Documentary research part one

 In class, after having a lesson about documentaries, we watched some in order to visually understand the formats of them. 

One of the first ones we saw was American Promise, this documentary followed two black boys through their education at a prestigious school in New York. It discussed growing up, racism, and the pressures of school such as parental pressure. This documentary really helped me understand the format used, like the indirect and direct interviews and the way the subjects were place on one side of the screen rather than in the middle. It also made me understand how to incorporate b-roll into my documentary. 

Another documentary we watched that was called Exit Through the Gift Shop, this documentary spoke about famous street artists like Banksy. The documentary was originally being told through the perspective of a man now known as Mr. Brainwash but he did not know how to edit the film, so, Banksy took over the film. This documentary had a lot of hand held shots in the b-roll. which made the documentary feel more realistic, this was something I considered when making my documentary with my project partner. 

We also viewed op-docs, these shorter documentaries were nice to watch since our project was meant to be 5 to 7 minutes, so it helped me understand how a shorter documentary would look. We got to watch the op-docs of our choice from the New York Times. One of the op-docs was named "Roaches Lullaby" it was super interesting and discussed roach problems in New York City. I also watched a op-doc called "Not for Money, Not for Love, Not for Nothing" which told the stories of women who did sex work in Wales, this op-doc was animated, which was very interesting to watch. Both of these op-docs helped further fuel my understanding the ways in which documentaries were formatted. The pieces included amazing examples of b-roll and how to organize a documentary so that it's engaging but it still makes sense.