What are documentaries?

A documentary is a film or television program that documents reality for education or to keep historical records. Normally the purpose of a documentary is to talk about events from real stories and interview people who were at the event or are related to what happened.

Types of Documentaries

Objective Documentary

This type of documentary provides the facts in an unbiased manner to tell what happened during the event. This would normally include interviews from both sides of the story. Some documentaries in this style include Unabomber In His Own Words and the Piers Morgan interviews like Killer Women with Piers Morgan and Serial Killer with Piers Morgan.

Subjective Documentary

This is the opposite of an objective documentary, it normally sides with the director of the production's views and is seen as biased to one side of the story. These documentaries normally only interview people from one side of the story to show a certain point of view. For example in The Imagineering Story, they only interview people from Disney and this is used to only show the positive sides of Disney and how great the company is (basically it's propaganda). Some documentaries in the style that I recommend are The Imagineering Story, Marvel Studios ASSEMBLED  and The Pharmacist.

Mockumentary

This is a type of documentary where the story isn't actually real. The filmmaker tries to mimic and use satire (make fun of) to make the production more for entertainment purposes than informative. I really like this style as they are often really funny and more enjoyable than watching a serious program all the time. Some of my favourites from this style are Come Fly With Me, The Office and Death to 2020. You can see just by the photos of the cast it is supposed to be a lot more light-hearted than most normal documentaries.

Social Action

This is a type of documentary where the film-maker tries to spark awareness and change within a certain subject. They are created because of certain events the filmmaker thinks is wrong and should be spread to a wider audience. One of the most popular films is Blackfish (2013) which talks about Seaworld and their unethical treatment of Orcas (killer whales). This lead to a public outcry and did negatively affect Seaworld financially for many years. This is what is known as "The Blackfish effect".

Poetic

Expository

This is a style where the narration is used to help educate the viewer. It normally uses narration as "the voice of God" and it is used to accompany the documentaries visual elements. The voice is unbias and doesn't show personal views. Unlike poetic documentaries, the documentary tries to make the audience feel a certain may with the content that they see. The most common type of documentary in this style is wildlife documentaries.

Observational (Fly on the wall)

This is a type of documentary where we (the viewer) gets to see more of the behind the scenes and personal life, mainly these documentaries are of celebrities. Methods of filming include placing the cameras in rooms and let the drama unfold or cameramen following the celeb. Some defining elements of this style include handheld shots, long takes, fewer voice-overs, no re-enactments and a sense of realism and immediacy. This isn't the type of documentaries I like but some in this style include the Educating (school) series, Cobain: Montage of Heck and Everybody's Everything.

Participatory

This type of documentary is when the film-maker becomes part of the production and there is a direct interaction between them and the subject(s) within the video. The audience is supposed to experience the documentary through the filmmaker's point of view  Some of the more famous presenters are Louis Theroux and Stacey Dooley. 

Documentary Conventions

Archive Footage

This is all the visual content within the documentary that isn't an interview. It is basically used as "filler" between the gaps of content and to build the viewer a better understanding of the story. There are three types of archive footage during the post-production process: illustrations/animations, photos and videos.

Mise-en-scene

Mise-en-scene, this is a French term meaning "setting the stage", is the use of composition to tell the story (or part of) within each shot or frame. Lots of things can come into place to develop this idea including the set or location, any props used, costumes and shot composition. In documentaries, some things to pick up on is the location of filming. For example, the interviewee may be placed in front of a bookcase or to reflect the subject matter. Alternatively, placing the interviewee in a location connected to the subject of the documentary to not confuse the viewer. A random example of not doing it properly would be interviewing a scientist in a pub, it would make more sense if he was in a lab.

Censorship

Censorship is used to suppress information used in tv, film and online services (like YouTube). It is normal used for ethical, moral, religious or legal reasons to protect the filmmaker/production company, the public and the identity of individuals involved. Some uses of censorship include swearing, blurring faces, "Watershed" (no nudity before 9 pm) and, more recently, sensitive content warnings on social media.

Main Task

For this task, I was pretending to be a video editor for BBC and had to put together the raw footage for a "consumer rights" program where a cowboy builder carried out low-quality construction work in London. I had to censor the climax of the program where the presenter confronts the cowboy builder.

1. Uncensored - It gives context to the scene and you wouldn't be able to tell where it is.
2. Censored - Gives away the location of where he lives which could allow people to send abuse.
3. Censored - shows his address and could leave him to get unwanted abuse or property damage.
4. Censored - The children aren't likely a part of it and they could get bullied for it at school.
5. Uncensored - I think they should both be visible to warn the public so that it doesn't happen again, his partner could be involved too.
6. Uncensored - Informs the viewer of the company and to avoid it.
7. Censored  - for privacy reasons you blur number plates
8. Uncensored - same as 5.
9. Censored  - Assuming this is before 9 pm it's better to not have swearing for children.
10. Uncensored - bit violent but I don't think it needs to be censored.

Censorship within my Documentary

I hope that there will be no censorship needed within my documentary because I'm not talking about a sensitive subject. The only censorship I may need to use would be a *BLEEP* on swearing but I will ask my interviewees not to swear as I want my documentary to be able to be watched by anyone.

Premiere Pro Censorship Task

For this task, I had to censor the labels of the drink for the Party rock music video. [WRITE METHOD] It worked well for what I wanted and I like the simplicity of the method as I was expecting it to be more complicated. I can't see myself needing to use this as my documentary but it was good just to learn a new technique in premiere pro

Tv Titles

Tv titles are sections within a show, normally only around 30 seconds to a minute long, which are normally used as a method to introduce the characters, locations and storyline/themes of the show. They also use a catchy musical theme along with the visuals as it can be used to give some exposition and something else for the viewer to recognize, and sing along to. They were more important before the internet became mainstream as you wouldn't have the ability to search up the actors or where it was set. Nowadays, nearly every show ever made is at the viewer's fingertips and they can choose whatever they want so they need for titles has decreased to a point where there are skip intro buttons and titles are reducing in length to just the title of the show, in most cases.

I think that a good representation of the evolution of tv titles is Wandavision. Each episode covers a different time period, with the sets, filming style and theme tune changing in each decade. Each episode keeps the same motif but changes style and takes inspiration from tv shows from each decade.

Interview Tests

Online Audio Interview Test

For the first interview, Oli and I had to do an interview in a breakout room online. Oli recorded it on OBS on his computer so I don't know his settings but they were good. There were some audio inconsistencies and lag which wasn't amazing but that is one of the drawbacks to interviewing online. We didn't use face cams but it would have been good to test that all together but I'm sure that screen recording will work fine to record the visual and audio elements.

In-Person Audio Interview Test

For this task, Lewis and I used different sound recorders for different methods of recording audio in an interview. 

For the first recording, we used a Zoom H1n Pro with a lavaliere mic and it was strapped to my lanyard. This went well however the sound was quite quiet and you could adjust this is post-production. We chose to pause the recording after each question to think of each question and answer so there was less stuttering.

For the second recording, we used a boom pole and swapped roles with me interviewing Lewis. We chose not to pause after each question to see the difference in how it would work and I think that it is better with the pause. We also got interrupted which was a bit annoying. I think that the sound quality was better for this but it would require an extra person to hold it out of the frame if you were to record the video.

Here is a link to the files:

In Person Interview Test

For this interview, we were in a larger group with different roles. I was director/in charge of setting up the camera in the right position, Oli was recording the sound with a boom pole, Tom filmed and set up the manual settings, Ashton was the interviewer and came up with the questions and Lewis was the interviewee. Initially, we wanted to go outside and do something more creative outside but we chose to go inside due to the weather being windy and slightly wet. I suggested the area we used as I had an idea to use the windows as the background and would work well with it being blurred too. We set up and filmed but we only filmed it once. I think that we should have done a couple more takes with another angle or filming Ashton asking the questions to have more than one static shot. I don't think that the camera settings were great as the final video is a lower resolution than I would have liked, I do not know if this was me when editing or the settings on the camera. Overall, I am happy with the view and it was great to practice before doing a proper one for the FMP.

Camera Lens Testing

Lenses are the part of the camera that makes the photo look better by controlling the aperture, image stabilisation, controlling the focus and image control (zooming in and out as well as changing the focal point). There are many different types of lenses that are used for specific types of shots the main difference is the different focal length.

Aperture

Camera aperture is how much light passes through the camera while taking a photo. A good way to think about it is how your eyes work; as you move between lighter and darker areas, your iris shrinks or expands to let in more or less light, controlling the size of your pupil. On a camera, it is controlled by a number with a low number (f/2.8) making the lens expand and a high number (f/22) making the lens shrink. A low number would blur the background to only keep the focal point in focus whereas a high number would keep the whole frame in focus.

Focal Length

This is the part that allows you to zoom in and out on the camera. Different lenses have different focal lengths (with some being static and only have one) which are used for different scenarios. For example here the Canon EF 24-70mm  f/2.8L II USM lens would be great for portraits, landscapes and journalism as it doesn't zoom that far. Whereas a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM Lens would be used best for landscapes and wildlife shots as you can position yourself a lot further away from the subject.

In class we had a go at using different lens here is what I took. This isn't an accurate showing of my ability but I was given the camera last on both occasions and I had to deal with Tom and Oli constantly moving.

EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6

For these shots, I tried to show the use of different focal lengths as photos can be completely different depending on how far zoomed in or out the camera is as it can change the focal point. To be honest, I don't like the photos as Oli and Tom didn't stop moving (other than for the shot of Tom's shoe). I also think the photos are underexposed and the composition isn't right for the majority of them as nothing of note is in the hotspots. 

EF 50mm f/1.8

This lens is typically used for portraiture, I know this as I have one nearly identical at home, and that is what I attempted to do here. I guess you could say I was trying to go for a more natural approach to the portraits. I do quite like the two of Oli as he contrasts quite well against the purple but it would have been good to get a bit of a bokeh effect there. The others aren't great  as they seem either too close or too far away for what I wanted.

EF 75-300mm F/4-5.6

This lens was quite interesting. It uses a very long focal length which felt quite weird to me as I normally do portraiture and I'm close to the model. I tried to show the ability to be far away but it was hard to do so with only 4 minutes. My favourite shot was the 2nd shot where Tom is at the end of a bannister which I used as a leading line. What would have made that photo better was if I used Oli or Tom wore a different coloured shirt to make him pop out from the white wall.

EF-S 18-55mm F/3.5-5.6

Looking back, I had a lot of fun with this lens. I tried to chose my top 6 photos for each which was hardest for this lens as I got nearly 15 shots which was quite a lot in comparison to the 8-10 in the other sections. This lens was great for close up shots and portraits and Tom is a surprisingly good model. My favourite shot is the 3rd one. This is because Tom is looking straight at the camera and I love the blurred background. I wish that it was slightly further out to see more of Tom, it feels more like a still from a film. 

After Effects Title Tests

Alpha Matte Title

For this video, I created a Title animation that uses 2 videos. The forest video is used as a background and the second video uses an alpha matte effect (it's basically the same as a clipping mask for photo editing) which means the video only appears over the text. I like this effect and I feel that this is one of the most likely title cards that I would actually use in my documentary. I had an idea that I could use this at the start of my documentary where I show the highlights of the first game and the title appears with a goal celebration.

Stroke Title

For this title animation, I added the video and then added the text that I wanted. Next, I right-clicked on the text and went "create" > "create shape from text" which rendered a set of shapes from the text and I changed it to have no fill and a 16 px stroke. For the actual animation, I used "trim paths" and set the "start" to 0, added keyframes for "end" at 0% and 100% and a high offset (I can't remember the precise number). To finish off, I used easy ease on the keyframes. I like this animation but I think that I should have used a different font or uses a smaller stroke as I don't think the combination I used worked. This animation will work for specific uses but for my documentary, I don't think it will work. I could use a more uniform version for the interviewee names but it may be slightly too much than just having text.

Moving Text

This animation shows text moving up each word at a time while the fade from opacity. I started off by created a gradient background with blues and created some text saying "Subscribe for more!". For the animation, I used "animate" > "position" and then moved the position of the text so it's not in the frame. Next, I set the opacity to 0% and on "range selector" I set a keyframe for the start and end values. To finish, I used easy ease and I went "range selector" > "advanced" and changed the "based on" function to "words". I quite like this animation and I think that it could work quite well for some text like names for the interviews. 

Blur Text

Like normal, I started off by inserting the background, this one was from Pexels, and adding a text layer. For the animation, I used "animate" > "blur" and then turned the opacity down to 0%. I then opened "range selector" and added keyframes at the start with both at 0 seconds and later with them both at 100%.  I thought that the "based on function" worked best with characters for this one. In other cases, it may be that "words" work better. I quite like this animation but I think that it should be slightly slower as it was quite quick.

Rotating Text

This animation was quite simple and easy to achieve. I started off by creating a gradient background with some dark colours to make it slightly more dynamic than a block colour. I then added text and used the animate menu and selected "Enable per-character 3D" as well as "rotation". Next, I was able to rotate the text on the y axis but I think that I increased it far too much as it spins too much. Like normal, I made keyframes to set the length of the animation and added easy ease. Looking back, I don't like this animation that much as I increased it far too much but if I was to redo the animation with it only rotating slightly that would be fine. I don't think that I will use this in my documentary as it won't fit the style.

Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019) Analysis

Fyre is a Netflix documentary that is about the failed attempt of a music festival in the Bahamas by Billy McFarland in 2017. I think the intended audience is likely young Adults around 18 to 30.

The purpose of the objective documentary is to educate people about the production and outcome of the festival, goes into depth about the Co-Founder Billy McFarland and shows the dark side of social media and how easy it is to put out false information. It also highlights how hard it is to plan and produce a great festival, it makes me think about how festivals like Glastonbury and Reading Festival are made and planned extremely well. I think that the main message for the film was about how money can corrupt and how it can change your outlook on life.

Before watching the documentary, I didn't know anything about Billy or the festival other but I do remember reading a news article about it when all of this happened. I remember that I was expecting that the festival would go wrong and the majority of the film would be about how it went wrong and the fall of its reputation. Some questions I had were "what went wrong?" and "Who is Billy McFarland and how did he get the money to start the festival?".

The documentary is about the making of Fyre Festival, an exclusive and luxury event in the Bahamas and was advertised to have celebrities and models roaming around too. The original idea was to make an app for booking talent. To promote this app, McFarland and, rapper, Ja Rule decided to host Fyre Festival and flew themselves and supermodels to an island in the Bahamas to shoot a promo video. This was followed up by many sponsored social media posts which were blank orange tiles with the #fyre, this helped to sell 95% of the tickets in around 48 hours. The problem with this was they promised a lot more than they could actually produce with only 8 weeks before the event. The event turned out to be leftover hurricane tents instead of luxury Havanas, headliners like Blind-182 dropping out and bread, cheese and salad for food, not quite the luxury event they were promised. After this, 8 lawsuits were filed against McFarland and Fyre Festival and he was sentenced to 6 years in prison for fraud.

The documentary used a combination of interviews, archive footage and animations which all worked well together. Some of the interviewees included Andy King (Event Producer), Gabrielle Bluestone (Journalist for Vice News) and J.R. (Former Fyre Employee). The interviews were conducted in different locations for each person and seemed to be local places to them like work or at home to make them feel more comfortable. I really like the way these interviews were shot as they use a low aperture to blur the background and they use the same fonts as the promotional videos do to keep it in the same style. They are made to look really aesthetically appealing and were filmed using a static and single-camera setup. I would like to film my in-person interviews like this too. The use of archive footage worked well to break up the interviews as there were quite a few interviews. There was a lot of archive footage used in the documentary including the footage from the original promotional video, old new show interviews with Billy Mcfarland and Youtube videos from content creators who went to the event, to name a few. The animations were used to show social media posts and used the same format and style as Instagram and I think that these looked nearly identical.

To conclude, I thought that Fyre was a great documentary that was well made and had a great amount of research go into it and it shows with the number of different interviews and amount of archive footage. My favourite part of the documentary was the making of the festival as we get to learn about Billy and we see just everything going wrong. Other than the fact that the festival went wrong, I feel that Billy was very good at being an entrepreneur but I feel that he got too arrogant and he didn't listen to anyone other than his "yesmen" which was his downfall. He reminds me a bit of Logan Paul who was a vlogger around the same time and was crazy and did wild things just for money and that led to his downfall too. One thing that surprised me was the lengths that Andy King was willing to go to for the event to be successful (he was willing to give a blowjob for the company to agree to give Fyre more time for their payment). I don't think there was much wrong with the documentary but I think that end didn't feel right. I personally don't think that they should have finished the documentary with the idea that Billy will be back or he is a good person. The festival was a disaster and was mainly his fault and should take the blame but I feel it ends with a positive message about him. Finally, I would recommend this to someone who hasn't watched this as I think that it was a very interesting subject about how easily festivals and events can go wrong if you don't take enough care with the event.

Seaspiracy (2021) Analysis

Seaspiracy is a documentary that follows Ali Tabrizi (as well as Lucy Tabrizi and Kip Andersen) to uncover their findings of the corrupt fishing industry. I think this has quite a wide intended audience as I feel everyone (above 15 as that's the age rating) can learn something from this and it really made me think too. Its style is a mix of social action and participatory as Ali definitely wants to spark change but he also is the viewpoint of how we see everything with how he talks about what he thinks and showing us him interviewing locals.

The purpose of the documentary was to educate the viewer on the dangers of bycatch, illegal fishing, seafloor damage, killing endangered species and some of the dangerous working conditions slaves and fishermen have faced. A question that the filmmaker asked that I liked was "Is sustainability the right goal for how we take care of the ocean?" as it made me think about other ways of helping the ocean and felt powerful as it did oppose what Ali was talking about for the majority of the film until then.

Before watching this, I had read comments and spoken to friends about how it has changed their perception of fishing and their willingness to reduce their consumption. That lead to me wondering what is so bad about this industry that has made many people change their diet because of a documentary? This is emphasised by me thinking that it was going to be about pirates not about global corruption and marine life.

The documentary tells quite a large story for only 99 minutes so I can't recap everything that happens but I will try my best to cover the majority of it. The film rejects the idea of sustainable fishing and that it only means we can keep doing it rather than it being safer for the animals. It also Talks about "Dolphin Safe" (who are supposed to guarantee the safety of dolphins are safe from bycatch) to being greedy and how they cannot actually guarantee safety and the observers can be bribed. Some other events that Seaspiracy covers are whale hunting in Faroese, police helping to cover up the exploits in some countries like Thailand and the use of slavery within the industry.

I thought that the documentary was very well made and it was great to see that the majority of the shots were actually taken by the filmmakers, there was still other footage used but it was great for the list in the credits was quite short and Ali and Lucy Tabrizi were both credited as cinematographers. All of the interviews there shot great with them being in different locations and the change in shot angle worked well to subtly indicate different people. It was great to see people like Richard O'Barry (founder of Dolphin Project), Professor Callum Roberts (marine biologist and oceanographer) and Doctor Sylvis Earle (marine biologist). I thought that the narration, staged shots and use of 1st person by Ali Tabrizi really refreshing and I haven't seen a documentary like that before on this scale. One of my notes was "glorified YouTube video", which I don't think is an insult, I wrote it because it felt like it had a much larger budget and production value than a YouTube video but it also had the charm of a handful of people working on it that a channel would have, which I liked. One of the best parts of the documentary was all the statistics and animations. Like most documentaries of this type, they needed statistics and headlines show help prove what they were finding out and the graphics I thought were great as they used the same fonts and design as the original website they were found on, replacing the background with some of their footage. I also like the clicking sound used with the animations as it helped to indicate the increase in numbers and stuff like that. Finally, the music was fine, I thought that they let the visuals take centre stage and I didn't notice anything of note.

Overall, I thought that the documentary was very well made and some parts really did shock me. For example, the part where the company that guarantees dolphin safety can't actually guarantee it. That really shocked me because it just means they are lying to the public and earning money. Some parts were quite gory but it did help to show what actually happens in the fishing industry and we as the public just think that the fish are safe when some are getting murdered. After watching this, it has made me think about stopping eating fish (Future Sam here, I can confirm I have tried to reduce the amount of fish to nearly nothing now) as it is very cruel and I don't want to be supporting those businesses. One drawback to the documentary was the amount they included. I think that it was slightly too much and could have worked better as a series on Netflix with 4-6 episodes just to go into slightly more detail on each without it feeling rushed at parts in like it did as a film.

Style

For my intro, I want to use the match highlights from the first game to spend less time on that game and have more focus on the 2nd leg of the game. I want to emulate the style of Sky Sports News where they use iconic match footage as intros with the sky sports logo appears.

Future Sam here, this didn't quite work how I wanted and I received some feedback from Paul to improve my intro. One of the main points was the length as it was nearly 2 minutes long. Paul suggested looking at other sport documentary intros and I took inspiration from The 30 Year Wait a BBC documentary on Liverpool's Premier League victory the year after my documentary took place. I also liked the documentary The Way Back: England's Evolution Under Gareth Southgate they use it more of a coming up segment but I like the fact they use footage from the whole story and not necessarily the start of the film.

I plan to use the interview style from Fyre as I thought the shots were framed really well with the subject in the middle and low depth of field for the blurred background. I also will use the same documentary style as Fyre as I feel that me being behind the camera will work better than a participatory documentary like Seaspiracy. 

In an ideal world I would have liked to travel to Liverpool and interviewed fans from Liverpool but due to coronavirus restrictions I won't be able to do that and I have to interview fans local to me or online. I would have tried to emulate the same style as in Super Size me where Morgan Spurlock interview the public.

I also really like the use of archive footage within Seaspiracy. The part I like the best is the b-roll which will be hard to emulate considering I don't own a drone and I can't get to Liverpool. I plan to use copyright free footage from websites where I can buy footage. I will also include game footage, fan recordings and animations. There is also a new article which says something along the lines of "Anfield Erupts" and I would like to use the same style as Seaspiracy.

I would also quite like to make an animation to help explain the champions league if I have enough time. I would likely take inspiration from the animations used in the Redmen TV documentary Number 19: The Liverpool 2019/20 Season Documentary. I think they are quite simple but work really well as they are mainly still images with animations before and after.

Content

My documentary is about the Champions League Semi-Final games between Liverpool FC and FC Barcelona. I want to briefly talk about the first game for context and explain what the Champions League is. In addition, I will cover what happened before, during and after the game. This will include the bus entrance, match highlights, fan videos from within the stands and the "spinetingling rendition of You'll Never Walk Alone" after the game. I will also include interviews with them explaining what happened and any personal experiences they had as voiceover as well as the appearing on screen.

Research for Documentary

Research Table

Finalised Research Report

For my research I watched highlights of the game, looked at stats and watched a fan video of them at the game. It was really useful to watch the game again to consolidate the parts of the game I want to talk about. That was likely the most important part as it also helped with looking at the archive footage I want to use. I also thought that it was good to watch another fan's perspective to see if I missed anything or anything extra I should add. In addition, I watched Redmen TV's documentary on the subject because I thought it would be good to look at what they did so that I can improve on it and add extra parts that they may not have included. Overall, the research was quite helpful as a refresher but as the event was quite recent and I have watched the game multiple times fully I felt that I did know most of what happened.

Finding Archive Footage

Anfield Stadium B-roll

I found some good ariel shots of Anfield on Videvo that would be quite useful to use. The problem is I need to pay a subscription of $5 a month so I will wait until editing in case I have found a different video to use instead.

Match Footage

Obviously I need match footage to visually explain what happened during the game