Back and Better than Ever!

Hey blog! I am back and ready for A-Level! I wanted to start off by developing a documentary for you guys since they have been my most recent obsession. The first one I watched was “American Promise.” This documentary follows subjects Idris and Seun as they navigate their lives from kindergarten through high school. Although I would love to tell you all about its contents, I am going to focus on the technical elements I learned from it and would like to use in my documentary. 

This piece achieved the verite look, the characters were not portrayed in an overly positive or negative light and it felt very natural which I loved. Indirect interviews being the primary interview type also helped achieve a sense of realism as the interview more closely resembled the characters speaking to the audience than to an interviewer. 

I also watched a couple of The New York Times opinion documentaries. One that really interested me was “The Price of Certainty.” Kruglanski raised a lot of good points through his voiceover narration about how people zero-in on what they believe to be true and why they do that. The indirect interviews helped progress the story and the use of the black and white filter during interviews with Kruglanski added to his point of the dangers of seeing in black and white.

“Abstract” is an episodic documentary about designers and their art. It features a wide range of people who specialize in all different types of media-related fields. The subject is the narrating ‘I’ of the episode. I felt this really helped progress and pace the episode well. There is typically a lot of music, especially in scenes that show the subject doing their art. This helped engage the audience and make her job feel fun. “Abstract” shows a lot of amazing b-roll of the subject doing their art while they talk over it and explain the context behind what they are making. 

I watched plenty more documentaries, but these were the ones that really stuck out for me. I saw technical elements in them that I would like to use in my own documentary. I hope to have engaging b-roll, indirect interviews with music during them and having voiceover narration or having the interview subject be the narrating ‘I’ of the documentary. Anyway, I am excited to see what I come up with, and I am glad I got to do all of this research on the documentary genre.