Documentary Plan: 'Mouth' Presentation

HERE IS THE SLIDES & BRIEF SCRIPT ON THE PRESENTATION FOR OUR DOCUMENTARY PLAN ON THE MOUTH

Idea Development - Slide 2 - George

The idea of making a documentary on ‘the mouth’ wasn’t put forward by anyone in our group. But we’re all intrigued upon the idea of the subject because of its great potential and numerous approaches to it. Since the mouth is part of a person, or a place on a person, the idea meets the criteria of the project brief. Now that we had our initial idea, we then had to logistically plan our creative documentary project and develop upon our ideas in terms of how to structure our documentaries from its narrative structure to its and visual aesthetic.

Logistical Planning/Creative Development - Slide 3 - Ben

The first thing we did as a group to develop our ideas was to creating a mind map about the mouth. That way, everyone’s ideas could taken on board and associations could be made between peoples suggestions, sparking further ideas. Practicality of finding participants

Audience and Style - Slide 4 - Mariah

Hiring Crew & Equipment - Slide 5 - Roshana

Hiring crew and equipment is vital in the productions stages, so organization is key. Since our crew would consist of just our group, we have to share the roles between us and exchange them during the production process so everyone would get a chance to play a different role. Equipment we will be using shall be the Sony Z1 to film, shotgun mic with boompole attachment, if needed, for sound. One of the tripods in the Sony Z1 kit and Adobe software on the macs.

-       Difficulty in booking equipment SISO

-       Edit Location/Freedom

Schedule the Shoot - Slide 6 - George

Scheduling the shoot is another important area in the production stage that requires a lot of organization. Sometimes your crew, equipment and cast may not all be available at the same time, so finding a date, time and location that’s suitable for everyone is vital.

We worked out what days of the week each of us were free to work on to film and edit our documentary. We concluded that on Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons would be days we could commit to filming and also having the weekends to work with on things too. We aim to shoot all our footage we need in 3 weeks, but to start on our post-production edit as soon as we get recordings as different interviewees will have different availability. Once we gain consent from our interviewees that we can film them. Being organised with time keeping makes the filming a more efficient process. We must ensure once we’ve secured a date and time to record an interview is to book the equipment via SISO as soon as possible.

Budget/Finance - Slide 7 - Ben

Being students, none of us have much petty cash spare to fund a major production so we had to be realistic in terms of what impacts this could have upon our production. For instance, when choosing our interviewees or locations, they had to be people and places we could have access to at as little expense as possible. Therefore, we knew our locations and interviewees had to be people based on Campus, in Brighton or anywhere, which our group could sensibly reach.

-       Werner stealing equipment

Researching/Sourcing - Slide 8 - Mariah

From our mind map and creative planning, we knew that we would want to interview people who had a profession that involved the mouth in some form. By doing research on the mouth this would gives us a better knowledge on who we could contact for an interview and what sort of questions we could ask them.

-       Definitions of the mouth/dictionary

-       Relate it to Werner

-       Research on interviewees field of work

Scripting/Storyboards/ShotLists - Slide 9 - Roshana

When it comes to scripting and storyboarding, this stage of the production allows you to share your potential vision with others, saves you times and makes the product run more smoothly.

Because of the uncertainty of the interviewees responses, we don’t know what cutaways we’d need beforehand, however with our interviewees, we’d always frame them appropriately with a mid shot to the side of the frame.

Werner didn’t do storyboard...FIND QUOTE

We knew this would need some area of thought but not too much as we didn’t want to come up with our cutaway shot lists before we attained our interview footage. That way we could acquire more cutaways that reflect on the interview dialogue rather than constructing our dialogue around our cutaways.

We have come up with a script for our questions, keeping them open ended so our interviewees could have a more detailed and less limited response to them. The storyboarding of our documentary is important as when it comes to filming our interviewees and cutaways, we will instantly know what shots we need and how to frame them, making the filming more time efficient

Casting - Slide 10 - Ben

As a group, once we came up with our narrative, we looked towards industries and professions that involve the mouth and could provide a good insight and knowledge on the subect.. I contacted many different people from our list, asking if they’d be willing to be involved by being interviewed for our documentary project. We contacted local dentists, make up artists, biologists, tattooists, sommeliers, musicians, bi-linguists and so on. [change to next slide] We wanted as many options as possible so that we could choose who to interview rather than having limitations for our documentary, such as not having enough people to interview. This is because not all who have been contacted will respond, want to be part of the documentary or their availability to meet our deadline.

We have received one response already, confirming their willing participantcy 

Recce - Slide 14 - George

Deciding on locations to shoot in for our documentary is crucial for the mise-en-scene as it signifies aspects of our interviewees. Herzog is known to use the mise-en-scene to reinforce meaning behind what the audience is being told. For example, in Grizzly Man, we would hear Herzog’s narration about the loneliness of living amongst the bears in the wild, it would then cut to a long shot of the Timothy, alone in a vast landscape. Therefore we wanted to base our locations around the places of work of our interviewees. For example we’d have the dentist in a dental practice clinic rather than sitting in park as it would harder for our audience to accept its authenticity of our interviewees.  For our cutaways, we knew they had to be relevant to the piece. Therefore, we decided that we wanted  to get as many cutaways of our interviewees place of work as well as basing it them around the answers they give to our questions. If the interviews cannot take place in the interviewees place of work if then we would have to book out the studio on campus to interview them there instead.

Narrative - Ben + George 

Werner Herzog, now 72, is a German filmmaker. He is seen as great figure in the New German Cinema movement, which originated in the 1960s-80s. He has made both documentary and fiction films, with his documentaries focusing on Bells From The Deep and Grizzly Man are prime examples.

His style of documentary filmmaking consists of expository and participatory mode techniques. Infact, he actually parodies the expository mode by his voice of god narration with his authoritive German accent.

From Herzog’s style to ours, we aim to convey the message that the mouth is a significant part of the body by raising awareness of the functions it has in our life. Therefore our choice of interviewees construct the evidence for our argument, whether this may be a good or bad thing as we no control over what they may say. If we do choose to convey a specific message, we shall use Herzog’s technique of voice of God to persuade our audience towards a certain argument.

From a narrative perspective, we aim to make a short length documentary feature the mouth and the implications it has by being part of our body. We want to engage our audience by making them critically think and be aware of the potential a part of their body has, for good or for bad by selection of whom we interview. Our interviews will consist of asking our interviewees open ended questions to our subject such as how their profession involves the mouth and hopefully then making a personal connection between our subject and interviewee, making our audience reflect upon the information given..

Visually - Mariah + Roshana