Week 1: Introduction to the course

Week One 

Our first workshop was an introduction to the course and documentary as a practice. This Workshop was very insightful and really helped me get to grips with what the course would entail. We were told about the course outlines and the learning objectives for each week. This led to the discussion about our assignment briefs. we were told that we would have to produce a short one minute film in groups as a mid term assessment and then go on to our main and final creative project which was to create a 4 minute documentary on a portrait of a person or a place. As a class we were put into groups and were told that these were the groups we would be doing all of our projects,with , we were told to each think of individual ideas for the brief that we could pitch to the class in week 3.

Once we had been informed about the course outlines, we were then told about documentary. This helped me to understand what aspects of documentary we would be exploring. We were shown examples of last years students documentaries to help us understand the different directions we could go. I was inspired by these examples because it made me interpret the brief differently, it allowed me to view it from a different perspective,A much more abstract and poetic perspective.The examples from previous students were not the only thing from this workshop that influenced me in my thought process when thinking of an idea for the brief. we were shown some case studies to help us understand the different types of documentary. The two case studies which stood out to me were Supersize Me(Morgan Spurlock, 2004) and 51 Birch Street(Doug Block, 2005). I feel like these two films stood out because i find that they're topics were about exploring and exposing information, which are documentaries that i particularly really enjoying watching as i find them gripping and i feel like i have learnt something worthwhile after having watching them.

In my own time i watched these films along with a few other documentaries to help me understand documentary film a little bit more. The other documentaries i watched were Marley(2012) and The Imposter(2012), these documentaries both from the same year yet very different helped me understand the different types of documentaries you can find but also helped me understand how different styles and techniques within the documentary bracket aid the topic of exploration and help the investigation develop, for example The Imposter used rein-acted scenes to explain parts of the story, this was highly effective for this particular factual film as it allowed the viewers to really understand what happened. In contrast Marley didn't use recreations but relied simply on interviews and  archive footage and photographs. In many ways i found the use of archive footage to be the most effective out of all the techniques used in these case studies as i felt it felt like you had access into parts of Bob Marly's life that you wouldn't usually be able to see. *(revisited notes)This is interesting that i found this out during my personal research as our own 4 minute documentary relies heavily on archive footage and cutaways to explore and develop the narrative. i think this was a strong influence from early on in the course as i used Marley as a case study later on during our presentations. 

We were told in our brief that our documentary about a person or a place had to be either an observational or participatory style documentary, which is a particular mode of documentary filmmaking. We were then introduced to all of the modes of documentary which were Observational, Expository, Participatory, Performative , Poetic and reflexive.

We also learnt about camera Angles and camera movement. This is something i had already learnt about but it was good to refresh my memory on these technical terms. some of the camera movement terms we learnt about were Panning, Tracking and Tilt Shots.

Here are some of my notes made in this weeks workshop: