Instilled Emotion - Critical Reflection

    Instilled Emotioned was developed to explore what motivates individuals to capture moments in photography, as well as what role authenticity plays as a result.

Bjarke Ingel 

    Prior to our documentary, Clara De Luca and I watched several productions in preparation. A large inspiration for me was the docu-series, Abstract: The Art of Design, in large part for its interviewee driven structure. In the episode focused on Bjarke Ingels, the filmmakers made heavy use of indirect interviews to allow Ingels tell his story as if talking to the viewer.

Directed by Banksy

    Another documentary we watched in preparation for this project was Exit Through The Gift Shop which did make heavy use of voice over, but it’s used to present a manipulated view on some of the interviewees. For our documentary, we didn’t want to use a voice over since we believe it would create a disconnect from the interviewees, and we wanted to avoid having the viewer feel as though they were being stringed along directly be creators.

    Not including a voiceover though came with the difficulty of keeping interview clips concise yet informative as well as transitioning from topic to topic. We had initially intended to include a third interview with a young macro-social influencer, but we struggled with figuring out how to introduce them in a way that would make sense without voice over. Ultimately, we decided to scrap the interview, but in doing so we removed a way viewers would have engaged with the documentary.

    

    While we didn’t expect viewers to relate to the fame and success she had, she was a high school student; not including her left us with 2 men in their 40s and 50s to lead the documentary, which doesn’t match with our intended target audience age of 16-25 year olds. We chose this demographic since people within this age range use social media much more than people of different age ranges. Even if the documentary, on the surface, focuses primarily on photography, the topic of authenticity is prevalent throughout and is an important aspect to those who produce and consume social media. With the decision to include those two interviews, we’d then appeal to older audiences 40-55 years of age, since they’re the only ones being represented as well as for their views against social media.

    I would’ve liked to see how the structure would have benefited if we introduced the topic of social media sooner, since from the first half and title alone, I believe some viewers would not know that we were going to touch on the topic.

    To make up for viewers that can’t relate to the interviewees or the topics discussed, we did our best to keep the documentary visually engaging. For our interviews we wanted to use two camera angles to emphasize certain parts of the interviews, rather than stay in the same angle for everything. For our b-roll we mic’ed up the interviewee, in order to capture things he said and unique moments, like when he asks the worker towards the beginning if he could take a photo. These two techniques were both used in Abstract to emphasize emotional moments and present the interviews as real people.

    When it came to finding people to interview, my partner and I first used social media to find photographers, but ran into the issue of many of them living an impractical distance away. As a plan B, I decided to ask a friend about their father, Juan Carlos Perez, who I knew was a freelance photographer. He was then the one who connected us with an old colleague of his, William Benshimol. At the time Clara and I jumped directly into writing questions and planning out the interviews. And it was only after filming the two interviews that we realized that we had only 2 latin men providing us with perspectives on photography.

    Deciding to only include these 2 photographers, doesn’t properly represent the photography scene in South Florida nor in photography in general. And naturally since they were friends, they tended to have similar views on the medium. If more time was put into researching possible photographers we could’ve included, we may have found other interviewees from different backgrounds and different views on the topic. This would’ve helped to present the photography community as much more diverse than how it is currently being represented in the documentary.

    We also have the two photographers speak on the topic of social media as people who don’t like social media, hence the documentary ends up generalizing the inauthenticity that is found on social platforms. If Clara and I were able to properly include the social influencer, it would’ve helped to diversify the perspectives shown towards social media.

    Looking back on this production critically, after sinking so much of my time into it. I definitely see the cracks that I glossed over initially. For subsequent projects I plan to spend some more time in planning to think more about representation. I’m still proud of what I was able to do, but I will be referring back to my experiences on this in the future.

The Hard Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

     Now if you remember last year, The Hard Part documented the hardest and most tasking part of my EXTENSION - Film Opening. And long story short, I basically spent a whole week and a half animating at least 6 to 8 hours each day. Now I didn't spend 2 weeks in post-production for this documentary, but that’s not to say it was easy. After filming each interview, Clara and I would each loosely transcribe them in order to plan a final structure and make editing easier. Two of the three interviews were nearly an hour long so it was a lot to look through, and a lot more that wouldn’t make it into the 5 to 7 minute documentary runtime.

The only photo I could find of the editing process

    When it came to actually editing after filming b-roll, it was annoying. We had already written out our plans based on the transcriptions of the interviews, but scrummaging through hours of interviews and hours of b-roll made it daunting to even start. For me the hardest part was making a flow that bridged together a wide array of subtopics without a voice over. The beginning was especially hard for me, since I knew how I wanted it to begin, but I needed to find a way to start with b-roll that looked establishing, clips that had diegetic sound/nat pops, allowed room to include the very beginning of the interview, and most importantly flowed well. I probably spent an hour and half trying to make the first minute of the documentary; I put in over 10 different clips into the timeline to see if it flowed and none worked. Eventually I got it to work, but bigger issues seemed to rise.

    The first issue I ran into was that we were initially going to have both of the photographers introduce themselves at the beginning, but it felt repetitive and didn’t flow with the b-roll or the grander structure. We cut William’s introduction since we couldn't have it flow at the beginning and it felt like a speedbump including it over a minute into the documentary, so decided to keep it concise and just keep what we needed.

    Another big decision we made was to cut out the social media influencer completely. When we planned the structure, we found a way to introduce the influencer, but as we were literally making the rough draft of the documentary the tone ended up different to what we had planned; not a terrible thing, but it just felt odd to introduce the influencer almost halfway through the documentary. Her interview also didn’t provide a super didn’t perspective to social media and authenticity. She said that much of what is success on social media is fake, which is similar to what the photographers thought of social media.

Second to last editing session.
We were hard at work

    After about 18ish hours of editing we had only a few small things let to add, so we left them for the last editing session. During the last session, my computer began to act up more than usual so I restarted and it said there was something wrong with the F Drive, a.k.a. The hard drive I use for bulk storage and that we had used to save the project. I restarted again and it wouldn’t even turn on. Now a week before I had been interviewed by my buddy John about an SD of mine from 2019 that corrupted all my footage from a project, and how I dealt with it for his documentary (Biases aside I thought it was cool, Check it out). While a relatively small project, that day when I lost my footage really hurt me and almost made me contemplate pursuing film as a career.

    Flashforward a to the final editing session and I’m beginning to see parallels to that day with the SD card. My computer wasn’t responding, and it reached the point where me and my dad had to open up the PC tower to see what was wrong. During this whole process, I kept thinking about how much a single SD with 1 project impacted me, and now here I was with my PC of 5 years thinking that the worst was going to happen. My Dad’s uncertainty and Clara looking up if Adobe Premiere projects can be recovered wasn’t helping. I believe I began to have a panic attack and went to another room to catch my breath for a few minutes. When I came back my dad was running probably the 3rd diagnostic on the computer. When it was complete he went to restart it again and after what felt like a lifetime of looking at the Dell logo, the computer finally loads to show the login screen. We all seemed cautiously optimistic as I typed in the password. When it went through, the F Drive was working again. Everything was still there.

    The wave of relief hit me like a truck and I almost burst into tears right then and there (luckily for me that only happened about 10 minutes later B] ). I told Clara that I was going to make a backup of my files and then we’d meet up again later in the day to finish the doc. And that’s what we did, we finished up, sent it to others for feedback, and then submitted. I was really happy with how it came out, both as my first try in the documentary format as well as it being the longest short form project I’ve completed. And the whole experience is something that has engraved this project in my brain. And I’m thankful for all the ups and downs that occurred. We hope to share a definitive cut soon, but for now here's the link to the version that was submitted for the initial due date. I simply can't wait to share more info about the next big project.

Post Submission Pic

I'M BACK!!!

I’ve awakened from a long slumber, and miraculously I made a documentary during that time.

    First things first, this is Clara. For eagle eyed readers, you may remember her from this blog post. We decided to work together for this documentary, which was honestly about time we finally worked together. I’ve never properly worked with her in the past, but I’ve been taking TV Production classes with her for years nowand quite frankly I wanted to see how it’d go.

An experimental short that
attempted to show what a
dream felt like

    On our first day we threw around some ideas, and eventually became fixated on a topic related to photography. Our first few ideas ranged from exploring different forms of photography to the process of developing 35mm film after physically capturing a moment. After a quick with our teacher though, she hit us with the “I think you can do better.” She did give us a bouncing off point when she mentioned that the capturing a moment part could be cool. By this point, it was the end of class and we split off to think on our own and then regroup. Luckily for us I took a nap after school and a possible structure somehow formed and I was able to write it down when I woke up before I forgot. When I told Clara she confirmed to me that it wasn’t just crazy nonsense and good, so we based our structure off a dream (Un Chien Andalou has NOTHING on this Doc)

    We were going to make a documentary about the power of “captured moments” and its influence on authenticity. We’d focus on photographers and their beliefs with staging and documentary photography. Then switching to their beliefs on social media and its influence on authenticity. Our main goal was to determine what really makes a photo or post authentic and whether or not it really matters.

    Not long after we elaborated further on topics, wrote questions, made plans to check out equipment from BECON-TV, made a film schedule, and found possible interviewees (including 2 photographers and a successful social media influencer for a separate perspective). Throughout most of the pre-planning process we’d talked with peers and an alumni about our topic and possible methods to go about practically filming the documentary. Generally speaking we were basically ready to go with everything, and we we’re very excited to begin!!!!!!!!

Schools and District offices will be closed tomorrow, Thursday, November 10. All before and after-school activities are canceled, including field trips, committee meetings and night classes. Aftercare will not be available. pic.twitter.com/KyrTwz6Ovc

— Broward Schools (@browardschools) November 9, 2022

    The hurricane had forced Clara and I to change just about everything with our schedule. We couldn’t pick up equipment since BECON-TV, a BCPS office, was closed, so all things filming were delayed. Even if we did have equipment, we were planning to film the photographers taking photos during events for b-roll, but those events ended up being postponed. We were left punching the air, but after calming down again we got back to work to make a new schedule.

    The next we had made plans to pick up equipment, film the 3 interviews, and shoot b-roll. At times it did feel very back-to-back, but we were on schedule and we were liking what we filmed. Also during that week I won a National Emmy, so that also helped with giving me an extra boost of excitement for the documentary. Anyways by the end of the week, all we had to do was edit.

Very Cool Thing