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.