Once we’d decided on Beach Of The Dead, we began the process of trying to contact its founder, Katie Amer. Unfortunately, this proved to be an extremely difficult task, and to add more difficulty, we discovered that the event itself won’t be taking place this year. There wasn’t any explanation as to why online, only rumors on message boards about ‘financial’ and ‘health and safety issues.’

We began to try and think of how we could still film it, with Katie Amer having seemingly vanished, and no event to actually film. In order to create something, we knew we’d need to change our narrative, so that’s exactly what we did. Instead of making the documentary about the event’s journey and how it came to be, we’ve decided to focus on how it came to an end, and the way in which passion based projects struggle to survive in an increasingly commercial and consumerist world.

After asking around, we eventually had some luck, and have managed to make contact with the organizers of Beach of The Dead, whom are happy to be interviewed.

We still can’t film the actual event, but we managed to capture some footage of a zombie themed night at Apocalypse. I spoke with the owner and got the permission for us to shoot there, so that we’d have something visual and relevant to use in the way of footage with our documentary. We captured plenty of footage to work with on the night, and there will be stock clips from the old Beach of the Dead events online for us to work with also.

We’ll be using the pub that Tom works at as an interview location, so in order to prepare, we’ll do an equipment test there and see what sort of lighting/sound problems there are and how to avoid them.

 

When it came to the individual pitches for our main project, I went back and forth between ideas, searching the internet for the strangest possible places and people I could find in Brighton. While I was doing this, however, it occurred to me that strangeness would only achieve so much, and be a mere novelty if there wasn’t a narrative to explore beyond aesthetic or general quirkiness.

The place I decided on was Apocalypse, a metal night club in Brighton, and the only one of its kind in the area. While there are plenty of alternative venues and locations in the city, this is the one real ‘club’ scenario for the metal community. Having been there multiple times before, I felt like I knew enough about it in order to form an interesting documentary idea around it.

I took into account everything I learned in the first session about documentary focusing on people, and decided that I would center my idea around not the place Apocalypse itself, but the people it attracts. There are many stereotypes about the metalhead community, such as its members being antisocial and miserable, but Apocalypse, just like any ‘mainstream’ club, is full of people dancing and having fun. It’s an incredibly social and positive place, so by capturing this on camera, I thought I would be able to conclusively disprove a lot of the stereotypes, and challenge society’s perceptions of the metalhead community.

Out of the two documentary modes we had available, this would have been participatory, since I would have wanted to incorporate interviews, music and narration throughout.

After everyone pitched, my group decided to go with Zain’s ‘Beach Of The Dead’ idea, where we’ll be focusing on its creator, Katie Amer.

 

We encountered our first problem almost immediately when it came to interviewing, as the person whom was going to be our subject pulled out at the last minute. Fortunately, we had prepared for this eventuality, and had back-ups in mind. Taking on board also the lesson of speed, we made sure we were set-up before the interviewee had even arrived. This made the interview process itself much quicker and more efficient.

Despite having phrased our questions in an open manner, the answers we got at first weren’t being phrased in a way which would make sense without the context of the question itself.  We gave our interviewee some polite direction, and quickly corrected this without issue.

After this point, everything went smoothly and according to plan.

This week we focused on cameras, working out how to set up and use them for shooting documentary video. I’m quite confident working with DSLRs already, but the Sony X70s we were introduced to today proved to be a much more of a challenge.

When we were tasked with simply assembling and dissembling the camera and tripod, I jumped in thinking that it would be easy. It actually proved to be a little tricky, at least to do quickly, and as I learned today, there’s a need for quick set-up in the documentary industry.  Unlike on narrative fiction film sets, where there’s a fixed schedule for setting up and filming, documentary filmmakers don’t always know what they’re filming or where. Interviews can come about quite spontaneously, and it’s important to be able to get everything set up as quickly as possible, so the interviewee doesn’t become impatient.

There were plenty of camera features I’d never come across before that we learned today, such as white balance and iris. Playing around with them made me realize how much of an impact colour can have on the tone of different footage. Since we’re filming documentary rather than fiction, the main aim would be not to create a specific mood through colour, but to match what the camera sees exactly to what we see, in order to truthfully represent the location.

We explored the various methods of recording interview audio (shotgun mic, radio mic) and found that the right choice depends on the location. For our one minute project, we’ll be shooting indoors for the interview, so the issue of background noise shouldn’t be a problem. Usually, a radio mic would be one of the preferred choices, but we found today that attaching one can be difficult if the interviewee is wearing clothing that’s hard to clip onto, such as hoodies. Since our interviewees for the one minute project will be university students, and the way we dress generally isn’t particularly ‘radio mic friendly’, we’ll be opting for the shotgun directional microphone instead.

In regards to interview technique, I learned from an exercise that the interviewer’s body language is incredibly important, and has a much greater influence on the interviewee than I realized. If the person being interviewed is closed off and nervous, the interviewer can relax them by mirroring their body language. By synchronizing with the interviewee, the interviewer is able to psychologically calm their subject, and subsequently make them much more cooperative. Asking open questions rather than closed ones is equally important. Since I’ll be the one asking the questions when we interview for our one minute project, I’ll keep these things in mind, staying conscious of body language and phrasing our questions in an open but specific manner.

Today was the initial introduction to the course. We began by delving into the meaning of documentary itself, something which, being a primarily fictional filmmaker, I’d never given much thought.  After a group discussion, it became clear to me that there are a lot of common misconceptions about what documentary really is. Up until this point, I’ve always considered it to mean ‘non fiction film’ – in other words, any film without a fictional narrative.

But now that I know that documentary always involves people. Rather than just informing the audience on a particular subject, a documentary holds up a mirror to different parts of society, telling the stories of human beings in an objective way. Therefore, shows like Blue Planet, where the subjects are animals, aren’t really documentaries at all.

In narrative fiction, the subject is also people, but there seems to be more of a focus on relationships and individual feelings. With documentary, on the other hand, there’s much more of a focus on facts and specific information. I can see how not following this rule when making a documentary could lead to bias and compromise the integrity of your finished film.