Week One: Documenting The Environment

This week in class, we explored the ideas of what constitutes as a documentary. To me documentaries are not a black and white clear cut genre of cinema. We have mockumentaries, crime, environmental, educational and purely entertainment.

Through all these various forms of media, we are showing a culture of time, place and society. Whether that explores the water crisis in South Africa or human fascination with cats, we are displaying culture on screen. Documentary promotes a global acceptance of differing cultures, and allows us, the viewer to open our minds to new information and experiences (McDonald & Williams 2015).

The Atlantic released a documentary on the water crisis in Cape Town. The storytelling and aesthetic of the production was beautiful, and chose to show, not tell. I really enjoyed watching the film, it’s not like most documentaries I watch, it was much more a visual narrative than a production riddled with Vox pops and voiceovers. This inspired my short filming session this week.

I wanted to document littering and rubbish in the natural environment of Merri Creek, a place I often go to have a break from the hustle of living in the city. It’s beautiful, but has a lot of rubbish around, and I tried to show that by juxtaposing the first half of the video with the nicer elements and the second half with the shots of rubbish. I was also just playing around with camera craft and film editing techniques, I know some of them are tacky, but hey, boys gotta have fun, right?

I know that I could have done a much better job if I took the time to storyboard and plan out the piece. It was more of a grab my camera and head down, shoot and edit the story afterwards situation. I wanted to try playing around with visual camera transitions and for this kind of work is really not needed, so next time I think I would focus more on just locking off the camera, and slowing down movements to match the overall feeling of the piece. I did lock-off the camera more for the “rubbish” scene, because I wanted to evoke a stark feeling, lacking in hope. Whereas the nicer elements of the film I was walking around, and moving the camera.

 

 

References

Hughes, H 2014, Green documentary : Environmental documentary in the 21st century, Bristol, Intellect, pp. 3-20.

The Atlantic 2019, Countdown to Day Zero: Cape Town’s Water Crisis, YouTube, viewed 6 March 2020, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZmxEY6QoUY>.

Williams, D, & Mcdonald, S 2015, ‘Reading across Cultures towards a Comparative Documentary Film Studies: Eduardo Coutinho’s Documentary Jogo De Cena (2007).’, Critical Arts, vol. 23, no. 5, pp. 676-88.

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *