Documentary and Drama evaluation

At the start of this module we were shown an example of some documentaries, some more factual, and others that that were more fun, and were more personal. At the end of this session we had got ourselves into groups and decided on our roles. I was in a group with James Webb, Reece Ronan, Jack Roberts, Kyle Piercy, and Ant Wilson. I have worked with Ant and Kyle before and know their strengths and weaknesses. For example I know that Kyle is a great Producer and Video Editor. Our roles were James as director, Kyle as producer, Jack as cinematographer, Ant for sound recorder, and Reece as video editor, and I was sound editor and camera assistant.

We went for our first meeting and all did a brainstorm, and came up with various ideas such as the cavern club where the Beatles first played we thought that we could get some good footage in the actual club of a band playing to give good cutaways, we decided not to do this as we thought that a lot of other groups would be doing the same thing, and we were right. As well as this we looked into doing the dock and the history of the war and titanic, but then agreed it would have been too factual. Then we heard something about “A peoples path” where people could place loved ones names on a path running over 200 meters from the main cathedrals doors to the road. Our plan was to get an interview with the religious leaders of the church to ask them what love actually means to them, and what the think the public’s perception of love is. In the end we ended up going with this idea, as it was a lighthearted subject that isn’t purely factual and slightly more interesting than a history of the docks. After we agreed on this idea we planned things out such as filming permissions for locations and peoples interviews. All the filming permissions for locations came through, but nobody wanted to have an interview with us. Instead of getting planned interviews we agreed to try and get interviews from the public on the days we were there. We researched the busiest locations, and places that would look good on camera and relatively quiet for sound. We found a street full of independent shops called bond street which has some tattoo parlours and book shops and other small stores that people have time for an inside interview in a different environment than outside in the city. As well as this we went down to the docks where there were lots of families there for us to interview.

For the actual trip we had got the train to Liverpool and stayed in a hostel. Our first problem was that Reece was ill so he had to miss the trip which made our lives harder for carrying gear around and getting help with quick set ups and helping to get people to interview. On the first day we used to recce out our locations so we knew our way around. On the second day we were up at 6 in the morning to catch a sunrise we wanted for the introduction for our documentary over the cathedral. When we got on location I helped Jack set up camera as we were using my canon 550D and I had recently looked into a software update called “Magic lantern” which give the 550D the features of a 5D or the Z1’s. But this new layout was confusing to learn. So I helped teach jack how to use magic lantern and all of its features. We had no camera issues after that. On the rest of this day and the next we were getting people off the streets to interview but we underestimated how hard it was to approach total strangers to get to interview them. To help us with this we created a sign to explain what we were doing and to help us explain to people we were approaching what we were doing, and more often than not people came to us asking what we were doing.

The edit went smoothly, and we had a draft video edit by a week after the Liverpool trip. Whilst the video edit was being done I was naming each sound clip and labeling the ones that we would be using. After this was done we had a rough video edit. I took this and attempted to use soundtrack pro to clean out the sound. I had to look up tutorials on YouTube to try and learn the processors of cleaning up sound and this benefitted me massively.   But unfortunately the only part of sound design I could really do was to put a atmosphere track on. I spoke to James about what else we could do but there wasn’t anything I could do that would match the style or feel of the documentary. So after I finished replacing and cleaning all the sound we were ready to present.

At this point I was very happy with the feel of our piece, it was very uplifting and pleasant to watch, and all of our colleagues agreed with us. However the feedback we got from Dom and Debbie was surprising, as we didn’t really take into account things such as the changing pace of the film that should have been consistent and some of the shots needed reframing. We all agree with this feedback, more cutaways were needed to keep the pace of the film the same throughout the film and some shots needed changing or deleting.

After this project was finished we started looking at dramas and had a look at several short films. We then got into groups. My previous documentary group had talked about staying in the same group for the final project to try and create something we were properly proud of, with everybody in their strongest roles.

We had Reece as director, James as producer, me as cinematography, Jack as sound recorder, Kyle as video editor, and Ant as sound editor. Now that we had our roles we started brainstorming. Our very first idea was to do with mental health, we decided that was too vague so we looked into narrowing it down, we had autism, schizophrenia, split personalities. After a while I realized I had not too long ago watched a video simulation of somebody experiencing a schizophrenia panic attack from his or her point of view. After watching this we talked about how we could do something similar to that, but dramatize it. So instead of doing it from this first person we do it from the third person and in a different environment, where the main character has support from friend and how he survives in his social network during this panic. We all immediately loved this idea and Reece came up with some brilliant suggestions for how we could let the story play out. The day after we met up in the library and discussed how we wanted the story to play out and wrote a character description. After this was done we gave both of these to Reece and asked him to have a draft script written by the first week of the holidays so we could send it off with plenty of time to get actors. Unfortunately we didn’t get the script until after the holidays. which meant from this point onwards we were now a week behind everything. A week behind getting actors, storyboards, shooting, editing and everything else. This has had a massive effect on us all and completely changed the film from how it could have been. However we made the best of the situation and all got the script written together ourselves. After this I created a shot list and storyboard over the next couple of days according to the script. After reading the script I looked into the meaning of camera movement and what it means to the audience. Because of this I had decided I wanted lots of camera movement through a dolly, and physically following with a shoulder rig, in time with his footsteps as it makes the audience feel more involved than if it was done separately. Reece and James had loved what I did with the idea of movement and the storyboard, I had shown them some test shots I did with my shoulder rig I had bought and hired out a track and dolly. Everybody loved it. Everything was going smoothly, the shot planning, perfecting script; we had a location and shooting date. We had auditioned several girls for our one supporting actress role, but we had nobody available for either of our male roles. We eventually had to push shooting back another week, and even then only 2 days before the shoot we found our lead male, who we were very lucky with as now him and the actress suited the roles perfectly. Our supporting male we had confirmed only a day before shooting. We were now ready for our shoot.

We had four days planned for shooting, Friday through to Monday and we had our storyboards and shooting schedule, as well as our lighting plan for each scene. Luckily everything was transferrable from our previous location to our current one as the layout was very similar. So nothing really went wrong. However on the day we were shooting our biggest scene we had got dramatically behind and a 9-hour day soon turned into 12. This was due to lots of changing of lighting set ups as they would end up in shot, and we had to move a lot of stuff to get the lights in place. However the day after that had picked up, we actually finished 3 hours early. We did have to reshoot some parts to get new angles for the edit as well as some continuity issues, apart from those two issues the shoot went very well and everybody had a great time.

After reviewing all of the footage the first thing I realized was how useless our supporting actor was. There was no movement, no facial emotion, and no effort in his acting. We had agreed to try and cut him out as much as possible, but this meant re editing the story. Luckily Kyle had just enough different angles and shots to cover the re edit. The only thing we need now is the separate sound recording of the voices in our script, we used all the original actors but Ant is going to stick lots of reverb over them to make them unrecognizable.

I have only just recently seen our final visual edit and part of our sound edit. I feel this is going to be a very strong piece, and I hope that people will get our story and what we were trying to achieve. It has had colour grading put on to make the quality and colours better as I shot completely flat to allow maximum flexibility for Kyle in his colour grading. I am feeling good about this film being our final film of our first year. However I want to have a chance to reshoot some  parts of it as I am not happy with some of my framing, but aside from that it is a strong piece and I cant wait to share it to the world before I follow my summer project, which will be an extended version of this mental health breakdown, but up to half an hour long to give maximum flexibility for our character development as I want the audience to have a full understanding of our characters, but five minutes just isn’t enough to do that in.

Word count: 1992 

Day 4

On this day we were working with some reshooting stuff at the graveyard with all the cast, to reframe some of the shots, but after that was done they were free to go. But we had to take nick to endcliff park to shoot the scene where he is losing it in the park and running from the voices. And that took several hours because, again we had shot new footage that wasn't in the storyboard. However this all went smoothly and we got some decent shots. We had now finished our shoot. Over the past 4 days we have had a great time, bonded well with all the actors and will stay in contact for our personal projects in the summer following on from this and some of our original ideas.

Day 3

This was by far our biggest day. We had our two biggest scenes in the film to shoot - the introduction to all of the characters, and Franchesca's death scene. The first scene took us a long time to set up as we had to move alot of furniture around to make space for the camera. However this meant that when we change the angle that we would see that we moved all the furniture so we had to do this for every single angle change pretty much. This made it a massive pain and we had to delay lunch by over an hour. The second half of the day was also delayed, we did lots of different angles that weren't in the storyboard, as well as the original shots. This ended up being a 12 hour day.

Day 2

For our second day we are now working with our whole crew, we filmed the outdoors stuff as that was the day with the best weather. We got a bus to the graveyard off ecclesall road, we had alsready scouted out this location and found where we wanted to shoot. Our biggest challenge for the shoot was keeping continuity with the sunlight that kept disappearing behind clouds. And the was one shot where i have to walk backwards through an overgrown area and circle around nick with a full shoulder mount on. As i couldn't see where i was going i had to get Ant to guide me through the foliage to help direct me until i could see where i am stepping when i circle Nick. This shot was pulled off very well. However when i looked back on some of the other footage there was several wooden poles that ruined the composition of some shots that i didn't notice on the monitor of my DSLR. So we used monday for a reshoot of that.When we went back to shoot some stuff with franchesca and jody we were quite effective and manged to finish on time with no issues.

Day 1

With this being our first day of the shoot we had actors call time at 10am. But me, Jack and Kyle went to stores to pick up all the gear at 9. I did a full equipment list and sent it to James for confirmation, and i had booked everything out the previous week from friday through to tuesday morning. This was the list:

-2x Standard video tripods

-1x Portable track and dolly

-1x Dedo set

-1x 200W Kino

-2x Reflectors

-1x Clapperboard

-1x Rifle Mic

-1x Boom pole

-1x Marantz 661

We were using my camera (Canon 550D) with a shoulder rig i had recently bought, and my lens set. On top of all this i also had a portable top light to stick into small areas to balance light out if needed. 

We knew that we wanted to use 3 point light set ups throughout our film along with gels to use some colour balance. 

When we got all the gear back we immediately started setting up for our first scene. This was the first time we used a proper lighting set up in practise, but i had made some lighting plans for myself for each scene to try and make it easier. For the morning we were slightly behind, but by lunch we had caught up due to becoming more and more familiar with lighting. After lunch we only had to shoot a tracking shot in the hallway which was tricky as we needed to pull focus at the same time. We had practiced this shot in a different location to get a hang of it. But this time we had my new camera rig and follow focus set up. Once this was on it was our first use of the full rig on the dolly. This took us nearly 10 takes to get right. But we feel this is a very good shot. 

Actors Auditions

We had decided to audition each actor to see the best we could get for our characters. We decided to have a full lighting and camera set up so we could watch all the audition tapes and compare them to each actor so we can properly judge each actor for each part. For auditions we had everybody there so the actors have an opportunity to meet the whole crew and so we can also analyse how they will get on in our group. We had plenty of girl actors actually approaching us from the adverts we had put out to several societies and other acting academies. However we could't find any male actors whatsoever. For our auditions for the supporting actors we decided to write a brand knew script in a different situation where they have more dialogue as the supporting actors had barely any lines and we felt we should get them acting in a situation where they are more involved. As well as acting a scene from the main script and the scene we wrote we asked them questions about their physical portrayal of the character they would be playing and how they should react in certain situations and what they think of the script and the message we are trying to put across. This helps us to know if people are going to understand our piece and if they are going to get the right portrayal of our characters.

With us still looking for a male actor we had got to the point where we thought we might have to push filming back another week. It got to two days before the shoot when we were approached by Nick. We were so lucky as he was exactly what we were looking for, for our lead male. Our supporting male wasn't confirmed until the night before shooting. So because of this we didn't get a chance to film an audition, but we had no other choice but to go with him. Now instead of being a week ahead of schedule we were now a week behind.

After Easter meeting.

Throughout Easter me and James were waiting for a script that Reece was supposed to write. He had all the ideas and relative information such as the character profiles and a description of how the story would plan out. We were supposed to have a draft copy by the end of the first week. We didn't get anything throughout the rest of the holidays despite us asking. If i had the script i would have been able to have a draft storyboard and shot list ready by the time we came back, keeping us ahead of time and allowing more time for reshoots if needed and to be able to perfect our final edit. However because we didn't receive it until we came back after the holidays I feel what we received was very rushed and not up to standard. So me and James talked to Reece and actually rewrote, using the same structure he set out, the dialogue to make it much more realistic and consistent. over several days me and James did this and eventually came up with a good script which we got a lot of good feedback from. We did some adjustments and now had our final script, a week and a half behind when we wanted it by. This in turn delayed our rough storyboard and shot list, as well as not having any actors auditions because we weren't able to get anyone to audition without a script. We had a location and shooting date set for the week after, planned in the holidays to make sure we had it. Because of this delay we had to push it back a further week. Despite this delay we still weren't behind, we just weren't ahead anymore, which gives us less time for reshoots if needed.

Team meeting one

In this first meeting we decided to go through our ideas to try and get something together, we also ended up deciding on our story and developing our characters.
Our very first idea was mental health, however we all felt this was too vague so we decided to narrow it down to try and get something more specific. We ended up listing mental illnesses. We eventually came up with schizophrenia when i realised recently i watched a video simulation of somebody experiencing a panic attack. Then we thought about doing something along these lines, but dramatising it. We eventually agreed on this idea and started developing character profiles. We have the documents that we used to create these on James Webb's blog. After this was done we all talked about how it would play out in the story. We came up with so many different ideas and plot twists and different styles that what we had was more of a plan for a half hour short rather than a 5 minute one. So we put the majority of the ideas to the side to develop as an independent project in the summer. In the end we had decided to keep it quite simple to make it easier for the audience. After this session was done we sent Reece away to develop our script by the end of the first week in the easter holidays so James could send off copies of our draft script to actors so we could start filming 2 weeks after we get back.

Le Miroir Analysis

We were shown a selection of films in our first drama session with debbie, "Le Miroir" was my personal favourite of the selection that she showed us. I like it because it is an original idea, and i love how well it was shot in such a small visual space and just what you can do with it to reflect the current age in the story.

The structure of the film reflects the main theme - journey. It is a personal journey that a boy takes in his life. It starts off with him being a little boy and ends with him flicking off the light when he is an old man, signifying his death.

I really like the use of first person in this film, it really helps to make things more personal with the audience. Seeing as this is the only viewpoint we have, and there isn't a change of location, for us to have an idea of what age our character is before we see him in the mirror is the set dressing and props. So we see a shaving set when he first begins to shave, or a cigarette with wrinkled tattoos on his arm when we know he is middle aged. All the small things like that make a massive difference to the audience because the location is all one colour and not that important to look at, it is all about the props that are used to help create a new character each time he turns away from the mirror, and it works very effectively.

Overall I really enjoyed this short film, it was the most creative idea i have seen in a long time, and it got me emotionally involved with the main character, which was very important. I enjoyed the camera techniques used and how it was used to link the edits into one smooth motion.

Drama Brief and Groups

We received our new brief for our journey project the other day. We have to create a 5 minute film based around the idea of a journey, whilst only having three different characters and three different locations. For me I feel this is both a good and bad brief, it is bad because it is very limiting with the character and location limits, but the actual topic "journey" could be interpreted in a few different ways. This is good because it forces us to think outside the box, whilst still meeting these limitations. This will be a good challenge to create not just a film to pass the module, but to create something actually worth watching, for me this is the main aim of this brief, which personally, pushed me harder than actually just meeting a brief.

After we received this brief we got ourselves into groups, we were told not to do the same role as we did in the previous project, but we decided to stay in the same group as we did in the documentary as we were all very happy with how we worked with each other. These are the group members names and their roles:

Director - Reece Ronan
Producer - James Webb
Cinematographer - Me
Sound recorder - Jack Roberts
Video Editor - Kyle Piercy
Sound Editor - Anthony Wilson

We feel we are at least all in roles that we are well suited for, if not our best role. For me cinematographer is my favourite and most skilled role.

In conclusion I think that we have a challenging, but interesting brief, along with a group who work well together all in our strongest roles.

Sound Edit

Before I did anything with the sound I made sure that all of my sound files were labelled with the interview number, the day it was recorded and if it was a good take, and if not what needs doing to it. In soundtrack pro I completely levelled off all the sound so the levels are consistent throughout the film. I used keyframes at some points to gradually have the levels pulled up or down in certain points. On all of the outdoor clips all of the lows needed cutting out up to 100Hz to completely get rid of any wind on the mic, or low level traffic. On a couple of clips I had to use noise reduction to minimise any buzzes, I also eliminated some pops and clips from some clips. It is still there, but I minimised them as much as possible. After this I added in transitions where needed, overlayed certain clips, scrubbed the atmos tracks and used atmos tracks throughout. We decided we didn't want any music in our film just because it would contrast too much with the talking. One of the only problems I had with soundtrack pro was that it kept crashing, it took several days as I had to restart several times, until i saved just before export, and even then it crashed several times at export, it took several methods and new computers before export, we would have finished over a day early if it wasn't for soundtrack pro. The one thing I learnt from that is to just not use Soundtrack pro, and to learn to use another program such as logic pro. After this we were ready to completely export the film and put onto a disk. Luckily the final export went without any issue, and I am proud of what we have accomplished, even though there are small improvements we could have made, with the framing, use of space and time in the film, get better interviews. But we still have a strong documentary with an original idea.

Video edit - Assistant editing

As the assistant video editor I was working with the editor to edit any other footage that isn't related to the main edit, so I was responsible for the individual edits of all of the sunrise images and the sunset and the text, as well as being in charge of the exporting/converting raw footage and at one point I covered for our main editor. Really the only problem I had in this role was managing all of the data. We shot about 40Gb of raw footage in H.264 format, I researched what the highest quality format to edit in was (apple prores 422 (HQ))  However this turned 40Gb worth of footage into over 200Gb. this massive size does allow us to do anything in FCP without having to render. Even though it has saved me a lot of time without rendering, it has probably cancelled out in terms of spending hours copying data between different harddrives.

Liverpool Evaluation

Straight away we had something go wrong in terms of our group, one of our members was ill and couldn't come on the trip. Luckily he didn't have a major production role, he was our editor. But it would have made it so much easier to have another person with us to help support the group and attract people to interview. As I was the sound editor I was just going to be the camera assistant to support, but instead I was camera assistant as well as boom operator. It would have helped to have had that extra person to help.

On the first day we got all our gear out from stores and checked that everything worked, we bought plenty of batteries to support my camera if we ran out of rechargeable and for my top-light. After we had signed into the hostel we had done a recce on all of the locations we were going to use and double check that the locations where we needed permission to film were OK  Its a good thing we did that because it allowed us to get an idea of how to get to our locations and how to frame our shots. When we got back we planned out where we will be and at what time. As well as this we made sure all batteries were charged so we were ready to go for the sunrise time-lapse at 6.30 am the next day.

When we first started getting foxpops we struggled to get good footage and were nervous at first to approach people, but throughout the day it got better as we knew how to do it better. At the end of the day we looked at the footage on my laptop and decided for the next day it might be good to attempt to get footage in some shop, so me James and Kyle looked at some of the independent shops on Bond street to get some in-store interviews.

On the second day we left to get in-store interviews at about 11 and we finished around 2 with about 6 quality in-store interviews. I was very happy with the quality of footage and sound that we got on the last day.

Overall this trip was successful, however we may need to go back to get some cutaway footage. But all of our interviews I feel are usable.

Magic Lantern

Recently I was looking on some cinematography forums and I noticed somebody mention something called "Magic Lantern". This is a firmware adaptation originally developed for the Canon 5D mark II, to allow cameramen using DSLR's to have complete control over other functions in the camera that would usually be completely inaccessible. These features include complete audio level control, including turning off the cameras automatic gain control, more controllable ISO levels, aided focus, and continuous non-stop filming, useful for our time-lapses.

So even though installing this onto my camera voids my warranty I did my research and all of the reported problems with the cameras after the firmware was installed was a known Canon fault, so I decided to proceed regardless. After I installed the firmware I thought it might be important for me to get to know the ins and outs of this new system and how to use it at its best so I watched a short tutorial to find out what does what and how it is all used and I did test shots in the Sheffield botanical gardens until I felt confident that I could explain to somebody else in detail how to use it in confidence.

Overall I am very happy that I installed this firmware, it is a massive help for filming, the features are all useful and I think this will help us get better quality images on the Liverpool trip.

                                          Some of the features on magic lantern on my 550D

Pockets

http://vimeo.com/21776727 
I analysed a short documentary done for channel 4 called Pockets, it uses foxpops to see what the public of London have in their pockets and what it says about them. Throughout the film there is a very shallow depth of field, usually with the use of a focus pull to guide the audiences eye to the various focus points of the specific object. There is a mixture of sync and non sync sound, this could be because of how interesting the character is to look at e.g. if it is an interesting person there will be non sync sound to focus on the person. The underscore of music is very light-hearted and is used to keep the mood uplifting, even throughout the cutaways that are used for breathing space. There isn't a lot of talking in this, but it works because its stripped back to the complete basics, a simple idea constructed simply.

What we are taking from this is mostly how camera will be used, mostly the shallow depth of field for focus on the interesting colours and detail of the faces of our subjects, and the framing of some of the shots. I don't think we want the sound track as we want more people to be in our interviews we feel it might distract from the actual interview.

Team Meeting 2 - Choosing and developing an idea

After we had developed and pitched our treatments we had to make a decision on which idea to go with. We decided to go with the lay your love in stone idea, as we had seen a few other people pitch ideas about the Beatles  and more specifically the cavern club. So we felt like it would be better to be different and do something that is a completely different idea to everybody else's. Also the idea is a lot simpler to prepare for and manage.

This idea was partly influenced by another documentary we watched called "Pockets". I will be analysis this in a future post.

In this meeting we just started to get ideas on paper how we would prepare getting interviews for the public. We suggested getting permissions to film inside the cathedral where the peoples path was. and that we plan out where we should be at what times to get these foxpops e.g. Clayton square at 11 till 2 to catch people as they are going to lunch, the docks from 2 onwards to catch families and tourists. We wanted to get a sunrise time-lapse over the cathedral to introduce the film and a sunset over the docks to finish it to give the film a sense of time. At this time we also specified what equipment we wanted to use so Kyle (our producer) could produce an equipment list for us. We decided that we would be taking my DSLR as we have a choice of my fast lenses, and also I recently looked into downloading some new software for my camera to improve the  usefulness of it for filming (Magic lantern, there will be a seperate post on this later) and it is much more portable than the Z1's. Because of me producing the camera we collectively decided I would now be the main camera assistant to aid Jack in the use of magic lantern.

Team Meeting 1- Idea development

In our first team meeting between me, Kyle Piercy, Anthony Wilson, Jack Roberts, James Webb and Reece Ronan we wanted to talk about which individual roles we wanted to do, what stories we have looked at, and how we are going to develop two ideas for a treatment.
However before all of this we created a Facebook group so it would be easy for us to keep each other updated on how our roles are going, and to organise any future meetings. I have used this method to organise all of my previous projects, all the way back to 6th form, and it has never failed.
After we sorted out our main use of communication.

Brainstorming

The Beatles origins - The Cavern Club
For this we wanted to get an interview with the owner and any of the audience in an interview to see what it meant to them. We also wanted to use archive footage of the original club and get a history for us to show to the audience. We would be getting the newspaper article from anywhere in history. This idea was selected for one of our main treatments.

Liverpool transvestites - Apparently there is a large area of liverpool dedicated to transvestites  We were thinking of getting a night out with a transvestite and filming all the getting ready and heading for a night out with them and having it recorded. We decided against this in fear of unintentionally portraying them in a negative manner.

The Docks - We knew that the docks had a strong history to do with the war and the titanic, we were thinking of doing a history up to the present but decided against it as it has a very heavily factual base and
it might bore our audience.

Our final idea was directly influenced by something that we saw in a local Liverpool paper. At the main cathedral there is a path that for valentines day couples could donate some money to get their names inscribed on a brick of this path. We would be getting foxpops of people in the public to get their views on what love is, and what it means to them as a concept. We chose to do this as our secondary treatment as it is a different idea, and we thought that the other groups wouldn't have anything that is similar to this.

After we decided on which two ideas to do our treatment on we decided on roles. James said he felt comfortable being in charge with the creative decisions with the ideas we had and wanted to take on the role of director. Kyle offered to be the producer, Jack wanted to try camera, and Ant wanted to do sound recording, and Reece wanted to do Editing. Which left me to do sound editing. Luckily we all ended up doing what we wanted to do, so there wasn't any conflict. I wanted to do something to do with sound just because I haven't had much experience with it yet.

Introduction to Documentaries

After we got back from our Christmas holidays we were introduced to our next assignment - Documentaries. We first looked at different types of documentaries and looked at specific examples to attempt to identify the different types. These are the different areas of documentary and how they are defined:

Observational Documentary - This is where the camera is used specifically to observe a subject as they go about their business. The documentary maker tends not to get involved onscreen and usually uses a narration to get across his or her point.
Direct Cinema Documentary - This is where the director is continuously involved throughout the film, he usually does direct interviews to gain his information on camera.
Educational Documentary - Involves in depth research into a specific subject and is portrayed on camera in a simplified way to help the audience understand.
Poetic Documentary - An experimental form of documentary, often uses metaphores or experimental footage to indirectly get a point across.
Investigative Documentary - A journalistic approach to an in depth subject, usually through the use of formal, sit down interviews.
Collage Documentary - An approach to  documentary that uses a mixture of different media and archive footage.

After we were given these definitions we were shown a series of documentary films, i am going to analyse one of these.

Skateistan: To Live and Skate Kabul by Orlando Von Einsiedek (2010)
This is an observational documentary about how young people cope with the war in Afghanistan through the outlet of skateboarding. Throughout this film there are stunning visuals, with stunning composition of the landscapes are architecture of the country (which i never knew existed). To contrast this we see the negative side of the country affected by the war, and what it has done to the people. To support these visuals there is a soundtrack that supports what the main skater is saying. When he is talking about the war the soundtrack is very sinister, and at one point it actually blocks out most of the sound so we only hear the bass of the skateboard flipping, this provides a shellshocked feel for the audience which emphasises that current negative mood. Throughout the film we gain our information from the main subjects through the use of non-sync sound. This is good because it allows us to focus on the place, and the effects it has on people in general, rather than the specific person.