The production team, Jeff Malmberg Morgan Nevile, Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez have a strong background punctuated with cultural and music documentaries.
According to Putnam on the documentary’s Facebook profile, PBS funded the production of the trailer. The team, rather than wait for another angel to fund the year long project, has turned to viewers and fans to fund completion, using the non profit 501(c)3 website documentary.org.
While the images are striking, it is compelling storytelling as multiple narrators are woven together through careful interviewing skills and precise editing so the multiple voices blend to tell the story. Detroit is burning and has been in an amazing decline for 30+ years.
Savvy shooters and producers may recognize some of the tools used to capture the images, in the comments about the trailer, the team shares they put the trailer together in five days, and spend only two-24 hour shits with the fire company….the cinemative camera moves and artful imagine making, clearly small, light, and agile gear opens new horizons in visual storytelling.
My friend, and collaborator on “Behind the Viewfinder” Tom Burton once shared a joke with me:
What’s the difference between painters and photojournalists?
Painters don’t stand around talking about brushes.
And I typically don’t talk much about tools — my camera is bigger/better/faster than your camera.
Recently, Canon introduced a digital SLR form factor camera that can also shoot HD video. At first glance, the camera, which looks like any other digital SLR, looks like a poor compromise video camera. But beyond the glance, it offers two new elements to storytelling. First, the size allows it to be used in ways a traditional video camera can not. Second, the chip set renders colors that are truly unique.
Sure, there are lots of small form factor video cameras, for example I’ve blogged about the FLIP, is a great small camera. This camera makes a new approach possible by adding traditional SLR 35 mm lenses, suddenly depth of field can be used to tell a visual story than previously was not possible. Canon’s larger prosumer grade cameras also accept their SLR lenses, but with a larger form factor and different electronics.
The key to success with this camera, is using it for visual story capture. In a sense, I’m implying a slight step backwards in how we shoot. High quality audio might be best captured with separate equipment. Yes, this caerma can campure some audio, bu to use pro audio gear requires adapter boxes. You can turn this into a larer form factor camera, but doing so changes one of its unique advantages. It’s a tool, part of a story teller’s kit. Not a one size fits all for everything.
Director Po Chan used this new camera with Shane Hurlbut, ASC. The results speak for themselves. H/T to Donald Winslow to this clip.
I stumbled upon Pomplamoose Music by accident on YouTube – if you’re like me, you watch a video, then see a related video, then see a related video and before long, you are clicks away from your original search, both in genre and idea.
What storytellers can borrow from the Pomplamoose artists is best summed up in the comment by Jack Conte on the MySpace page featuring the song “Push”
This is called a VideoSong. It’s the recording of a song, start to finish. There are two main rules:
1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice).
2. If you hear it, you see it at some point (no hidden sounds).
The music videos made by this duo understand the medium of the web — these are intimate close-ups, often with picture in picture, with short shot length. Vocalist Nataly Dawn is most often shown in facial close up — leaving her face to tell the story alone — for example, in the cover of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On it)”
The video, shot is close quarters, is a very intimate 1 to 1 performance. It creates the feeling that this is personal that these are our friends. As storytellers looking to create video stories for the Web, it is much better to do as they do, and create the intimate feeling of the video.
Contrast their use of video the Beyonce’s video of her hit. The Beyonce video is great. But not intimate. And at the end of both, I feel like I know Jack and Nataly — but not Beyonce.
Producing video for the Web — and now the iTouch / iPhone / iPad or any of the other personal devices, means the emphasis is on the close up and intimate. And while it would be awesome to shoot a 70 mm landscape scenic like the desert scenes in Lawrence of Arabia, today’s storytelling is about intimacy…and that means…..close ups.
Many NPR listeners heard Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson’s February 19 story about the time she spent with U.S. Marines from India Company and the resulting death of Marine Alejandro Yazzie, of Rock Point, Arizona.
U.S. Marine and Afghan army commanders confer after their men begin taking fire while on patrol earlier this week. Image by: Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR
Nelson’s behind-the-scenes story shares the challenges and intimacy when covering intense stories in close quarters with the subjects:
“I was in a room with maybe 20 or 25 Marines. It was freezing. I mean, it was basically a petrol station that had been – the glass had been blown out from the various IEDs that they had detonated. I was in this room, and you have to picture it’s just a concrete floor, rat feces everywhere, and all of us were so cold.”
Reporting on the reaction to her story, Nelson exchanged shared:
“And so what struck me about him, unlike the others, he was a little quieter, he was a little shyer, but very sincere, very nice, and just – I could tell when he would just mention that he wanted to talk to his wife, his eyes would just light up in a way that I knew he was very much in love with her. And I know he was trying to call her on Valentine’s Day on my phone and couldn’t reach her and he had planned to call her that night again. But he definitely was thinking about her and their unborn child.”
Montange, in her closing, said,
“Soraya’s story, with sound of the firefight in which Lance Corporal Yazzie was killed, upset his family, but his wife Colandra(ph) also told NPR she was glad he was interviewed before he died, because now she knows his last thoughts were of her.”
In the storytelling seminar, I shared some examples of short length and medium length documentary film making. If we had more time, and one more credit hour, we would have continued to discussing long form documentaries such as “The Way We Get By“.
Filmmakers Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly, with Warren Cook, Dan Ferrigan, and Zack Martin have created a hauntingly intimate look at three people and the thousands of lives they touch.
“The Way We Get By” will likely surprise you. It may draw you in and get you closer to the main characters more than you are ready for. This is a very personal and intimate story about three senor citizens in Maine who staff a troop welcome center at Bangor Airport in Maine. Critic Dan Zak of the Washington Post (spoiler alert) writes
“The Way We Get By” is not so much a slice of life as the whole pie, the highs and lows of twilight living, all found and filmed in a terminal at an airport in Maine. What a country.
From it’s opening, the director and interviewer create a slow, careful, and respectful treatment of the cast as we follow their lives. The film provides a portrait of America that is perhaps one of the best in the last decade…..or longer. The film does not tell us anything, but leaves it for us to discover ourselves… a point emphasized in our storytelling seminar. Director Gaudet explains his vision on the movie’s web site:
Throughout The Way We Get By, each character tells their own story, without the aid of narration, through on-camera interviews and moments of verite. Unlimited access to our characters provides an in-depth look into their lives. Keeping the camera static whenever possible allows each of them to quickly forget they are being filmed, removing any barriers between them and the viewer. The result of this shooting style is a well-crafted, layered story with a polished, cinematic look that enables the viewer to feel they are experiencing these personal moments alongside the characters. The pacing of the film appropriately matches the subject matter, allowing each storyline to breathe, while capturing life in a small town.
When we started, we were a little naive about the process. We really didn’t know how to make a documentary — we knew how to make news stories. So there was a large learning curve throughout that process.
and on the same site, Gaudet shares:
We also really wanted our subjects to be comfortable, so we didn’t bring in a bunch of lights and have boom mikes hanging above their heads. We miked them up, brought no lights, got the cameras set up and then tried to make them forget we were there. And I think that comes across, because the film is very intimate. It wouldn’t be if we had been in our subjects’ faces, but we backed up and let their lives play out.
His paragraph above clearly articulates the art of the contemporary documentary. Her quote shows respect for both kinds of story telling, the short news video and the longer documentary form. Some disclosures are in order: Gaudet and Pullapilly are now married since October, and one of the cast members, Joan, is Gaudet’s mother. These personal relationships help open doors to both trust and intimacy. But it is the art and skill of these filmmakers, however, that makes it possible for us to witness these very personal stories told with cameras just a few feet away
F.R. "Fritz" Nordengren is Assistant Professor at Des Moines University where he supervises health care administration graduate student capstone projects.
He is a President of the Iowa Food Systems Council to recommend policy, research and program options for an Iowa food system which supports healthier Iowans, communities, economies and the environment.
Nordengren is an award winning producer, a graduate health care educator, and a small farmer & rancher
