Documentary and Film

Work on your shooting script---consider A-Roll and B-Roll material.

Also, work on your film treatment for Mr. Craddock.

Documentary Planning

 Go over the previous post and check out POV documentaries.


 Start planning your own documentary.  Here are some useful web sites to read and learn about making documentaries.




http://www.desktop-documentaries.com/making-documentaries.html

Social Issue documentaries

Stylistic categories include:
Public affairs essays: Food, Inc.; Critical Condition; Waging a Living; Good Fortune
Personal/Memoirs: the works of Alan Berliner; Bright Leaves; Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North; In the Family; In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee
Narrative history/Biography: Revolution '67; Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed; Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner; The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers; Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin; William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
Cinema verité: Flag Wars; My Country, My Country; Street Fight; Election Day; Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go; High School
Poetic: Hybrid; The Beaches of Agnès; SALT
Once you have selected the topics and films, explore the related resources — particularly the relevant filmmaker interviews and production journals. Use these to hear and read filmmakers' own stories of why they chose the approaches they did.
2. Ask the group to work together to analyze the implications of the different styles. Below are some options for organizing this discussion:
Organize a discussion (either with the group as a whole or with the class broken into smaller groups) comparing different styles. The comparison should address these general questions: What expectations do filmmakers who work in this mode have for their films? To what kinds of issues does this style lend itself? What are the particular advantages and disadvantages of this approach? You may want to contrast two or more different styles (e.g., public affairs essay and personal/memoir, or poetic and narrative history/biography). You can also develop a chart to use for group discussion; the number of rows will depend on the number of styles you discuss:

Film Style	Topics/Issues	Pros	Cons
Public affairs essay
Personal/Memoir
Narrative history/Biography
Cinema verité
Poetic

This discussion should reveal that any style can be used to address any topic, and that each one has advantages and disadvantages in terms of achieving different goals. During the discussion of these advantages and disadvantages, cover the need to identify desirable goals, in order then to determine which style should be used.
Another approach is to select a theme or topic from the POV list of topics on the Discover Films page:

• Adoption
• Arts & Culture
• Criminal Justice
• Economics
• Environment
• Ethnicity
• Family & Society
• Gender
• Health
• History
• Immigration
• International
• LGBT
• Music
• Politics
• Race Relations
• Religion & Spirituality
• War & Peace
• Youth

You should look at these pages in advance in order to narrow down these large topics and tailor the assignments to your class.
Break the class into groups, assign each group a different style of documentary, then ask each group to brainstorm a short documentary on its topic as that topic plays itself out in their lives, their town or at a local institution. For instance, if assigned the topic of race relations they might explore race relations at their school. Have the groups compare their material. Show clips from the relevant POV pages to demonstrate how artists have approached the same topic with very different results. For instance, with regard to race relations you could show clips from films with different styles, such as a public affairs essay film (Every Mother's Son), a personal/memoir film (Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela), a narrative history/biography film (Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin) and a work of cinema vérité (Flag Wars).
3. Summarize discussion/takeaways:

• Social-issue documentary can take on a wide variety of formats and styles.


• Styles can overlap, and filmmakers can be eclectic in their choices.


• Each choice of expression has advantages and disadvantages.


• All choices involve engaging the viewer with a clear point-of-view.

Lesson Four: Production and Producing Challenges
Read about production issues in pages 18 to 22 and pages 125 to 128 of Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) by Patricia Aufderheide. For deeper treatment of production issues, read Michael Rabiger's Directing the Documentary.
What is involved in making a documentary film? This segment exposes students to questions documentarians must answer in the process of making a film; it should give students an awareness of the nature and magnitude of the task of making a documentary film. (Note: this unit does not teach filmmaking skills.)
1. Identify the issues you want to address. You can determine these yourself, or the class can work on a list of issues together. Possible issues include:
Filmmakers routinely stress that documentary filmmaking is not a lucrative field, and that they are driven by passion rather than a desire to make a lot of money. How do filmmakers get into this field and why?

• Jane C. Wagner and Tina DiFeliciantonio


• Roger Weisberg on his career

Can anyone make a movie? How important are experience, craft and production quality?

• Lourdes Portillo on craft


• Daniel Bernard Roumain on creating a soundtrack


• Natalia Almada on matching the look of different media


• Ellen Kuras on cinematography and sound


• Peter Kinoy on finding the story as an editor


• Anthony Giacchino on avoiding narration

How do filmmakers find and work with their subjects?

• Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker on building trust


• Laura Poitras on working with an unreliable subject


• Yung Chang on finding subjects


• Ido Haar on working with subjects who do not speak his language


• Nicole Opper and Sharese Bullock on building trust

How do filmmakers deal with safety and security?

• Filmmakers dealing with safety in Africa for The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court and Good Fortune

How do filmmakers find a way to show their work to audiences?

• Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar on Made in L.A.


• Judith Helfand on A Healthy Baby Girl and The Uprising of '34


• Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly on The Way We Get By

2. Working in small groups or with the class as a whole, discuss the problems the filmmakers' approaches raise. How do the issues raised by POV filmmakers connect with the students' own aspirations for filmmaking?
3. Organize students into small groups, according to their concerns. Assign each group to make a list of issues its members need to research before moving forward with their own planned documentary projects. Have at least some of them share those lists with the group, then ask the other class members to provide ideas for dealing with the issues or to expand their classmates' lists further.
Summarize discussion and stress takeaways:

• Documentaries are works of art, with elements including narration, soundtrack, editing and cinematography. These concerns are of particular importance to people who make social-issue documentaries, because these films must engage the viewer and inspire commitment.


• Social-issue documentaries can take months, years or even decades to produce.


• Social-issue documentaries are produced out of commitment and passion rather than for profit. Nonprofit and taxpayer support are critical. Public broadcasting is a key resource.

Documentary Journalism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0BxFRu_SOw


 SOTA student Kadisha Phillips' documentary work.  Kadisha is currently at the Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse University.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0pLp57kD90

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdQ0i-sRCyg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgMRlIT6ak4


Documentaries about our society:


http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=223

Peronal Interview Editing

CONTINUE EDITING YOUR INTERVIEW

ADD "B Roll" Material

Broadcast News

The Structure of Broadcast News

PBS NewsHour Extra Student Reporting Labs

Lesson 1.4: The Structure of Broadcast News
Developed by Imani M. Cheers

Standards

• McRel: Viewing, 9 Students will use viewing skills and strategies to understand and interpret visual media.
• ISTE: Media Concepts, 3.0 Students will be able to interpret and evaluate various media presentations within their context.

Overview
Students learn about elements like an attention-getting headline, a strong lead, the use of quotes and trustworthy facts, a summary and skillful arrangement. Students identify some structural features of broadcast news and then compare and contrast a segment from PBS News Hour, a segment from NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, and a segment from ABC World News with Diane Sawyer.

Learning Outcomes
By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Identify the structure of a broadcast news segment.

Advance Preparation
Make copies of Worksheets A for students. Review additional resources for students to watch for extra support.

Engage Interest

Ask: What makes an interesting news story?

Listen to students’ answers as they will vary based on their experiences.

Explore: How is a television news segment structured?

Pass out at least 2 copies of Worksheet A to each student. This worksheet can be passed out the day before as a homework assignment for students and their families. Ask the students to watch a nightly news program and fill out the worksheet. Teachers can also pass out the worksheet in class and play clips from at least 2 of the links below and have students fill out the worksheets after the clips have been viewed.

PBS NewsHour
NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams
ABC World News with Diane Sawyer

Television

Discussion Questions

1. Television was first invented in 1886 by a German student, Paul Nipcow. How much television do you watch in one week? How would you spend your time if television had never been invented? 2. RCA's David Sarnoff was credited for bringing television to the masses at the 1939 World's Fair with President Roosevelt speaking. If television were invented today, with what programming would you choose to debut the new invention and why? 3. The first color television camera was the TK 41. Describe how would black and white television change the programs you watch? 4. The most recent invention in television is digital technology. Explain what could you invent to improve television programming and viewership? 5. Video recording has revolutionized the television industry and brought about channels like CNN, ESPN, and MTV. What would television be like for you without these channels? Describe the target audiences for these channels. 6. How will the agent or Intelligence Search Software affect your choice of television shows?

Links

The Farnsworth Chronicles This is a concise and easily accessible site detailing the efforts of Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of modern television. Exploratorium Exhibits Exciting online demos and guided discovery help explain how we come to "make pictures" on the tube. Vocabulary Click on any of the vocabulary words below to hear them pronounced and used in a sentence.    fiber-optic Definition: Relating to thin transparent fibers of glass or plastic that are enclosed by material of a lower index of refraction and that transmit light throughout their length by internal reflections. Context: The signal will be captured and temporarily be converted into laser light and fed down long strands of glass called fiber-optic lines.    bit Definition: A unit of computer information equivalent to the result of a choice between two alternatives (e.g., yes or no, on or off). Context: A television camera breaks the scene into bits and scans the world a bit at a time.    vacuum tubes Definition: An electron tube evacuated to a high degree of vacuum. Context: For the next 60 years, television cameras used vacuum tubes.    prism Definition: A transparent body that is bounded in part by two nonparallel plane faces and is used to refract or disperse a beam of light. Context: In broadcast color cameras, the light streaming through the lens enters a prism, which does the usual prism thing, splitting the light into three colors.    ray gun Definition: A device which fires a stream of electrons toward a fluorescent screen. The direction of the stream is controlled by a magnetic field within a cathode ray tube (the point of origin for the stream). Context: There is a ray gun at the back of the picture tube firing a thin beam to light up a tiny dot on your screen.    record head Definition: An electromagnetic strip device which imparts a characteristic pattern on a storage medium such as magnetic tape, thereby saving information to the storage medium. Context: All magnetic recording begins with an electromagnet called a record head.    segmentation Definition: The process of dividing into segments. Context: He could get rid of segmentation by a nice long scan with a tape wrapped around this big drum.    analog Definition: Relating to a mechanism in which data is represented by continuously variable physical quantities (such as voltages). Context: We live in an analog world.    digital Definition: Relating to data in the form of numerical digits. Context: To make our analog world digital it must be converted.    agent Definition: One who is authorized to act for or in the place of another. Context: And these days you use the word agents to do that.    Intelligence Search Software Definition: Computer instructions, customized to the preferences of an individual. Context: And the term agent refers to Intelligence Search Software that will be programmed to know what each family member likes.