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.
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