*Individual Pre-Production Research Report [2,000 words]

This should be in the form of continuous prose and should reflect your personal research for the project and on the documentary genre to date. It must contain critical references to reading undertaken and films viewed. It should include:

• Critical reflection on what you have learnt which may be useful for you project from viewing at least 3 documentaries such as for instance about approaches or techniques relevant to your proposed project as a whole or your own role on it. You should draw on your own responses to films viewed as well as your critical reading on the documentary genre.
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• Reflection on your own production research to date e.g. on practice for your role, exercises undertaken, subject research. This should include reflection on your contribution to the production of the pilot material
  Some pointers on what issues you should show awareness of in relation to roles:
  
  

Camera – creative thinking on how visual approach will address story/subject/theme, key lighting challenges at proposed locations, framing, equipment requirements and limitations, subject research. 

Sound – creative thinking on how sound recording/design will address subject/theme, key sound challenges at proposed locations, microphone selection, subject research.


Editor - creative thinking on how editing will address subject/theme, key challenges for structuring proposed project, scheduling and organizing the edit, subject research. 

Production management (all team members) – logistical issues, permissions/consents needed, scheduling required, budgetary considerations, any copyright issues and how these could be resolved;

Director – creative thinking on how story will be told,/subject/theme explored, notes on contributors/source materials, subject research,


If you are in a team of less than 4 people one person will need to double up and take the director’s role on location as well as doing either sound or camera. The director and editor should not be the same person. You are all however expected to contribute to the creative development and research for the project.

You should also attach to your individual report:
Minutes of group meetings noting who was present, (or absent) summary of points considered and action decided. Minute keeping should be delegated to someone in the team 

Plan

Things to include:

• Practical Tasks 
• Pilot material
• Readings concerning doc modes, humans and dogs, editing
• Films/Documentary inspiration and my responses to them
• Interview practice and techniques
• How I will organise the edit, challenges I will face
• Things I've learnt from or need to consider

The Essay

From the moment our production group decided our roles and documentary project theme, I have conducted vast amounts of research into an array of different mediums that concern my production role as the editor and our documentary's subject matter on human and dog relationships and the documentary genre. I’ve have applied the knowledge and skills acquired from my research to our production tasks, creative project and it's pilot material and this is what I shall be reflecting on in this report.

Since our documentary mode is to be an observational one with interactive mode aspects, I drew upon Nichol’s honoured taxonomy’s Representing Reality (1991) and Introduction to Documentary (2001) to acquire more extensive knowledge about the modes that our documentary the code and conventions our documentary would follow. I shall be using these readings by Nichols as a main critical reference throughout for this report and relate it to how the films I have watched that have inspired me for our group’s documentary project and how much they meet Nichols’s classification on certain documentary modes.

There are many documentary films in which I have drawn inspiration from for our documentary project. One is a Dog’s Best Friend (Briles 2012) where the film follows many different dog owners who see there pet as more than just an animal they care for. The filmmaker establishes a meaningful relationship between the owners and their dog by the amount of equal frame-time both the dog and their owner receive. A non-diegetic soundtrack is also added to certain pieces of sequences to emotively engage the audience into what is being told to them which in turn, sets a tone for the piece and reinforces its message. For example, when John & Cindy tell us about the passing of one of their dogs they previously owned, a piano score accompanies the dialogue. This made me sympathize towards these characters and the music emphasized my emotions. This editorial technique shall be incorporated into our final piece once our sound artist decides on at suitable score available.

Rhythm, pace and tone is set from the backing score, with cuts occurring between shots simultaneously with the music. I found this to be an effective technique used with in Dog’s Best Friend as it kept my attention with the visuals and well as the audio. Furthermore, the use of fade-to-black as a transition between each character(s) was used which made me as if the documentary us segmented and unnatural. These were all possibilities we play with for when it comes to the editing stage of our documentary so we could emotively manipulate our audiences response just through our selection of sound score and when to use it.

This documentary contains performative and observations aspects of documentary.  One technique being the use of “pseudomonologue” for the interview sequences where the visible and audible absence of the filmmaker allows the social actors dialogue to  “appear to deliver the thoughts, impression, feelings and memories of the individual witness (in this case, a dog owner) to the viewer.”  (Nichols 1991, p.54) We want to incorporate this method to our documentary as it allows our subjects to “speak for themselves” as if they are directing their word to the audience rather than the filmmaker, giving a more personal link between spectator and subject. The absence of the filmmaker in Dog’s Best Friend is also an observational characteristic Nichols discusses since the Briles “adopts a peculiar mode of presence ‘on the scene’ in which he or she appears to be invisible and non-participatory.” (Nichols 2001, p.112) Therefore, to adopt this technique for our documentary, I will have to edit out all the questions we ask as filmmakers from the recorded interviews and transcript our interviewees response to our questions and select the most emotive response in order to shape our documentary’s narrative. I will have to be careful with continuity issues when it comes to editing of our interviews if we are to use this editorial procedure since the “editing operates to maintain a logical continuity between individual viewpoints, usually without the benefit on an overarching commentary, the logic of which shift to the conversational exchange between filmmaker and social actors.” (Nichols 1991, p.45)

Another documentary I learnt from is the interactive and observational documentary called Lift (Isaacs 2001), where the filmmaker places himself in a lift in at a tower block of flats located in North London and people start conversing with him in the lift, where we find out more about their lives as the narrative progressea. The use of cutaways in this film is significant as they are used purely to push forward time within the narrative to ensure the audience is aware it is a new day or another character we are being introduced to. I liked this technique as I found it a simple yet effective method of transitioning. We could incorporate this technique of pushing time within the documentary to advance onto our next interview simply by using footage from the morning and the afternoon for each dog and owner relationship we focus on.

Isaacs made his subjects feel more comfortable around the camera with just by conversing with simple conversion and a small hand-held camera. The characters in lift began to form a relationship with Isaacs through his polite small talk as well as his constant presence. The relationships he made whilst producing the documentary became strong enough with his social actors that one of the them offered him some food, and another revealed and opened up to more personal matter such told us about the passing of a family member. A technique in Lift used by Isaacs, which discussed by Nichols in concern to the interactive mode, where “the filmmaker need not be a cinematic, recording eye. He/she may approximate the human sensorium…the filmmaker’s voice could be heard as readily as any other, not subsequently, in an organizing voice-over commentary, but on the spot, in face-to-face encounters with others.” (Nichols, 1991, p.44)  From something that could have been so intrusive and revealing in terms of its concept resulted in quite a touching and personal documentary and via that form of approach, it is very similar to the style of documentary we want to produce for our group’s documentary produce. I want the carefully select people we interview for our project to be wary of the cameras presence but I want to form a positive relationship with our interviewees before we interview them so they feel more relaxed in front of the camera and have a more natural and confident response from them, as it’s clear in Lift that the more the characters had interacted with the filmmaker Isaacs in Lift, the more comfortable they felt around the camera by ignoring it’s presence.

Anvil: The Story of Anvil (Gervasi 2008) is another documentary I watched which is a performative and sincere rockumentary by Sacha Gervasi. It explores the unfortunate history of the metal band Anvil and catches up with the band members Steve Kudlow (Lipps) and Robb Reiner 30 years after the release of their first album ‘Metal on Metal’ a follow them on their quest to fulfill their dream of being a successful metal band. This characteristics and qualities this documentary has holds a firm essences of realism and dramatization within its narrative. This in mainly conveyed by Kudlow in documentary as we are shown every side of his life throughout the film. We see him display all types of emotions, such as happiness, sadness, regret or remorse. Whether it is Kudlow working in a kitchen or working on stage, we are exposed to his emotional and eccentric character, whilst Reiner has a more reserved character.

Gervasi allows his audience to see the subjects for who they truly are and does not exclude any embarrassing or revealing moments within the documentary. For example, when Lipps loses his temper at the Croatian club owners as they refuse to pay the band for the gig at their club and a fight kicks off in which the camera follows with lengthy takes. This is an identifiable trait used by Gervasi from the observational modes, which let’s the scene unfold for itself and the filmmaker doesn’t intervene on the action. Grant summarizes Nichols’s definition of the observation mode as “seeking to be objective, the unobtrusive camera takes on the role of the audience, watching and observing the action.” (Natusch, B. & Hawkins, B. 2014, p.112) and that is exactly what Gervasi does here.

What I really liked about this documentary is how Gervasi aligns us with these two characters emotionally by building this bond between character and spectator. It forces us as a spectator to sympathize with the two characters and makes us hope for them to succeed their boyhood dream.

It reminded me of a more realistic version of This is Spinal Tap (Reiner, 1984).

Since our documentary’s aim was to provide a deeper awareness into the emotional connections people build with their pet dogs, and yet I am not a dog owner personally, I took upon myself to find out more about the forms of relationships people have built with their pet dogs so I would have a broader understanding regarding our documentary’s subject matter. I read various articles, journals and surveys related to this and found the most relevant and interesting piece called Understanding dog-human companionship (Dotson, M. J.; Hyatt, E. M. 2008). This journal provided a strong insight into how and why humans form specific relationships with their pet dogs, and explains the benefits of people keeping pet dogs and the nature and meanings of certain dog and humans relationships. For example, this journal elaborates on Michael Fox’s work on the Interrelations between humans and pets (Fox 1981) where he reports that there are four categories of dog and human relationships. "Object-oriented (with the dog as possession), utilitarian/exploitative (with the dog providing benefits to the human), need-dependency (with the dog as companion or child surrogate), and actualizing (with the dog as a respected significant other)." (Dotson & Hyatt 2008, p.458) He explains that dogs also have identical emotions to humans and that is why such strong bonds can be formed between humans and their dogs. From all my research behind our subject matter, I can deduce that research has confirmed that there’s also a psychological bond between humans and their pets in terms of satisfying each other’s needs such as unconditional love and affection, friendship and companionship.  It is this message that we want to try and convey to our audience with our observational documentary by showing these emotional and almost humanistic bonds people form with their pet dogs and we have constructed our questioning to our interviewees.

In terms of editorial-related reading research, I have been taking notes from Walter Murch's editing bible In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Murch 2001). One of his key practices, which I have been incorporating into our pilot material and the project as a whole, is what he called the rule of ‘Rule of Six’. This is a method of analysing what makes a good cut. Murch elaborates that there are six sections of criteria to an ideal cut which are (in order of importance) are emotion, story, rhythm, eye-trace, two-dimensional plane of screen and finally three-dimensional space of action. Murch prioritises emotion over the other characteristics that you should look for in a good cut and goes on to say that “what they (the audience) finally remember is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performances, not even the story – its how they felt.” (Murch, 1992, p.18)  Thus, by incorporating this editing technique we shall achieve our goal in making our audience participate in the documentary by making it emotionally engaging through the manipulation of our footage in the editing process.

With regards to permission and consents needed for our documentary, we would definitely need to acquire consent permission from our interviewees to film our interviews. Therefore, we would ensure we would get each individual shot an interview with to fill out a consent form before recording. We also decided to film a majority of our documentary in outdoor, public locations so that we wouldn’t need to get location permissions to film there. On the other hand, since we are making an observational documentary, even though our subjects are wary of the camera, others in the public area where the camera will be place are not. We’ll have to be wary of this as some dog owners may not to be filmed in a public place. Also, with our musical score, we have to be wary that we do not use any copyrighted or unlicensed material and when we do find our appropriate score, we shall be sure to give its produce a credit in our documentary.

Bibliography

Briles, P. (2012) Dog’s Best Friend. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN9zSNN-k88 (Access: 10^th October 2015)

Dotson, Michael J. ; Hyatt, Eva M. (2008) Understanding dog-human companionship Journal of Business Research, Vol.61(5), pp.457-466

Fox, M. (1981) Relationships between human and non-human animals in interrelations between people and pets. Bruce Fogle (Ed.), A symposium on the human-companion animal bond (1981) London, England

Gervasi, S. (2008) Anvil: The Story of Anvil [film] Canada: Metal on Metal Production

Isaacs, M. (2001) Lift. [film] UK: Dual Purpose Productions

Murch, W., (2001) In the blink of an eye: a perspective on film editing, Los Angeles: Silman-James Press.

Natusch, B. & Hawkins, B. (Summer 2014) 'Mapping Nichols' Modes in Documentary Film', The IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film, 1(2), pp. 103-112.

Nichols, B. (1991) Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Ch. 2: Documentary modes of representation

Nichols, B. (2001) Introduction to Documentary, Indiana University Press Chapter 6: What types of documentary are there? pp.99-139.

Reiner, R. (1984) This is Spinal Tap [film] USA: Spinal Tap Productions