Documentary Research Pt.1 (Post 1)

     And we're back! It has 8 months since my last post here, and I kinda missed Blogger! I'll probably ditch the song titles being titles here. That is one part that will not be missed. Anyways it's been a while, but now it's time to discuss the research I did for the documentary, Violet Storm, which featured the local band Visions of Venus. 

    For doing research, I watched some documentaries in class like "American Dream", episodes of "Abstract", and "Exit Through the Gift Shop", which impacted my production choices the most, and some outside of class, including episodes from the "The Andy Warhol Diaries" and some Op-Docs like Blue Room and Almost Famous: The Other Fab Four. From American Dream, I learned about the purpose of using indirect and direct interviews were used, which my group decided to use mainly indirect to better allow the interviewee's thoughts to flow without our biases. From the Abstract, we learned about staged b-roll, and how to effectively use it to reinforce ideas that an interviewee says. In Exit Through the Gift Shop (which by a long shot was my favorite documentary), I learned how Banksy created a narrative from an undirected documentary by pinning it to an event, which we did with our documentary, by pinning it around Vision Of Venus's performance at Homecoming. The Andy Warhol Diaries uses heavy use of archival footage of Warhol, which inspired me to include old photos of the band, to show how they have changed and matured. The Op-Docs showed me how to condense a large topic into a short piece, which I used to condense the story of Visions of Venus into a piece 7 minutes long.