This week we were looking into different forms of documentary; the ecocinema and contemplative imagery in poetic documentary. Ecocinema doesn’t just involve documenting the environment, but it’s also studying and being aware of our environmental impacts within the industry and producing cinema with respects to this (Hughes 2014).

We looked at two films in relation to these above topics, the first, Nikolas Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread (2005). Our Daily Bread had some really interesting, captivating imagery. Following a quite distinct form of agriculture/farming as we perceive it. Fresh fields, tractors and expansive land, but this paired with such sharp, geometric locked off shots had me thinking it was a stark manner to display nature. This being an obvious choice as Geyrhalter developed into much darker industrial footage, conveyer belts, mass production and slaughter.

I loved how impactful Our Daily Bread was, even though it lacked traditional documentary forms of narrative. Geyrhalter’s use of shot framing really led into the overall film and kind of had this overall feeling that these organic images we saw, were not so organic. This concept was explored as having a privileged camera style, where us the audience are seeing something that is normally not shown to the public (Hughes 2013).

I wanted to replicate the shock and starkness in my film for this week. Now I lack the oppurtune of a documentary filmmaker to get on site of an environmental disaster, but I worked with what I had to attempt a short poetic documentary.

Ecocinema is looking at new forms of cinema to display a message, not necessarily having the power of hollywood production behind you (Macdonald 2012). So I kind of went into it thinking how can I make as much impact as possible without this; sound was my answer. I played around with a lot of foley, field recording and had around 9 audio tracks in the project – weaving in and out of shots.

I think maybe at times the sound can be quite overpowering and I could have slowed down the crescendo of the sound to imagery to have more impact, but it kind of drastically built up a bit faster and right at the end then I had anticipated. I was recording most of the field sounds with cheap shotgun mic, and felt that some of the quality definitely could be improved through more polished recording techniques.

I was also playing around a lot with slower frames, shooting in 120/240 and slowing down the videos. I feel like some of the shots were too slow and I could work a bit on having that editors eye on seeing which shot works best for scene.

Another thing I struggle with is actually taking out my camera and filming in a public setting – I did notice even after a few hours of wandering around filming and recording audio that my confidence built up, but at first I was reluctant to stop, set up my tripod and hit record in some places.

 

• Hughes, H. (2013). Arguments without words in Unser täglich Brot (Geyrhalter 2005). Continuum, 27(3), 347-364.
• Hughes, H. (2014). Green documentary : Environmental documentary in the 21st century. Bristol: Intellect.
• Macdonald, S. (2012). “The ecocinema experience”. In Ecocinema Theory and Practice (pp. 1-41). Taylor and Francis.