Documentary Filmmaking 2020: 60 Seconds of Fame (Day 2)

Today, we dipped our toes into what it is like to film a documentary. Before we start to film our actual documentaries, we worked on some short 60-second docs to get some experience with using the cameras and film equipment, how to successfully interview someone, and editing film. To understand how to structure a short documentary, we looked at a few 60-second documentaries on YouTube. When most people hear documentary, they often imagine a longer film with a lot of detail on the subject so it was interesting to see how documentaries can be short and sweet. For our documentaries we made today, we each interviewed one another in the school and had to find ways around challenges that we might encounter as a documentary film-maker. One of the unforeseen challenges which we had to work around today was figuring out the lighting. We had planned to use the lighting equipment which the IB film class usually uses. However, the equipment was nowhere to be found today so we had to try and figure out places in the school where the lighting was good enough to film. Normally if you want good lighting, you can film in the sunlight outside but the constant drone of the Houston traffic on 59 keeps us from being able to capture audio outside of the building.

When making our 60-second docs, Ms. Harrison had us incorporate a few different shots and cuts often used in interviews. These are the close-up shot, extreme close-up shot, wide shot, and a cutaway shot. A cutaway is basically when the audio from one clip plays while the video from a different clip is transitioned in or out. This is sometimes explained as a scene away from the action or subject. Using the cutaway shot was useful for some students to get video taken outside in the sunlight while the audio from the interview plays.

Each of our interviews turned out quite differently but at the end of class we all sat down together to watch and critique the lighting, framing, cuts, and editing of each of our documentaries. If you want to check out our films, all of these short documentaries can be found on the POHSFilmMaking youtube channel! After today, we now know what to look for when choosing how we film our scenes. Although the editing was a little stressful it was really fun to see how each documentary turned out.