Documentary

Introduction To Documentary

The documentary unit primarily focuses on building your skills as a storyteller and a reporter. A lot of focus was on creating stories out of evidence you gathered, and learning how to ask compelling and layered questions in oder to gain intriguing information. This in turn can help you in spotlighting important issues in the community, portraying subject pieces of interesting people or organizations, or promoting a certain ideology or product.

I chose to document one of my main passions in life, that being collecting and listening to physical music (Vinyl Records, CDs, etc.). My friend Cristian and I teamed up for this project because we have the same interests, and together we set to interview other people who collected records. This eventually led us to Paige Brodsky, the head manager of Streetlight Records on Bascom Avenue (the place where I purchase all of my music), who offered many insightful comments on the industry in the age of streaming and lent a lot of credibility to our project. Once we had all of our footage and interviews we still had the issue of trying to assemble a story out of it because our research didn’t entail a bigger picture, merely various perspectives on one issue. We decided to tie these stories together by interviewing an artist named Jim Dewrance who plays the blues. Jim gave us a good closer for our documentary story and we were able to hammer out a film that sets out to show physical media consumers in the age of streaming.

Looking back on this documentary I feel like I made something that I’m really proud of. My passion for music collecting is evident through our film making, and even though our film doesn’t have a story per-se it captures the spirit and the joy of owning and using physical media. The one thing that I’m most disappointed about this project is the fact that we weren’t able to interview a wider variety of collectors and musicians, and one day I wish to make a full project based on all types of physical media, not just music related formats.

 

Documentary Paper

We were required to write a companion paper along with our main documentary project. It was supposed to be reflective of either a book or a magazine article. I chose to do the latter because I felt like the reporting format of the documentary would suit an informative magazine article more.

RichardF – Documentary Paper

 

Documentary Film

This is my main product that came out of the documentary unit. Cristian and I worked hard on trying to fit every interviewee’s voice into the final product and hammering out all of the cramps and we think it turned out very well. It has an energetic style to it and does a thorough report on the subject matter.

 

Mocumentary Film

Aside from the main documentary film we were told to make a mocumentary for practice. If you are not familiar with mocumentaries, they’re a form of parody that pokes fun at the cliches of a documentary or centers around a fake but played off as real subject. My mocumentary is about one of our teachers and a fake hunt that revolves around his pelt.

 

Photogallery