On Black Friday of 2023, I bought a few courses from The Art of Documentary – a filmmaking class put together by Mark Bone (who I discovered via his excellent YouTube channel).
Once or twice a year, AOD runs a One Day Doc competition, which has the following format:
- The contest runs for a 30 day period
- You have 24 consecutive hours to shoot a film
- You get the rest of the time to do all the other work – pre-production, editing, post, etc.
This year’s competition ran 17 May - 14 Jun, and I didn’t finish my Miyazaki essay until 23 May, so I was late to the game…
But I <3 deadlines, so looked through my ideas-for-docs notebook, and I saw this:
on SaveArtSpace: https://www.saveartspace.org/team (replacing billboards with art)
Rob had turned me on to SaveArtSpace when he saw one of their billboards in Bushwick back in 2022. I (of course) LOVED everything about the project and have been following SaveArtSpace since then.
I saw on their website that their founder (Travis Rix) was in NYC, and I cold-emailed him. Within a day, Travis emailed me back, and within a day we had a shoot scheduled for 6 Jun 2024. This would leave me a little over a week to edit and do all the post production… but I <3 deadlines! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The shoot went well, and I got something submitted – a quick 6 minute profile of the organization, including interviews with some of the artists currently on display – Yolanda Hoskey (in Crown Heights) and Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan (in Washington Heights).
We got far more footage than we could cram into 6 mins, so we may go back and do a slightly longer cut,
but the deadline definitely worked as a motivator to get SOMETHING done ;)
With all the film projects I work on, I like to write up a retro of what I learned. Here’s the retro for this project:
- Story vs Topic
- Before and After Questions
- Return to Key Themes at Each Location
- Prep List
- PA Prep
- Subject Prep
- Image Stabilization is Hard
- Shot Retro
- DJI Mic Recording Mode
- Thanks
- Final Thoughts
Story vs Topic
Perhaps the most emphasized point in the AOD classes is that you should use a real CHARACTER – someone with goals, encountering obstacles, struggling through verite scenes – to drive your documentary.
Luc Forsyth says basically the same thing in this video:
A 10-year Himalayan expedition is not necessarily a better STORY than a film about a senior citizen walking up the hill behind the retirement home every day for 15 years.
It’s just a more dramatic TOPIC…
If the film about the senior tells a real STORY – while the expedition film is just a bunch of eye candy visuals strung together with an Imagine Dragons song playing in the background – the first project is going to be much much better.
Finally, the character needs to RESOLVE their journey. The journey may or may not be successful, but either way we need to see the character CHANGE or LEARN something.
Looking back at the short doc we made for this project, I think we had a great TOPIC, but not necessarily a great STORY.
We learned from Travis that his mission was to (1) replace billboards with art and (2) give (ideally new / first time) artists a place to display their art in public, ideally in their own neighborhoods.
We go into the wild, see the invasion of advertisements on the streets, meet artists, and hear from the artists themselves who cool it is to get texts and calls from their friends who look up and see their artwork on billboards.
We get a “mission-accomplished” feeling, but we don’t necessarily encounter a ton of obstacles along the way or see a dramatic change in the main character of the story, Travis.
On the one hand, with only one day to shoot I’m not sure there was the opportunity to do a whole lot better than this for this project, but on the other hand, I left the project wondering if there was something we might have done slightly differently to give us a bit more of a concrete story ARC….
Before and After Questions
Perhaps, we could have asked more questions comparing his before and after feelings to get more of his thoughts about how he has changed over the years he has worked on SaveArtSpace:
- What has changed for you since you started SaveArtSpace?
- What has surprised you?
- What has disappointed you?
Return to Key Themes at Each Location
We might have (more intentionally) returned to KEY THEMES at every location. From the initial call we had done (and then the long interview we did at the beginning of the shoot day) – we had a sense of what was important to Travis and SaveArtSpace, viz:
- fighting back against advertising
- displaying art from first time artists
- displaying art in neighborhoods where the artists lived
- displaying art that gets people to think
- co-opting corporate space to put up images that evoke critical thought and feeling from viewers
Luckily, (1) Travis evoked a response from each artist we met about the importance of having the art in their local neighborhoods, and (2) Travis had a lot to say about the history of outdoor advertising in Brooklyn as we passed areas that inspired the founding of SaveArtSpace.
This stuff (imo) really helped hold a longer arc together and I think is what gave the film the “mission-accomplished” feeling you (hopefully) get by the end.
Prep List
As usual, I made a little prep-list / call-sheet, but I think I could templatize this to ensure I hit all the things I want to do. Things that come to mind:
- safety meeting ✅
- lenses - wipe all of them down the night before ❌ - you can see a smudge in a few shots
:/ - bmpcc4k - reset the internal clock in both cameras so the date time created on each new video file is correct ❌
- white balance camera - at every location ❌
- record audio room tone - at every location ❌
- do a bit of production design - at every location ❌ - eg, in one shot, there’s a laptop in the background we could easily have screen-wiped down and I should have checked the visual on screen in the monitor (looked much better OFF than with a graphic on the screen - plus OFF just makes more sense for continuity)
PA Prep
I had a few generous but not-as-experienced friends help out with some of the PA and camera work on this set. I think perhaps part of the safety meeting could be devoted to a beginner tips tutorial. Things like:
- Don’t start shooting / interviewing the subject while someone from the crew is in frame. We got some great but unusable footage where I was mic-ing one of the artists that I wish we could have used.
- Don’t break the fourth wall.
Subject Prep
Along the same lines, I think even for docs prepping the subjects a bit more would help.
- Whenever possible, try to call ACTION and CUT for each shot, so we don’t start rolling when a camera is out of focus.
- When shooting a conversation, remind the subjects not to speak over one another.
- I also think we could have run the artist interviews a bit less like interviews and made them more casual.
- One thought I had was I wonder how this would have felt different if I had conducted the interviews (vs having Travis have a conversation with the subjects). At the very least, I think we could have gotten more footage of the artist talking TO the camera.
Image Stabilization is Hard
We primarily shot on BlackMagic Pocket Cinema 4k cameras, and even with the built in Camera Gyro Stabilization Mode in Resolve, the image stabilization was far from perfect – particularly when we were shooting with longer lenses. On our pickups day I made far more use of my camera strap which seemed to help reduce the shakes a bit. Note to self: use the camera strap immediately next time!
Shot Retro
Some things I wish we had done differently:
- Better image stabilization on main shoot day (eg with straps).
- For conversations, ensure shots are MORE DISTINCT. I wish we had more shots of just the ARTIST (without Travis) in frame.
- For profile shots (especially in the long interview), get both eyes in frame. We really on got access to one eye in the profile shot.
- Shoot establishing shots. Shreyans got a great one of Yolanda that we used, but (1) I wish the shot were much longer and (2) I wish we had these for everyone else we talked to.
DJI Mic Recording Mode
I thought Recording Mode controlled how wav files were recorded to each microphone, but apparently this only controls the signal sent from the 1/8 jack on the DJI Mic Receiver marked OUT. More in Sound Recording Notes.
Thanks
To everyone who helped out!
- SaveArtSpace Founder - Travis Rix
- Artist - Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan
- Artist - Yolanda Hoskey
- DP + Color - Rob
- Camera 2 - Shreyans
- PA - Anthea
- PA - Miguel
- PA - Nam
Final Thoughts
All-in-all, I’m pretty happy with the way this came out, and I’m going to be in touch with Travis about opportunities to get a bit more of a “journey” on camera so we might flesh this out into something slightly longer.