DOCUMENTARY TITLE: Thoughts and Beats
PRODUCER
Siavash Giahchi
DIRECTOR
Cristiana-Ioana Turcu
EDITOR
Siavash Giahchi
Metin Bulent
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAHPY
Cristiana-Ioana Turcu
CAMERA OPERATOR
Jordan Steel
BOOM OPERATOR
Metin Bulent
STARRING
Eren Gürcan-Kempfer
Our observational documentary ‘Thoughts and Beats’ aims to cover two very contrasting subjects that our protagonist, Eren Gürcan-Kempfer is interested in: music and philosophy. I find our subject very interesting but also very difficult in respect of how we can portray Eren’s story and his passions. In this critical essay I will be discussing how I have used images, lighting and sound to interrogate and represent a real event/situation.
I would like to begin with discussing about the events and actions that happened ahead of the actual filming the documentary. Before we went to film on the location, I had a discussion with my team about how I visualized this documentary. As a leader of my group and as director as well, I have organized the team in order to be very proactive and productive. I planned to finish shooting in two days and this is how it happened. Prior to the day when we had to be on the location and film, I had a couple of meetings with Eren, the protagonist. I went with him in his favourite places in order to show me where he gets the inspiration from. Together with Eren I decided where the shots will be and also the interviews. I must say that it was a difficult task to manage our schedule with his schedule.
In these meetings that I had with Eren I conversed with him about music and philosophy. Subsequent to the meetings and discussions I have compiled a set of questions, which I thought may provoke such a response that the audience can understand his approach to philosophy and music. I asked Eren the same questions I asked in the interviews, and it seemed that was too much information. Then, I asked Eren to show us what he is doing instead of talking about it. So, basically from here I to write down where to film, what to film, what are the main questions and what are the shots that will help to tell the story.
Secondarily, I would like to discuss about the process from the initial idea to the final cut. After I have planned the interviews, the settings, the shots, we wrote the Statement of intent. I am quite pleasant because our Statement of intent is the same with the original idea and with the documentary. We managed our time very well and also we established the shots before filming so, in this way we will not waste time when we have to film. Initially we wanted to make this documentary as real as possible and therefore I kept talking with Eren to be himself and to forget that the camera is there. I wanted to explore with our documentary actual people and actual situations. Again, it was difficult because it is not a film, where everything is scripted, we had to deal with everything unexpected and treat it like is normal, we have to keep going.
I went together with Eren and with the producer (Siavash Giahchiand) to take pictures of the places where we will be shooting. Because I thought this is very effective for when we actually had to film. John Grierson defined the documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality” therefore I took my time and planned this documentary well before the actual day. ‘The modern documentary differs from its earlier and more scripted form because technology allows us to record events and authorial consciousness as they unfold.’ (Michael Rabinger, pages 4 to 5). I spend time with Eren, in order to see how is he like, I have listened to his mixing, I met his friends and I was taking notes. In this way I started visualising the flow of the story within the documentary. I started thinking of the places for interviews and I established the shots.
We planned two days of shooting. We had written down what we had to shot what we had to ask and also a rough draft of the story flow. We decided to film all the interviews first in one day and next time the observational only. It was very interesting and difficult but fun in the same time. Because I wanted this documentary to be very fresh and very real and not boring I decided to film all the interviews in real locations with natural light. Thus, we all met very early in the morning around 8 we fixed the equipment and start filming, because we needed the natural light. Some interviews are filmed indoors, for some of them me used the reflector and for the others just the lighting from the room.
It is very difficult to work with the camera especially when me had to film people in the library or when we had to film in the bar ‘The Union’. People get very intimidated by it and therefore sometimes is a bit difficult to reproduce the same shot one had on the paper designed. I must admit that the camera work was brilliant. Our cameraman (Jordan Steel) managed to get all the shots we were looking for and he captured all the footage that we wanted in a very professional manner.
The first shots, the establishing shots, were very easy to film, they are very good shots but they would have been better if it was summer so we can have all the colours of the trees and flowers to perfectly fill the frame. There are a couple of scenes where the camera follows Eren, for example these shots were very good mastered. Jordan handled the camera very good, we don’t have any wobbly shots and they perfectly frame Eren while he is walking. Another shot that I like very much is the one when Eren is sitting in the tree and the camera is slowly focusing on the subject and zooming out. All the footage that we had came out grate because we have planned everything before. There are a couple of scenes outside that we needed to reshoot because the boom was in the frame but at the end, we had all the shots the way we looking for.
For us the interviews were very stressful and time consuming, not to mention very hilarious. They were fun to shoot because was the easiest job just hold the boom not to be in the frame, set the camera in the right position, ask questions and watch the speaker. Couple of interviews were reshoot as well, because everyone was amused by nothing, with no reason we started laughing. This was the fun part which I must admit was not very professional for us to do this, but you cannot predict or avoid this kind of situations. In a sense it makes me feel happy that we had fun because it shows our relationship between each member of the team. So this was for us time consuming in a sense. Now this was the fun part, the part that was very stressful is when we realized that we have too much information about anything else except what we were looking for. We completely changed the questions and asked different ones in order to get the answers to tell the story.
When we had to shoot the observational scenes it was very frustrating. As I mentioned earlier, people are very intimidated in front of the camera or they change their behaviour immediately. This is not what we were looking for obviously because this influenced our subject Eren many times and as a result we had to reshoot. For example, for the scene in the kitchen we were prepared before shooting this scene I went in the kitchen and told everyone not to make faces in front of the camera so everyone behaved accordingly. We had some trouble in the library when we filmed because we were interviewing Eren and it was quite loud for a library atmosphere. The filming in the library was difficult from the two main points of view. First we were not allowed to film in the library, second while we were filming people were hiding or laughing. We wanted a normal quiet ambiance for the shot to represent the real atmosphere of the library. After three attempts of shooting we finally got our footage which was quite good.
In all of my observational scenes I wanted to let the camera capture everything. The inspiration behind this came from one of the documentaries viewed in class, Titicut Follies the black and white documentary made in 1967 by the American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. However, the footage was too long and we had to cut it out so we can fit everything in a 10 minutes documentary.
The sound was not a problem for us, we had a good sound overall thanks to our boom operator (Metin Bulent). The scene in the kitchen didn’t come out very well in terms of sound because Metin forgot to check if the boom is on, not only the camera microphone. The only issue we had apart from the scene in the kitchen, was the obvious one when the boom is in the shot, but again we reshoot the scene. Surprisingly we managed to have a very good sound in the library when we had the interview. Although it was quiet and perfect for recording, there were a lot of students studying and we told Eren not to speak loud or very quietly. Metin had to place the boom as closer as possible to Eren’s mouth without being in the shot or without creating a shadow on his face. With ups and downs we got our sound and image perfectly.
The editing process was very interesting and very tiring, although we had two editors unfortunately just one was with me in the editing room. We had a lot of footage to cut from. We didn’t read the booklet properly and therefore we had to suffer the consequences. We didn’t film our observational part bearing in mind that we had to tell the story with images first and the interviews. However, I still believe that our observational is good but not very good as it could have been if we had paid attention.
First, we started with editing the observational part then we started editing the interviews. When we edited the observational piece we felt that something was missing, the flow of the story without interviews. This is our fault but we didn’t have time to reshoot or to rethink all the process from the beginning. So we cut all the bits that we thought were too long or were repetitive or they were not saying anything and we succeeded in having more or less a story without a voice added. We also did another mistake, when we recorded the scene in the bar an observational one we didn’t recorded it with sound because we had something else in mind like a voice over for this shot or a cut way . For that reason, we had to take the sound form another shot in the bar and place it on the image which didn’t have sound.
Once we finished editing the observational part we moved on the editing the interviews. For every single interview we set the audio levels where was necessary and we also cut out the unnecessary bits. After we finished with this we moved on editing the observational and the interviews as a documentary. We added all the interviews in the observational part. Here we realized that we have too much uninteresting footage and information which didn’t improve our documentary. We improved our scene from the kitchen were the sound was not very good. We started to really like our project once it made more sense because we consistently got feedback from our teacher and this is how we improved our editing and we learned a lot. We added some soundtracks from Eren’s mixing music in order to represent his personality and his state of mind at that particular moment.
I must say that the observational part made us think more about the documentary and it really brought a meaning to our work. We learnt that first we need to be able to tell a story with images then the voice comes last. We used all the interviews for our final project along with the edited observational part. We used as a voice over some interviews in order to have a narrative flow to the documentary.
All most all the techniques used in this documentary were more or less inspired be two main documentaries that I like in particular such as: Titicut Follies directed by Frederick Wiseman and Peter and Ben directed by Pinny Grylls. May seem an odd choice but I took the observational scenes and techniques from Titicut Follies in order to tell the story exactly how it is and the narrative structure from Peter and Ben.
I wanted definitely to have the narrative structure that I saw in Peter and Ben but still it doesn’t mean that I didn’t insert my own style in this documentary. But I wanted every time I watch this documentary to flow nicely, in terms of telling a true story with real people in real situations in a different manner like a story with images rather than a documentary. I find our story very interesting, different and challenging to put it into motion without spoiling the beauty of the story, therefore the aim of our group is to tell the viewer the story as it is. Michael Rabiger argues that ‘There are different levels of respect for the audience’s intelligence, and whichever is used becomes part of an implied contract between communicator and audience’. (Michael Rabiger, pages 8 to 9)
One of my ambitions was to engage the audience more with the character for example, when Eren says ‘Listen to the leaves’ the viewer must really listen. My target was to portray to the audience Eren`s different feelings and emotions towards his music, and his life studying philosophy. I also added music tracks in order to capture the viewer’s attention and to express what is in Eren’s mind at that moment. We as a group wanted to tell the audience Eren’s way of living two different lives which in fact is one through stimulating interviews to accurately portray his story to the audience. We wanted like this to ultimately provoke questions in the viewer’s mind as to what he will be doing in the future and to what extent his life as a DJ matters to him.
Working with Eren was sometimes difficult and sometimes fun. When you are getting your equipment ready it takes a while and people get bored easily especially Eren. And it is very easy to get distracted by listening to music or eating, speaking about something completely different and is easy to transmit the same feeling to the rest of the people. We have been through hard time putting people to work because of that.
The observational/improvised shooting strategies are so different from the more controlled, rehears shooting strategies of the drama project. For the drama project we knew exactly what we were going to shoot. We already knew the angles the actors everything was scripted. On the other hand, documentary is nothing like that. If something happens you have to deal with it, you cannot just stop recording and fix the problem and start over. Once I analyzed the difference between the drama project and this documentary project I wanted to have a sincere documentary and engage the audience and let the viewer draw conclusions ‘ A good film, like a good friend, engages us actively, and never patronizes or manipulates either its subjects or its audience.’ (Michael Rabiger, pages 8 to 9)
For the interviews you must pay attention to see if the person answers you question because if not you basically have a footage full of nonsense. It was very difficult to shot a documentary than a drama project, because you have to deal unexpected situations and make decisions right away that you not necessarily like or entirely agree. This happened with us, when we had to shoot the observational part in the library, people were coming and looking at the camera and asking questions or we were in their way. As difficult as it is I find it very empowering and this experience made me grow as a director and it convinced me that I have to take quick decisions right away in order for the camera to keep recording.
If I had the chance to redo the entire project I would like to change, defiantly my team not all of it just the producer. I would like also to rethink some scenes for example, the one in the kitchen. I still believe that with a better team we could have done much more and probably a more interesting subject. However, I am quite happy with what we have so far I wouldn’t change much.
To conclude, I have discussed how I have used images, lighting and sound to interrogate and represent a real event/situation. I have learnt so much from this experience and therefore I would like to quote Michael Rabinger ‘Directing well takes a highly evolved consciousness, both of the world you are filming and of the process by which it will be presented. How do you get to that stage? By practice. So be prepared for your first work to me clumsy and naive. Be prepared for an incredibly long and demanding process. Be prepared to grow from being wrong over and over again, and knowing that is sometimes takes great persistence to keep going, especially when you feel defeated.’
ENJOY !
Let me know in the comments section how did you like the short documentary .
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