I found that calling into question my personal motivations for creating documentary a really valuable way to commence this semester. It’s been through identifying what it is about documentary that I find so appealing – and necessary, as well as valuable – that has allowed me to ascertain what it is that I wish to achieve through producing the medium.
The video that I have created for PB1 brings to the fore my personal motivation for documentary making: in essence being my belief that, as a society, we generally are not concerned by ‘the important things’ or the issues that really matter, on a deeper and more sincere level. Generally speaking, we are also far more concerned with that by which we are directly affected. It’s harsh position to take but, I feel, an accurate one.
This phenomenon, I believe, has been exacerbated by several elements of social media which, in particular allow us to participate in social activism at a fairly superficial level. ‘Liking’ and ‘sharing’ different articles and pages connected or based upon certain social causes, usually via Facebook, allows for futile, ‘click-bate’ activism far too easy.
Just consider this and ask to yourself the question – do we really care about the issue as much as whether we appear to care about the issue on a surface level?
Take Kony 2012, This was content that we all know, for it exploded upon our Facebook pages when it was topical. Suddenly, every second person across Facebook was determined to personally capture and bring to justice the African warlord, Joseph Kony. Or so it would seem. That’s because Facebook and other social media domains make it easy for us to appear as though we care. Once topical, the ice bucket challenge and the picture of a little Syrian refugee child, washed upon the shores of Turkey, followed a similar pattern.
I suspect that more people (particularly of the Millennial Generation) know Beyonce and Jay-Z’s new babies names than that, for instance, the Arab country Yemen is facing a humanitarian crisis currently and that millions of citizens have literally starved to death.
And so, ultimately, my key point of focus is to create content about issues that simply matter – across a diverse range of topics – in a meaningful, creative and unique manner that grabs the attention of those who wouldn’t otherwise seek out the information.
And thus, it is this idea that drives me as a budding documentary maker – that we need to carve out new ways to appeal to those who wouldn’t naturally look certain topics or information up, to bring into the public domain important and weighty subjects of matter.
This won’t be totally clear in the video I created for PB1 (largely due to tight time constraints) and that, for the sake of simplicity, I decided to focus on the key idea that we are too interested in the wrong things. But still, this first idea is key to helping me communicate what it is that drives my aspirations and (hopefully) later work.
