Select from one of the readings and briefly describe two points that you have taken from it. Points that interest you, something you could apply to your own documentary.

Fiction and Non-fiction: The Great Divide

The first point was that traditional documentarists have an outdated mentality of keeping everything close to the truth meaning little to no re-enactments and so on.

Second point is the power of observation.

The documentary I am working on is regarding cultures and language but more specifically of people who have had a third culture experience. a third culture experience simple means when someone of a different race/culture lives in another foreign country they are faced with a culture clash and that clash results into a third one.

the theme of our Documentary is to have “feel good” motif to it with the main idea being “finding yourself by finding other people” we want to stay as far away as we can from unreal and recreated scenes. the shots we want to capture are ones that occur without any assistance. i think the authenticity lies within these sort of things. how genuine and sincere are the characters, viewers notice ingenuity and if we want to pull this off we need to know what would be considered as fiction.

There are no scripts for our project and we intend to keep in that way, we only prepare questions so that we know what direction to take the conversation to.

But, would provoking the subjects be fictional? perhaps provoking is too strong of a word to describe a kind hearted project. But we as film makers want to capture that raw emotional sensation that is so hard to grasp. an example is when we had our first interviewee and we asked him the standard questions about what we want to know, but towards the end of the interview i realised that he kept on recalling and mentioning his father so i asked hard hitting questions like “do you resent your father for not letting you speak indonesian as a child” and as a result he paused and had to think for an answer. That pause that he made could be taken out of context and we could follow it up after a separate question and make it seem as if he stumbled on a different one. that is not the intention of course but the power is in my hands to do so. and then the work would be considered just over the line of fictional and not to mention false.

Throughout our time filming we have had much time with the camera and as a result a lot of stock footage and audio from the H4n. some of them are close ups of various objects but most are of us as a crew. when people see a camera they tend to have slight more control over the words they say and how they present themselves. some even cover their face when they see camera lens. and the size of the Sony Ex3 does not help.

Although, when the presence of the camera is not noticed people act back to normal and almost sigh in relief knowing that whatever they say is not permanently documented. That is why the fly on the wall concept is very important to this project and documentaries in general! I as a film maker wish that I could hide the camera so that the subjects don’t stare into the camera. I wish there was a way to distract them from noticing it, the solution is good conversation. The stock footage we have was all spontaneous and unplanned and we did not realise that the camera was rolling (apart from the camera person which rotates anyway). So we had the best jokes the most fluid and intriguing conversations and its all natural. No one was acting a part. of course there were a couple of “leading” questions that gave direction the content and answers we gave. That is what we want with all the interviewees, start a conversation then slowly descend into the serious stuff without the pressure of knowing the camera is turned on.