Form and Genre; Production

Typical Conventions of a Documentary: • Length – 5 – 35 minutes long • Around 2 – 3 main characters• Editing – minimal editing usually just cuts and fades• Dramatization• Voice of God Narration• Expository style filming• Observational style• Reflexive style

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What we have included and why?

Genre conventionsFrom our research we wanted to achieve an observational and reflexive mode in order to target a sophisticated audience. An observational mode is best for an intellectual active audience as they can fully understand what’s happening in the shot. A reflexive mode was chosen as it allow explicit information to be transferred from the interviewee to the audience.

• Observational style filming – This was achieved through unique cinematography were we filmed cinematic long and wide shots as well as including postmodern close ups of coffee cups for example in our B roll footage. This targets VAL type experiencers who will want to see more than just an interview.

• Reflexive style filming was included through the staged interviews such as Toby Moore’s in front of a white backdrop which is clearly and intentionally a reconstruction of reality. We adopted this style to help portray the educational side to the documentary as it gives direct information to the audience, This targets our secondary audience who is older wanting to gain information and surveillance as a gratification

Formal conventions of a short film• We have following general

convention such as the length of our short documentary is around 7 minutes which fits in the broad 5-35 minute boundary

• All the editing in our production is minimal, cuts or fades between shots. This creates an appropriate sophisticated tone for the documentary. Furthermore it allows us to achieve a greater level of verisimilitude, this then enhances the breaking of the fourth wall in final scenes with Toby and in the credits which is a postmodern feature.

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What we Haven’t included and why

• we slightly stretched the convention of 2 – 3 main characters as we included 5. However we don’t feel this is an issue as it allowed us to cover all aspects of creativity and doesn’t over crowd the production. In our draft we included too much from each interviewee so the production became more boring. Therefore we cut each interview down allowing us to include each aspect of creativity and still fit an appropriate length

• We didn’t include any dramatization in our documentary as we wanted to keep it as minimal and realistic as possible. This was because we were not recreating a past event but exploring an idea.

• We didn’t use voice of God narration, we felt the narrative was clear enough without it. Furthermore with emphasise on a reflexive style filming it was easy to let the camera and the subjects do the story telling. However a voice of god narration could have added to our production to add background information on each interviewee or it could be used to narrate our journey as the film makers trying to find the meaning or creativity ourselves, this would add to the narrative of the film and invite audiences take the journey with us.

• Finally we didn’t adopt an expository style filming as Expository documentaries speak directly to the viewer, Often in the form of an authoritative commentary employing voiceover or titles, proposing a strong argument and point of view. This goes against our subjective narrative inviting the audience to make up their own mind on what creativity is to them. Which targets are more active intellectual audience using Morley reception analysis.

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Form and Genre conventions;In Genre research we established that our documentary should include values of education and entertainment. This was based on Grieson’s film-making evidence who defined the documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality”. I feel we have met this genre convention as we have incorporated both a observational style filming with many cinematic shots and artistic montages, as well as adopted a reflexive style filming where we have provided a reconstruction of the truth and added an educational value. This is evident in our interview with Jeff Kindleysides, for example, where he is filmed drawing and ‘working’ however we still include footage of an interview where he provides an education for the audience.

In terms of cinematography all interviews should be static on a tripod with the interviewee sat still on a chair. We used montages to show each interviewee using their creativity, This was used with a handheld camera to connote the creativity and production in action juxtaposed to the static interview. The montage footage was directly linked to what the interviewee was talking about. Our montages would also incorporate relevant mis-en-scnene which adds a personal touch to the footage and allows the audience to immerse themselves into the lives of the creative experts. We can see this in the Paul Bennett interview where as he talks about him as a child dressing up as the “predator” from the film franchise there is a cut to his action figures illustrating how this was a key memory for him, the audience understand and believe him as there is visual evidence of what he is talking about.

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To improve on…On evaluation there are a few conventional attributes that we could have included but haven’t…• Narrative – although we explore different ranges around

creativity on reflection we do not necessarily include a clear Equilibrium, Disequilibrium and New Equilibrium we could maybe have achieved this by laying out our interviews differently or re designing the questions to offer a more constructed narrative arc.

• For example for the first interview we could have focussed on creativity as a general introduction, which we did, then for the interviews in the middle focus on the negatives of creativity and finally bringing back to the new equilibrium giving the audience the ideology that everyone is creative and it is different within each person.