Expository/Observational/Poetic
When I started making this documentary, I was pondering which mode I wanted to do. Thinking back to what we had watched in class, Grey Gardens kept sticking in my mind. The whole question of Grey Gardens is watching these two women live together when it seemed like their life was falling apart around them and yet they had not a care in the world about it. It got me thinking about life and how snippets of my normal day to day life would seem to someone who did not know me at all. As a result, I chose observational. I wanted to just let the camera capture what was happening and how I lived my life. The main difference was that is most observational documentaries, the filmmaker is filming someone other than themselves. This instance, I just had to put the camera up and see what it caught. It caught me talking with my husband. It caught me taking off my sweatshirt when I got too hot. It caught me finding more dishes that I had to clean after I thought I had gotten them all. This all cumulated into a snapshot of my life. That is the beauty of Observational because we get to see hidden gems about a variety of people and learn about their "normal". However, during editing, I tool a step back and starting wondering how people would judge me if this was the only bit they saw of me. The documentary we watched "Sherman's March to the Sea" was a combination of Observational and Participatory. The face-value things we learn about the filmmaker was that he had a difficult love life and was obsessed with General Sherman. Looking at my video, I know the kind of life that I lead but how would someone else view it? Would they see it as a normal night like I would? Would they think that I needed to clean more? Would they believe that I was angry or annoyed or happy or tired? What would they think? Then it hit me. Does it matter? Am I making films to be appreciated by people or am I making a film about something that is important to me? Cleanliness is important to me. My husband is important to me. My life is important to me and that is the beauty of Observational. I get to see the beauty of my life in the simple act of doing dishes. We get to see the beauty of a man who is struggling to find a woman. We get to see the beauty of a mother and daughter relying solely on each other simply just by looking at the world around us.
Participatory/Reflexive/Performative
My mother is turning 50 and I have been planning for weeks what her birthday is going to be like. My sister organized letters from everyone who knew her and I planned dinner reservations because my father is going to be out of town. When I started planning this documentary, I could not get my mom out of my head so I decided to make it about her. I wanted to reflect and look back on how our relationship has changed throughout the years. It has not always been easy but we are in a good place now.
I decided to go with a participatory documentary where I was not only creating something in the film but also filming the documentary while voicing my thoughts about the whole thing. The commentary did not really stay on topic with the making of the bracelet but it does go down the rabbit hole that is my brain. My mother makes me anxious because I am her child and I want to do right in her eyes. I have mostly pushed through this and now am confident making my own decisions but it still can be stressful when talking through problems with her. Nichole defines a participatory documentary as “What happens in front of the camera becomes a measure of the interaction between filmmaker and subject.” In my documentary, the creation of the bracelet drew out all of these inner thoughts about the subject, my mother. While she is not shown at all on camera, she drives the narrative as I think back through the years.
The physical actions in the film itself are not very indicative of a participatory documentary. There are no interviews or conversations between me and someone else. It is quite literally just me speaking to myself about an important person in my life. It is not obvious like Man with a Movie Camera where we see shots of the filmmaker filming people in the moment. All the participation is verbal as we listen to myself confirm what I am doing and why. It is also different from Sherman’s March. In that documentary, we see McElwee interact with every single person on screen as he carries around the giant camera on his shoulder. He forces the camera to capture every single moment of his life. My documentary is capturing a brief snippet of my day and yet those brief moments make me reflect back on my 22 years of life. I think back on my mother and how she has helped me and raised me but also during the tough times when she did not support me or questioned decisions that I had prayed and fasted about or moments where I did not have all the answers to her questions and I felt like I needed to.
This film was supposed to be simple. It was supposed to just be the bracelet and myself talking. However, it also goes to show that it can be the random, little moments in our lives that make us completely dive into a rabbit hole of our own thoughts. I did not expect myself to get so introspective about the whole idea. However, we have to take those moments and just exist in them or we run the risk of losing our precious thoughts and how we view and interact with the world around us.
Doc Mode 3 - Poetic
https://youtu.be/IJ1FwzzCJsU
The website would not let me add another video so here is the link to it.
I got inspired from seeing one of my classmate’s poetic documentaries and I wanted to try this mode myself. However, I am not a good editor at all. I do not know how to do the fancy motion blurs or dropping frames trick. I just have to cut and stitch the videos together in a way that makes sense to me but this is poetic mode, what actually makes sense? To get my videos, I took a compilation of videos of me driving and videos of the various activities I had driven to. As I was putting them in different orders, the sequence of the videos just started coming together. I did not have a set plan of the order but as I continued editing, the sequence just flowed. I thought about adding music to it as it would help set the mood for what people would watch. However, as you have probably noticed, the entire semester, I have been experimenting with natural audio from the videos that I took. I tried a couple different scores and listened to see if they would evoke the mood I wanted. In the end, none of them conveyed what I wanted so I took the music out. I let the natural noise of the car drive the documentary.
Now, why driving because to me, driving is a peaceful experience. My family took many road trips growing up and we would drive everywhere and I mean everywhere. I did not get on a plane from the time I was six to the time I was sixteen. We lived in Southern California and with most of the extended family in Utah, we made that drive about three times a year. Us kids got very used to entertaining ourselves and holding in bathroom breaks until we stopped for gas. It became a time for me to just sit and ponder as we crossed the Nevada desert. This has continued into my adult life, as long as I am not driving. During car rides, I am able to sit, relax, and quite often fall asleep to the lul of the road. Thinking about it, I believe it is due to the sense of movement you get in a car.
I am a homebody and can be quite introverted in a space where I am new. I enjoy cozy evenings at home playing video games or watching movies. However, a car is how I move. It gets me to school, to home, to the grocery store, and to my friends. It is literally the vehicle to get me out of the house. Because I grew up on road trips, I always get a sense of adventure when I get into the car. It feels like a new start or a new beginning on an unknown experience. Playing music as I watch the trees or buildings pass by helps me exist within the world. I am able to connect to the here and the now instead of being distracted by my phone or computer or stressing about homework I have to do. A car became the place to let go of my distractions and think through how I want to proceed.
As I edited, I realized I wanted to show where the car had taken me so I scrounged up old videos showing the various places I had traveled. Some of them are from years ago and some are recent. Either way, the videos were experiences that I could never forget and they all were possible because of a car.