Poetic Documentary Planning + Tutorial Feedback

Poetic Documentary Planning
Our original idea for the poetic documentary was that we wanted it centred around Hannah but as a child. This was so we could introduce the audience to Hannah, but only by giving a brief background view of her through the eyes of her family and their memories of her. The reason we wanted to do this is because the subject matter still relates to our main documentary because it is about Hannah and obviously her childhood would affect how she is as a person now, but also we didn't want to introduce the fact that she has had a brain tumour and has beaten cancer at her young age. The reason we didn't want to do this is to give an enigma effect to the poetic piece so the audience question who this is they are hearing about and what are they like, as well as not directly addressing the main points that the final film will (the cancer and the charity). When we filmed last weekend in Chester, we decided to begin to create a sequence for the poetic film, including some of the sound from the family we had just got.

This is the detailed sequence we came up with which focuses on the childhood stories the family told us in interviews which we believe reflect Hannah's personality and childhood well. For this we wanted to mainly use (if not entirely use) old family photos and old home video which we were allowed to use a large quantity of. We began putting it into a sequence in preparation to show Debbie in the group tutorial today.

Tutorial Feedback and Next Steps
The main pointers we were given in the tutorial today were:

• The sequence we had come up with was too much like a conventional documentary and not a poetic piece.
• Some stories were inappropriate for what we were trying to convey.
• We focused to hard on narrative in the sequence when we should be looking to explore and elaborate on themes.
• Not much consideration into the sound-scape we could use and the sound we had was too much voice over dialogue.

We met as a group after and started to consider ways in which we could address these points. In the end we decided to scrap our original sequence and explore some potential themes instead of focusing on creating a narrative to make the film less conventional and more poetic. We eventually decided after a lengthy Skype discussion, that we focus on Hannah's personality as a theme by using a small selection of voice overs obtained through interviews, combined with still images and sections of interviews recorded last weekend.

 

We will combine these things with a carefully considered sound-scape which we will discuss tomorrow which will magnify the different parts of her personality with relation to the images shown on screen.