Stella Bruzzi Reading

For our presentation week on San Soleil, I read Stella Bruzzi’s “Narration: The film and its voice”.

She suggests that voice over, in both documentaries and fiction films, is an extra diegetic soundtrack that has been added to the film. It “gives insights and information not immediately available from within the diegesis”. This I believe to be true and helps back up my past argument when discussing whether voice over is inferior or not.

Bruzzi demonstrates within the reading that we have been ‘taught’ to believe in the image of reality and similarly ‘taught’ how to interpret the narrational voice as distorive and superimposed onto it.

I will use some of these ideas when watching San Soleil and it will help me with applying it possibly to my own documentary this term.

Voice Over Task

For our voice over task we were given an 8 minute clip of Glastonbury festival. We had to use Adobe Premier to edit this and make a voice over to create a completely different story. Kylie and I chose to make up a story about how cows started to rule the world and people fled away – using the clips of planes and animals at the festival. This gave us a good reminder of how to use the softwares as we also had to book out a voice over booth and use Adobe Audition. It also bonded Kylie and I as we could see what it was like to work with one another.

 

Week 2 Notes From Class

Week 2 was really great to get back in to class and start working. I was put in a group with Kylie and Mark although Mark wasn’t there. As well as going through the theoretical side, we also got to go through some ideas we had about making our Documentary. Here are my notes from class:

“Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random. It leaves myriads of ends untied, untidy. The writer can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies.” – Jonathan Coe (2004)

Voice Overs

We had to discuss as a group whether voice overs are an inferior form of storytelling. I believed that voice overs may be more honest as with talking heads you can cut the footage to what you want and not the bits that agree with you however  it then can become more biased as your have a script. In the terms of watching, it is easier to watch a documentary with a voice over as audiences are passive to the information they are given through sound and may restrict interpretation however if it it just images, you can translate them. Whether that makes it more inferior though is difficult to say. Narration bias is how you depict it, it is a flow of images rather than an image in a book that you can look at and consider.

Characteristics/Stereotypes of Narrators
– Formal
– Male
– Educated
– Detached
– Older
– Middle Class

Models of Narrative

Conflict Model
Classic narrative structure
Specific ideological approach

Opening – Equilibrium
Event – Disruption, recognition of event, attempt to repair damage
End – A new equilibrium

Inductive Model
Development over time, a story unfolds, gradually more information is revealed. An example of this model we were shown was the documentary ‘Lift’
Opening : introduce main characters/location/theme

Deductive Model
Opening: question/statement/thesis
All scenes relate to main question
Conclusion

 

Documentary occupies “a complex zone of representation in which the art of observing, responding, and listening must be combined with the art of shaping, interpreting, or arguing.” – Nichols, B (1997)

 

Group Meeting

Kylie and I met to discuss our ideas for our documentary and have settled on Animals and Humans.

We want to look at how we interact with them (mainly concentrating on dogs). We can look at guide dogs and how they help the owner, companionship and dog walkers. There is also a website called ‘borrow my doggie’ where people without dogs can borrow/walk someone else’s. I thought this could be really interesting to look at. I also read an article once about how interactions with animals can lower levels of depression and anxiety. I will be researching a lot more in to this whilst the project goes along.

My Idea

My chosen idea that I will present to the class tomorrow is our relationship to other animals, how they can be used as pets, for companionship or as a food source. Particularly looking in to vegetarianism/vegans – how they have to alter there everyday lives, there reasons behind their lifestyle choice, would they ever go back to eating meat, looking at whether it has an impact on farming/supermarkets orders for meat?

Possible interviewees:
Farmers
Managers of Supermarkets
Butchers
Vegans
Vegetarians

As well as interviewees, we can use a voice over to demonstrates facts about the change vegetarianism has had on the environment or to other people such as farmers and their trade.

 

Ideas

I thought about the brief and what could be an interesting subject to do a Documentary on. Here are just a few ideas I had:

Human and Non-Human

People and machines – the rise of internet dating/dating apps
Relationships that started through the internet – how is it different?
Relationships that are long distance – phone calls/skyping
Addicted to phones/social networking

Our relationship to senses – sound, sight, smell, taste and touch

Relationships to animals – companionship, entertainment, food source — Vegans/Vegetarian

Relationship to environment – global warming, people trying to help the environment through charity work, 5p bag charge

Addictions

Or

Self and other

Football Hooligans – the culture, the drinking, fights

Homeless people – the trials and tribulations and how they got there.

Horse racing – middle class entertainment

Protesters

LGBT

Brief

The brief that we have been given is as follows:

Human and Non-Human:
For this you might think about how you could tell a story about the following through particular characters, objects and places: our relationship to landscapes/places/environment/nature/other creatures/machines

Or

Self and other:
In what ways do people live/perform their sense of national, ethnic, religious, sexual, class or gendered identity? (e.g. explored though an ethnography of aspects of British society looking at what might seem strange to people coming from elsewhere). How is our sense of self defined in relation to what we think we are not?

I think these themes are great as they have a lot of space developing interesting ideas. I have started mind mapping and will make a list of mains ones to think about.

Our Documentary has to be between 5-6 minutes long so it has to be a story that has a lot of potential for different interviewees or for a lot to be said in a voice over.

Michael Rabiger – Elements of Documentary

To gather some basic knowledge about Documentary I have read Michael Rabiger’s chapter on Elements of Documentary. I found this insightful and it refreshed my knowledge from first year specifically on the modes of documentary. Here a few quotes I noted down whilst reading:

“All art, including film art, exists so we can vicariously experience realities other than own own and connect emotionally with lives, situations, and issues otherwise inaccessible”

“Film is a medium of immediacy, while literature is one of distance and contemplation”

“Film is a dynamic experience which the spectator infers cause and effect even as the events appear to happen.”

These quotes really interested me as it makes film seem like a dream or as if the viewers are dreaming – the image enters in to our mind and we don’t really consider it unless actually thinking or talking about it afterwards.

“Your job as a filmmaker is to refresh film language by journeying inward, recognising your own emotional and psychic experience and finding its equivalency to use on the screen”

Picture

Action Footage: People or creatures doing things such as work/play etc
Shots of landscapes and inanimate things
People talking: To each other (unconscious of camera), to each other (conscious of camera presence), in interviews
Re-enactments – factually accurate of situations
Library footage – archives or recycled material
Graphics – still photographs, documents/titles/headlines/line art/cartoons
Blank Screen – causes the audience to reflect on what we have already seen or gives heightened attention to existing sound

Sound

Voice over – Audio only interview
Narration – a narrator, the voice of the author, the voice of one of the participants
Synchronous Sound – diegetic accompanying sound shot while filming
Sound effects – can be spot sound effects or atmospheres
Music
Silence – the temporary absence of sound can create a powerful change of mood or cause us to look with a heightened awareness at the picture

Documentary Modalities

1. Record, reveal or preserve
2. Persuade or promote
3. Analyse or interrogate
4. Express

Putting genres in to categories is hard – “it’s plain that trying to typify and categorize them is highly arguable”

Nichols puts them in to 6 different categories:

1. Poetic
2. Expository
3. Observational
4. Participatory
5. Reflexive
6. Performative

Week 1

I was really ill during my first week of this term so was unable to make week 1’s lecture. The tutor informed me that I only missed introductory information. I was also put in to a group with Kyle and Mark. We still have not met Mark, but Kylie and I are currently working on a voice over task that we missed on week 1. Because I had done the readings, I didn’t feel as if I needed to catch up too much which was good.

Introduction

This term I will be doing a module in Documentary. I am really excited about this module as I really enjoyed last years project. We learnt all the basics and made a very short Documentary and I’m keen to broaden my skills both practically and analytically.

This blog will be an update on my research and practical development throughout the course and to see the process of making my 5 to 6 minute documentary.