Learning about documentaries!

We are so back!! I'm so incredibly excited to be back for another year of my favorite projects!

Currently, in class, we have been learning about documentaries and doing a lot of research on these to prepare us for our very first big project of the year. 

The first documentary we watched was an episodic documentary on Netflix called Abstract. The series is organized with each episode being on a specific creative field with a specific subject, and since they're all about different things, there is no need to watch them in order. In class, we watched the costume design episode with Ruth E. Carter, which was incredibly interesting because she showed the process of her work. I didn't know she did the costuming for the Black Panther movies and I was really impressed. 

After watching this one, we had to go back home and watch one of our choice. I choose the one that focused on stage design that followed Es Devlin. This was really interesting for me because of my love for concerts and it was really cool seeing the behind the scenes of how the stages operate and are created. I hadn't thought about how much work goes into designing them to make the visually appealing to the public. These two episodes gave me a lot amazing and useful examples of b-roll, which I really needed when making my own documentary, as well as a good example of how to create a consistent brand for a documentary.  

After watching these, we transitioned into watching a full length documentary: American Promise. Even though this documentary is older than the last two I mentioned, I truly loved and enjoyed this documentary. It made me realize how much time and work is put into making documentaries. I never got bored while watching this documentary because it used techniques to maintain the audience engaged at all times, which made it a goal for me when planning my own documentary. I found it amazing that this documentary was 13 years in the making to follow the life of Idris and Seun. 

After, we watched another full documentary, which was a bit more confusing, but I still enjoyed it. The name of the documentary was Exit Through the Gift Shop, and it was a documentary inside a documentary that focused on street art. This documentary used a lot of archived footage and b-roll which really served as inspiration for my own documentary since I also had to use a lot of archived footage. 

Finally, we had to choose two short op-docs to watch, and since I knew these were going to be more like the one that I had to create, I made sure to take into account all the techniques to implement them into mine. For one of the op docs, the sound was very minimal, mostly focusing on her voice and the soft background music to emphasize her words, which is something that inspired the sound production for my documentary.

After watching all these documentaries, I had so much information and techniques to work with and I was ready to start planning for mine!