The Research Behind It All

I have always LOVED documentaries. Ever since I have started appreciating media and the "why" behind everything I have been a big fan. So when I found out that creating a documentary was part of the A Level exam, I was pretty excited. But when I heard that we would be making our own documentary in November, I was a little less excited. I was looking forward to coming up with my own idea (well, one with my group) and filming, but it was very soon. Luckily, we prepared for weeks in class watching and researching documentaries.

The first documentary we viewed in class was American Promise. This piece was about two boys who live in New York and followed their loves over a course of 13 years. It documented their experiences at different schools, one of which that was extremely academically challenging. The directors of the film were one of the subjects parents, which made for an interesting way to view the subjects as there was obvious bias present. 

While this piece featured the subjects' lives for around 13 years, it was vastly different from documentaries I have been used to seeing. When creating Shifting Success, my group's piece, I wanted to keep in mind the techniques used in American Promise, especially when dealing with interviews.

In the earlier parts of the documentary shown in class, the directors relied on direct interviews due to the young age of the subjects. Since the boys could not grasp the idea of rephrasing the questions, direct interviews was the way to go. The majority of documentaries made today do rely on indirect interviews because it flows better, I had always wanted to utilize direct interviews in a way that makes sense for Shifting Success. I don't want to make this blog post feel like an analysis of American Promise, but I do want to take ideas shown in the documentaries from class and how it influenced my ideas for the documentary my group and I produced. 

We were assigned to analyze the production techniques and purpose of two op-docs for a class assignment. This also allowed me to do research on documentaries and the different stylistic choices directors use in their work. I chose to analyze We Are Penn State. 👉

This six minute documentary featured a statue of former Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, which was under high criticism due to his past actions. This documentary highlighted one subject who was interviewed with indirect interviews and the b-roll within the op-doc actually carried the majority of the piece. It was interesting to see how interviews played a rather minor role in the piece and b-roll of the subject standing next to the statue and his interactions with other people provided all of the necessary information for the piece. I kept this in mind when planning for Shifting Success because I had been exposed to previous documentaries where the interviews actually provided most of the background information for the documentary.

Well, that's it! First official blog post done for this year. I'll be back shortly to bring you guys more examples of how i researched and planned for the creation of Shifting Success!