Critical Reflection

  About a month or so ago I worked on a documentary for my AICE Media class. I worked with two other students: Meghan and Nadia. Are guidelines were to make a 5 minute documentary in 2 weeks. We decided to have our subject be a 17 year old high school student named Kyle Dutra who loves the art of graffiti, and knows a lot about it. Though this documentary he explains his love for street art, along with how he’s channeled his love into his own work. 

    The goal in my documentary was to give a voice to those who are silenced, so representation was a big part of this documentary. My documentary followed a high school student who is highly influenced by the culture of graffiti, and adds his own spin on it in his sketchbooks. A goal of mine is to create films that represent diverse experiences and bring joy to audiences, which is what I made sure to highlight in my documentary. The stigma surrounding graffiti is negative, as most in society see these artists as “trashy”. According to a study done by YouGov, only 14% of Americans enjoy street art. Being able to get a perspective of a young man who is inspired by these artists is a unique perspective that I highly enjoyed obtaining. 

Before this I along with many other people assumed that this art form was just for the fun of breaking the law, but it has a lot more behind it. First of all, not all street art is illegal, as some areas and businesses take a liking to this art and pay artists to create this art form. It’s a rare thing to see, but has grown over the years. I was informed that many of these artists who do illegal spray paint, do it for the thrill and adrenaline. They use it as a coping mechanism or an outlet for their emotions, both positive and negative. I was able to inform others on a different perspective surrounding the issue of how these artists are viewed. It’s good to know that even if my documentary effected one person, it taught them that these artists aren’t “trashy” and are under appreciated. 

    My interviewee mentioned how he comes from a Brazilian background during his interview, so I decided to go more into it. He described the difference in the graffiti in America and Brazil, stating that Brazil is the “capital” of graffiti. He explained how he has gotten lots of inspiration from what he sees during his visits to Brazil, mostly influencing how he does his letters. I didn’t expect his ethnicity to have such an influence of him, and seeing that it does opened up a new perspectives of how I would structure this into my documentary. I was able to include this part of the interview because I believed it was such a crucial part, and I have no regrets. It shows how culture affects artists, a topic not spoken about frequently. 

    My product engages with audiences in many ways. Firstly, through the sound designed used. The constant change of music keeps the audience focused and entertained, as most people enjoy the music. Having something to distract having a “talking head” elevates a piece, and makes it flow better. Another way my product keeps the audience engaged is the fast cuts. During the part when he goes throw his sketchbook, we used up to 3 angles to show what he was talking about, keeping the audience entertained as there was something new to look at every couple of seconds. When Kyle was drawing on his iPad, we obtained a screen recording and included that, which also kept the audience entertained as they were seeing the literal iPad screen. Apart from this scene, we included fast cuts in-between b-roll and interview. We included a 2nd angle to also make this piece intriguing. The use of so many different shots kept the viewers entertained throughout the piece.

    This documentary has a target audience of ages 15-30, any gender, in an urban setting. I used different methods to ensure that this target audience related, or enjoyed this piece. One way I did this was buy using music that many people in Gen-Z listen to. Hearing music they are familiar drags the viewer into a piece, as it feels more personal. Another way the target audience was hit was because I interviewed a high school student. He has many similar experiences to people in this target audience, making it easy to understand and/or relate to him on a personal level. 

     My product challenged conventions because most people wouldn’t even dare to do a documentary on a topic like this one. Many people wouldn’t take the risk tackling an interest that has had issues with the law. Many sources online have publicly displayed their dislike to graffiti. According to Vincire, “Graffiti attacks can ruin the reputation of many businesses.”. This along with many different sources express their disliking towards graffiti using points such as the one stated. In the legal realm, states have even gone as far to make the legal age as 21 to buy spray paint (New York). This law was part of the city’s anti-graffiti effort, which shows how much government officials dislike street art. It’s clear they don’t support it and want to stop it from spreading.

        I also experimented a lot with lighting, which is something not commonly seen in documentaries. Watching a video with something new or unusual grabs the viewer’s attention. It makes the story more interesting and memorable.

     Overall, this documentary was an amazing experience that taught me a lot. From technicals, to 

how I choose to structure, I was able to pick up on many film making tactics that I will use moving forward. But most importantly, I learned valuable information about these artists, as many people who you see as unacceptable in society are actually really good people, and you shouldn’t put labels on them just based on what they like to do. 

Production Day 2 and Post Production

 Nadia picked up the equipment during her privilege before the interview and it was A LOT to carry to say the least. 

It also took a long time to setup, because we had so many lights and cameras, shot in a tight space, and my group members had never worked with this sort of equipment before. We had to be out at a certain time, so we were rushing to get it setup. This caused me us to not get the best looking 2nd angle. I liked the lighting in the shot, although we did receive a critique on the lighting. People thought the blue was too harsh, but I liked it. 

(without color grading)

We honestly should've just cut out the 2nd angle but we didn't. 

(without color grading)

One challenge we had while filming was forgetting the mics, stupid mistake. I have forgotten mics for interviews before (maybe I should be more responsible) so I knew what to do. I hid my phone to as close to his face as possible, and captured the audio on voice memos. iPhone's actually have really good audio quality. I use it a lot for my videos in my TV productions class and no one has ever said anything about the quality, so I wasn't too worried about filming the audio on my phone. 

We were able to ask all the questions, and got good responses out of most. The only thing I didn't like was that it was very surface level answers to some of the questions. I should've done a better job as an interviewer to get a better response. 

I had a good idea of how I wanted to structure the documentary when going into editing, so it was pretty quick. When he talked about Brazil and the bad artists, I just used photos from online and key famed in a slow zoom or pan for some movement.

Nadia and Megan choose the music and sound effects, I texted them what I needed and they sent them. 

This made it a lot easier when editing, as I just had to add them in, lower the gain, and fade them in and out. Takes 15 seconds a sound bite. 

My favorite part in post production is always color grading, as I want to be a cinematographer. First I color corrected, as I evened out all the clip's highlights, shadows exposure, and white balance. I then went in with an adjustment layer to add a cool tone to the video. I felt like a cool tone was a better fit because it was a calm video, and blue and green are calm colors. 

(adjustment layers are purple)

I decided to put him going through his sketchbook after he introduced himself, as it introduces his work with a minimal understanding before he goes into more details during the interview.  

I exported way to last minute, but was able to upload to a google drive and submit in time, and was pretty proud of what we pulled off in two weeks. 

Production Day 1

 Going into the production of the documentary, we decided to film b-roll before the actual interview. This is because we didn’t have access to the lighting we used until later in the week, and didn’t want to be rushing around last minute. We decided to film with two cameras. Bellow is the list of equipment we used on both days:

Day 1:

-T7I

-90D

-Tripod

-Rhode Mic

-50 Mil Prime Lense 

-18-135mm Zoom Lense

Day 2:

-Sony A7III

-Sony ZV-E10

-2 50 Mil Prime Lense

-2 Tripods

-GVM 3 Point Light RGB Kit

-Cob Light, Stand, and soft box

-GVM Mics

The equipment from day 1 is from my school, and day 2 from this equipment renting place called BEACON TV. Knowing that I would have different camera brands for the 2 days concerned me. I was scared that it would look a lot different. The only solution to this would be color grading, which I was prepared to do. I’ve done research for along time on color grading, because I want to be a cinematographer, so I was ready to deal with whatever footage I got. For the 2nd day, I could’ve filmed with the school camera, but the BEACON TV camera’s are better quality. I am debating whether to extend this documentary to submit to film festivals, and didn’t want to reshoot the interview. Asking the same question again just doesn’t get the same response out of people. Although, I knew I could refill B-Roll a lot easier, so I wasn’t worried about that. 

Continuing on with lighting, I wanted to have creative color in the interview, so made sure to get a RGB light kit, and got a soft box to balance it out. This stylistic choice is why we had to wait longer to shoot the interview, but was worth it in the long run. I wouldn’t have had the lighting I desired if I filmed without these lights. 

During the first day of filming, I was surprised with how it went. I expected to just get some cinematic shots, but I wound up getting really good sound bites of him talking about his sketchbooks. He went through all of them, explaining why he chose every little detail. I was worried these sound bites would have bad audio because we didn’t bring any mics, but it turned out fine after some tweaking in post production. Life lesson, always bring some laav mics with you, they’re small and useful. 

While filming B-roll, we decided to have him draw on his iPad. Right before he started, I had him screen record the entire thing which allowed for creative B-Roll. This was something to “raise the floor” of our documentary that I really liked. 

Coming out of the first day of filming, I added a section of him going through his sketchbooks into the documentary, because the sound bites were so good. It totaled 2 and a half minutes. I wasn’t sure where this part would be, but it was nice to know that I had 2 and a half minutes cut up before the interview that was done a couple days later. 

Pre-Production of the Documentary

  I had the idea to do a documentary on “unconventional art” for a long time. Back last year, I had heard from my friend in A level media that there was a documentary project. With my excitement for this project, I started to come up with ideas so far ahead. I first talked with my classmate Nadia, and we decided we were going to work together. I also discussed with my mom what would make a good documentary, and she came up with the idea to interview artists who work in a field where their art is seen as “trashy” to society. I loved that idea, as it would give me the opportunity to shine a light on an artist(s) who is put in the dark, so I held onto the idea until the following year. 

When the documentary project was mentioned, I knew that I was going to do it on an artist, but I wasn’t sure what type of art. Originally, I was just going to do a tattoo artist because it was an easy connection; my childhood best friends brother is a tattoo artist. After watching the Banksy documentary, I thought it would be really cool to interview a street artist, and I knew someone in my school interested in it. 

    We decided to take the approach to interview both a tattoo artist and a street artist. We wanted to focus on how they found a community in this hobby/profession that is socially unacceptable, and started to plan it out. 

    After speaking with our teacher, we decided to take a different approach. She pointed out the idea that our idea for the documentary was not too much about the artist, but more the art form. This would be a fine approach to take, but both of our artist have such amazing stories that we wanted to have a big part in our documentary. We came to the conclusion that we should make a series type on the two of them, and make two documentaries being more about themself. 

Me being very excited to create this, made questions months in advance. I made A LOT of questions to say the least.

I wasn’t sure completely how I wanted to approach the documentary’s structure, so I wrote down ever single question I could think of… This made it easier because I basically just chose from this bank when picking questions to ask going in.

We were supposed to make it a series of two short documentaries, but, things fell apart with our second interviewee. We waited till last minute, because I missed the first couple days of the project due to being sick. We were rushing and just didn’t have enough time to work something our between both of our schedules. 

With this said, we just elaborated on our first documentary, making it contain more information about the artist and the art form. 

We decided to film two days, one for b-roll, one for the interview. I wanted to incorporate him going through his sketchbooks for B-Roll, so we planed as that to serve as our b-roll, along with pictures found online. 

Researching for my documentary!

 For a couple weeks, we watched documentaries in class to get an idea of what a documentary initials for our own documentary’s that we created after our viewings. 

The first one we watched was amazing. To be completely honest, I don’t remember the name of it. Although, it was about these two boys who were African American, put into a prestigious predominately white school in Manhattan. It followed them until high school graduation which was so cool because we got to watch them grow up.

Although, I obviously couldn’t replicate a documentary like this because it took over 10 years to make, there was some stuff that stood out that I wanted to include in my documentary. What appealed to me the most was the fact that there was not many “sit down” interviews included. I liked how they sort of followed their subject with a camera, and I wanted to incorporate that in my documentary. This style makes a documentary more entertaining, as you’re seeing what they’re talking about, and it simply just feels more intimate. 

The second documentary our teacher showed us is titled "Exit through the gift shop”. This documentary served as a major source of inspiration when it came to coming up with ideas for what we would be passionate enough to film our documentary on. Street artist "Banksy" created this documentary to highlight the realm of street art. This film was  Thierry Guetta, a French artist. He appeared many times in the film, so he was the videographer, along with a subject. 

This documentary answers the question of why someone is a street artist, and also shows the deeper meaning of it. It also maintains humor and entertainment with this. It also poses the viewer with a very difficult question of what exactly qualifies as art. 

What I wanted to replicate in my own documentary was how it was shot. I like the dark setting they used. It was dark, but not in a depressing way. I wanted to set up my interview shot that way.

We chose to create a documentary about the realm of street art, particularly graffiti, after being inspired by this one. A friend of ours who has been doing graffiti for years was the person we had in mind from our school.

Project Reflection

 I am relived to know I finally finished this project but am also sad. This was such a fun process where I learned so many news things, from camera settings, to sound effects. I was able to spread my previous knowledge in the film industry to my groupmates and it was really fun being able to create something with people I never thought I would be making a film with.  I enjoyed writing, filming, and editing along side my classmates. I have grown closer to my group members and will forever be thankful for the friendships I made from this project. I will continue my media studies in AICE Media A Level next school year. I wish you all the best and thank you for reading my blogs!

Creative Critical Reflections

Here is my first Creative Critical Reflection:

Click here to watch 

And Bellow is my second Creative Critical Reflection:

Click here to watch