experiances
This documentary is one of my only influences that isn't the netflix style of dramatisations and cinematic tones but it is still an influence for two main reasons: 1) I want to get this raw visceral emotion on camera the same as this doc does, and 2) it tackles a asubject that is not too often front page news of reported on as much as other topics. It is something that could cause controversy between certain groups of people, but to be honest, I love that!
Something that helps with the cold chilling reality of what these people went through is actual footage from the event or of something that happened to them/ thier experiance. There is a lot of access to the police being BBC so they show police tapes of the abuser's interview and body cam footage of when officers arrived at the scene when he was attacked with a bread knife.
So we had established so far that we really needed to try and get a good connection within the police in order to get an interview with them or at least obtain some footage that the police may have of any of our contributors or topics. This however proved useless and impossible to achieve as the police will only consider spending time with and cooperating with large scale companies such as the BBC. Never the less we found another thing within this documentary that we wanted to incorperate and this was thier use of titles. To keep the narrative flowing and not let the doc spiral out of control, they sum up periods of time or events in this factual timeline so that in the terms of "show don't tell" they only have to film what is absolutely necessary to "show" thus saving time and money.
Picking Up The Pieces - Structure
Picking Up The Pieces 2003 (due to its age the full doc is on youtube)
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