Back Like I Never Left

 

Hello.

     I have not interacted with my blog for a few months now, even though I assumed I would based on how much I enjoyed creating posts during my film opening production earlier this year. I haven't stopped creating my own projects since then, I actually have a few projects I could have documented my process on, and I'd like to detail how the most recent of the few came to be. 

    Last month, I planned out a documentary about how people tend to attach such unexplainable yet profound meanings to small trinkets that come into their possession. It was the first time I had ever tried my hand at creating a documentary, and I had the help of two friends in my media class. We planned out four interviews with people who had different stories about their collecting of trinkets and baubles, whether it was someone who collected a ton or could connect a specific feeling/memory to one object.

    The documentary did not end up being on the topic we initially planned out, though. During the second interview in our series of scheduled interviews, we interviewed a friend and aspiring filmmaker named Alex who wanted to talk about a corrupted SD card that he claimed was the reason he pursued film. While we were shooting B-roll, we had the idea of shooting a clip of him scrolling through all of the corrupted footage, and while we did it, we were both dumbfounded when we saw the lost footage magically reappear before our eyes. The meaning Alex found in his useless broken SD card that he had so thoroughly explained in the interview was no longer real to him, and finding the moment and the shift in meaning as a result of a new context so riveting, we decided to change our documentary topic to just this moment. 

    With the pre-recovery interview as well as another extensive interview post-SD recovery(together with an interview of Alex's Mom,) the total footage we had filmed came around to a whole hour. The cutting process for this hour's work was tough and unlike any editing job I had ever done. This being my first documentary ever, I was surprised to realize that most of the time I would spend working on it would be editing and structuring the interviews. The process was very grindy and resulted in a 3-day long headache, but I eventually managed to create something I was moderately proud of. The final doc ended up being 7 minutes and 42 seconds long, and it had a discernible narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and end. I named teh documentary Recovery and you can watch it right here. 

Critical Reflection

    

In our documentary Recovery, we aimed to deliver a story about a shift in one’s perception of an object that held so much meaning to one person as the object lost the meaning it had before. While spotty in some regards in terms of editing and cinematography, the narrative structure of the piece created was able to deliver what it needed to in a cohesive manner, one that proved effective in demonstrating a clear takeaway for the subject of the doc after events played out the way they did.

Going into the documentary, we had a broader focus on our topic. Instead of focusing on one person’s experience with their object, we initially hoped to interview a variety of individuals and their different outlooks on the meaning of their trinkets. The sudden change in focus was the result of an interesting turn of events during the second interview in our schedule; the corrupted SD card that our interviewee had grieved over after years of it not working magically fixed itself during the filming of the interview. This revelation seemed like a much more interesting avenue to take the documentary, and as such, we decided to ditch the trinket idea and wholly focus on how the broken SD card shaped Alex’s life. In retrospect, I believe we could have done a better job in delivering the gravity of the moment, specifically by using the footage from the first interview we filmed and subverting the narrative within the documentary. Similar to the odd and everchanging narrative structure of Exit Through the Gift Shop, we could and should have made the audience think the documentary was just going to be about trinkets and then hit them with Alex’s reaction to the SD card fixing itself on-screen and shifting to his story. 

The target audience of the work is 16-30-year-old media creators, ones who understand the basics of how cameras work and who are old enough to relate to the theme of having a deep-rooted connection with an object that has no real purpose. Certain stylistic choices, like the lingo used in taking viewers through Alex’s story as well as the language allowed/used in the doc, define the appropriate demographic of the work. The music and editing of the piece(or the lack thereof in certain moments) work well in allowing the project to breathe a bit after major interviewee dumps on the viewer. Also, moments where the music takes a backseat to the visual storytelling on screen, most specifically the moment Alex realizes his once corrupted files are no longer corrupted, artfully allow the onscreen emotion to navigate the way the viewer engaged with the documentary.

The documentary filming and editing process was uncharted territory for me coming into this production, and as such, I did not know what to expect. The result of this inexperience was a lot of stress during post-production while I tried to find exactly what bits of the interview footage were deserving of a place in the piece. In addition, the structuring/ ordering of the clips from each of the interviews was even harder to do, considering I needed to bind interviews from two individuals together. The product came out as very amateurish and not too exciting visually since my goal first and foremost was to create something cohesive in nature, but I am not exactly disappointed in what I was able to accomplish with this project. The production process for a documentary is fairly different and arguably much more difficult than anything I had ever experienced in my past productions, but I am glad I was able to have experienced it. Now with the knowledge that the editing portion of documentary-based filmmaking is the most crucial part, I can place greater importance on allowing myself more time to play around with clips I’ve collected in post if I were to create another documentary.