When we were first given our final major project I was
happy to have such a free reign when it came to deciding what I wanted to do. Having
always previously been giving briefs for our projects, I was unsure what to
expect.
After looking at
the paperwork we were given to accompany the task, I decided straight away that
I wanted to create a documentary. I had tried twice before to make a successful
documentary and neither project went particularly well. Never a person to shy
away from a problem, I saw this last final project as a chance to overcome my
difficulties with this genre of film.
To start with I
looked at my favourite documentary directors such as Kurt Kuenne, Michael Moore
and Nick Broomfield and their movies , Sicko, Bowling for Columbine, Dear
Zachary and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. I felt like all of these
documentaries had something in common - a personal touch. This gave me the inspiration to create a
documentary about something that was important and personal to me. I started to draw
a mind-map of all the things that meant a lot to me, Snowboarding, the USA, my
friends, ice-skating and my family. I also looked at the interesting people in my life such as my parents who want to emigrate to America, my unusual pets
(ferrets), my grandfathers history and my step-sisters history of being
adopted.
The first idea I came to was a documentary about my grandfather, he had a very interesting
life and although I never met him, I always felt that we would have gotten
along really well due to similar interests. After his death, my grandmother
discovered some family secrets on his side and shared them with us. I wanted to
create a piece about the discovery of his secret life however my Grandmother was
not happy to share everything on camera and therefore that idea was pushed to
the side.
The next idea I
looked at was a documentary about my adopted half sister, Jackie. My father
offered to raise her and her brother Paul as his own at the age of 4 and whilst
she still has contact with her mother, she feels closer to our dad as he was
always present in her life. Recently she discovered that her mum had been
keeping secrets from her and she had another brother. I decided that for my
documentary I wanted to follow my sister, who lives in Southampton, as she found out more secrets about who her
real dad was, if she and her brother were alike and more.
I started to storyboard the idea, but realised that to
get a good feel to the documentary that wasn’t too acted, I needed to just
create a general feel for the piece. So instead of storyboarding I decided instead
to write a list of questions that I wanted to ask her.
·
How old were you when your mum left?
·
Did you ever ask about your dad?
·
What are your expectations?
These are a few examples from the list. I sent Jackie the questions before I went to
visit her, to see if she was happy to answer them all and also to see if there
was anything else she wanted to include.
Whilst conducting
my research on different editing techniques, I watched a series of episodes
called “weird weekends” by director Louis Theroux and was really intrigued by
the way he involved himself in the situation and made it personal to him,
therefore making it personal to the audience. I think that way that Theroux
does this is by putting himself on camera with his subjects and really
immersing himself in their daily lives.
This personal feel
is really what I was looking for in my own documentary so I took inspiration
from Louis Theroux, and asked Jackie if she wouldn’t mind me accompanying her
when she went to see her mum, and more poignantly to meet her real dad for the
first time. This then brought me to the
title of my piece “The thing about my sister”, I feel like this allows the audience
to know that the documentary would be as much about my relationship with my
sister as it was about her finding out about her past.
I travelled up to
Southampton in April to see Jackie, and spent the first day of filming with her
reminiscing about our dad and the silly things he gets up to. These stories
made me realise how much me and Jackie had in common despite never actually
living in the same house together. I
then tried to work that into filming as much as I could so as to add another aspect
to the documentary.
The set-back to
this documentary came when Jackie mentioned the project to her mother. She was
unhappy with the view of the piece and assumed that I would perceive her in a
bad light. This unfortunately meant that unless Jackie’s mother was in a public
place, there was no chance of us filming her, and so the project seemed to have
hit a dead end.
Without an
alternative storyline to follow and with time running out, I decided to abandon
the idea and start fresh with a new documentary. However, because of the extent
of the research I had done on family dynamics and personal documentaries I
wanted to keep within the same subject area.
This is what led
me to my family, and the view of families in the media. After speaking to a few
of my friends, I realised that each one of them had described their family to
me as odd, different and weird. I then thought about the perfect, Mum, Dad, and
two children dynamic that we always see in cartoons like The Simpsons, Family
Guy and American Dad, and movies like Little Miss Sunshine and Matilda. With
three siblings, two half siblings and two parents, my family seemed a complete
contrast to these characters and with that realisation came my next idea.
In a very “Dear Zachary” type style, I wanted to create a
documentary that showed audiences that although they may think their family is
incredibly weird and different, all families are in fact the same. To do this I
had to put my family, and the dynamics we have, in a spotlight. I was more
excited to start on this documentary than the previous one due to their being
no potentially awkward situations to deal with, and I think that this really
showed in the piece.
I asked my family
to be featured and they agreed, so again I started to film. This time however I
storyboarded and I feel that this was the wrong thing to do, because as I had
previously feared the footage became stiff and acted. I then went back to just
asking light hearted questions such as “What annoys you most about mum” and “what
are Josh’s best traits” ect. I think that this method worked better, and the improvements
between my storyboard and the finished piece are noticeable.
I decided to take the name of my piece from the well
known Madness song “Our House” because not only was the song a favourite of my
parents, but the lyrics and beat really
matched the friendly and silly nature of my family.
I had a few set
backs during filming that included older brother Sam deciding that he did not
wish to be featured in the piece. It was hard to re-create some moments between
my siblings that had been previously captured when we had to reshoot due to Sam
being in the background but I feel that because of the nature of the piece, a
few potentially “stiff” moments, went unnoticed. Filming went quite well, with only a few
minor problems like dark lighting and camera shyness from the youngest member
of the cast.
When it came to
shooting the cut-away footage, I really wanted to capture the personal nature
of this piece and so asked each member of the family to choose five things they
wanted me to include. This allowed them to feel included in the making of the
piece, and in turn made them more willing to participate in extra interviews. I also think that this personal feel comes
across in the documentary, giving the audience something to relate back to
their own family.
When I started to
edit I was unsure about how the project would be perceived, and therefore
decided to add a few small titles to outline the objective of the documentary.
After a couple of hours editing I encountered a problem with the computer. It
decided to wipe a lot of footage and sound from the editing software I was
using. This was a major problem because a majority of the footage was now
unusable. After taking five minutes to decipher how it had happen, I decided
that to fix the problem, I needed to just re-capture the footage. Being able to
come up with a solution for the problem was a new step, one that I had
previously failed to overcome when creating the other two documentary projects
that didn’t go very well.
Overall I think
that my piece turned out really well, I am happy with the message that it
conveys and think that it does what it was intended to do. If I were to make “Our house in the middle of
our street” again I wouldn’t storyboard at all because the difference in
free-filming footage and scripted footage is very noticeable. I would also look
more into different editing techniques before editing the piece, I became very focused on the style of Kurt
Kuenne in “Dear Zachary” and taking inspiration from that when my piece could
possibly have benefitted from a different style.
