Week 1 ： https://www.mediafactory.org.au/mason-mao/2021/03/07/six-modes-of-documentary-week-1/
Week 2 ： https://www.mediafactory.org.au/mason-mao/2021/03/14/six-modes-of-documentary-week-2/
Week 3 : https://www.mediafactory.org.au/mason-mao/2021/03/18/six-modes-of-documentary-week-3/

In this week, we learned the Participatory mode among the 6 modes. In this mode, filmmakers are no longer only responsible for shooting, but directly participate in the documentary and interact with the characters in the docu. In this week’s reading, the author continued to introduce the form and application of participatory documentaries, and gave some examples to help us understand. In these examples, I found one thing in common, that is, the filmmaker needs to have a real emotional exchange with the subject, which makes me feel that this form of documentary will reflect the real situation. However, in the latter part of this reading, the author mentioned that “In participatory documentary, what we see is what we can see only when a camera, or filmmaker, is there instead of ourselves.” This made me realize that although the filmmakers will communicate with the subject, their identity or camera will affect the subject’s mentality, and the content of the documentary will be different from what we really encountered if we get into these situations.
In order to verify what I have learned in reading, the documentary that I watched this week using participatory mode is called Roger&Me(1989) by Michael Moore. The documentary is to exploring the impact of General Motors closing several auto plants in his hometown. Moore filmed from his own perspective, looking for Roger, the chairman of GM, as the story line, interviewing people in different positions in society.Those who marched due to unemployment told the camera what they had experienced, but the people still work for General Motors chose to avoid Moore’s problem under the pressure of the camera. At the end of the film, even though Moore met Roger in public and wanted to interview him, Roger refused to answer. In this documentary, I discovered the advantages and disadvantages of Participatory Mode. In this mode, we can indeed interact with the subject more directly, but the presence of the lens will still affect the content of the film.
In our sketch this week, we are still in the same group as the previous two weeks. In this cooperation, we have established a certain tacit understanding. Determine the subject first, then discuss the shots that need to be used and determine the timeline for the completion of the assignment. And during these three weeks, we will switch roles every time, so we have improved in all aspects. Due to the theme of this week, we decided to make a topic about Julie’s mother immigrating from Vietnam to Australia. This video is produced in Vietnamese to try more possibilities of documentary. At the same time, this documentary also reflects the problems encountered by many immigrants, that is, it is difficult to integrate into the local society and it is easy to feel lonely. Although the video is less than 2 minutes, I think the problem it reflects is still worth thinking about.

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This week we continued to learn about the Expository mode in the 6 modes of documentary. In this week’s reading, the author distinguished the difference between Expository mode and poetic mode. Instead of establishing a rhythm like poetic mode, it uses narrative voice over to connect footage or describe events. This reminds me of my favorite animal documentaries since I was a kid. Since animals cannot speak, the documentary of Expository mode can explain the behavior of animals more conveniently to the audience and establish a more attractive storyline for the audience.
And in the videos we watched this week, one of them is about animal hunting. The hunting scene in this film creates a tense atmosphere, but it gives me a feeling different from ordinary movies. In ordinary movies, the emphasized content is always the picture, but in this documentary, the video part appears to be less important, but as an aid to voice over to help the film maker narrate the hunting process more clearly. In order to confirm my guess, I watched other documentaries. In The Blue Planet, the video part is really simple，it only has a few of Close-up of lantern fish and its tentacles. The author mainly explained the phenomenon of bioluminescence through voice over.
In the sketch this week, we are trying to make a documentary about international students face the problem of not being able to go to school to have class during the epidemic. We have absorbed the characteristics of Expository mode and put more emphasis on script instead of footage. The reason we want to do this topic is that this is the problem we are facing, and it is also a coincidence that our team member Charlotte has a experience of been interviewed by abc about this matter. It is really helpful for us to collect the materials. But during the production, I found that the 2-minute limit is very unfriendly to the expository mode, because it is difficult to introduce the whole story background completely in two minutes, and I had to delete some voice over content when editing. But making this sketch still gave me a deeper understanding of the documentary of expository mode, which laid the foundation for me to make a complete documentary in the near future.

In this week’s tutorial, we discussed several documentary modes, which changed my perception of documentaries. In my initial thoughts, I think that the content of the documentary is more inclined to state facts, rather than a personal voice. But in the reading of this week by Nichols(2017) this week, I found that my perception is more in line with the definition of scientific films and surveillance footage. In fact, documentaries tend to express the author’s personal voice. And its borders are blurred, it may be combined with any other video mode to tell a story. In preexisting nonfiction models and distinct cinematic modes, I prefer the latter as my main research area, because it allows me to better combine the content that I have learned in previous studios.
After this week’s tutorial, I watched “the bridge” in the poetry category in this week reading. After I watched it, it was difficult for me to calm my mood. That should be the charm of documentaries, all of its content is real, so it can easily arouse my empathy. This documentary tells about people who committed suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge after it was built. Unlike the documentaries I have seen before, most of the shots in this documentary are interviews with the families of those who committed suicide and asked them to tell the story of the suicide. But what impressed me the most was that it captured the process of some people jumping off the bridge. Without any side, only background music and video make me feel speechless. Unlike the movie, the death of the characters in the movie is known to the subconscious mind of the audience to be fake. But in this documentary, behind every jump shot means that a person is dead. The action of their jumping does not give the viewers the feeling of fear, but of relief. What I admire is the courage they need to do this behavior. And the interview part of this documentary made us understand the stories of these people and made me more in awe of life.
In this week’s documentary sketch, since my team members and I are currently in different countries, we want to make a video of the hobbies of young people in different countries. After discussion, I found that my group member’s hobby is lion dance, so I chose to play dance video games as my hobby which is related to lion dance. This group assignment is a relatively smooth one since my online class, because every member contributed during the discussion, and we determined the specific lens needed during the discussion, so the actual shooting went very smoothly. Therefore, in this sketch, I discovered the importance of discussion, but it is also difficult to achieve in online classes.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary, Third Edition, Indiana University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.act