[DUE SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24 AT 10PM AS POST IN “B-ROLL” CATEGORY]
During your first or second visit to your neighborhood, focus on filming a large body of footage that captures the sights and sounds of the places that you think you will focus on in your documentary. This step in the process involves some experimentation – don’t be afraid to try some things out that you will later want to discard – you’ll never know until you try!
Although many of the shots you take will not end up being used, sections of this “B-Roll” footage will probably end up providing some of the most important material for your finished film. Put some thought into the places, people and objects that you shoot, and try to take aesthetically appealing or interesting shots.
The end result of this assignment should be [at minimum] 10 minutes of footage and 20 stills (standard digital photographs).
Here’s one way that you could structure your work for this assignment:
- Before visiting your census tract, use Google Maps and some basic Internet research to identify landmarks (e.g. churches, parks, restaurants, public libraries, political offices and non-profit organizations) in the census tract that you have chosen. Because you may end up focusing on one or more small spaces (e.g. a specific block, two street-corners, a barber shop, a collection of bodegas) within the broader neighborhood, you may want to narrow your focus to one or more geographical areas within the census tract before you visit and focus on those when you arrive.
- Visit the neighborhood as a team and tour the area, starting to get a sense for who lives in the census tract, where they live, work, eat, shop, and hang out. At some point, you should start to narrow in on a few small urban spaces (e.g. a train station, a restaurant, a small park, etc.) that you think may be especially interesting to focus on in your film. Hang out in these places and start to think about what you would like to say about them in your documentary.
- As a group, make a list of the people, objects, images and sounds that define the social and cultural settings that you’d like to focus on in the film. This list will provide a rough shot-list for your B-Roll. If you’re focusing on a street corner with several restaurants and a bus station, you may want footage of the menus in the restaurants, the signs out front, the activity behind the cash registers or in the main dining areas. You may want footage of where people stand while waiting for the bus and what happens when a bus arrives.
- Be patient! When you find a location that you want to shoot in, spend a little time looking around. Let yourself be surprised by small details, let yourself begin to see and hear some of the rhythms that occur – flows of people, sounds, repeating activities. Assuming you are with other members of your group, talk about what you see, each of you will notice different details, and in talking it out with one another, you’ll start to figure out some creative ideas for what sorts of images and footage to capture.
- Don’t be afraid to take ‘boring’ shots. Don’t forget that you are collecting pieces that will all be put together into a larger whole. Not every shot needs to zoom, pan, or have a lot of action – sometimes a few calmer shots can help the flow of a good video.
- If you’re going to film people at close range or shoot inside a place-of-business, you should ask permission first. Tell the people at the bus stop or behind the counter of the restaurant that you are doing a documentary film project for a college class about the neighborhood, and you’d like to take some shots of the bus stop / bodega / barbershop / whatever. If they’re friendly, you might choose to go ahead and interview them a little bit as well (see next assignment), but the main objective is to get their permission to film the location.
- Once you have a rough shot-list, go as a group or split up to cover more ground if you have multiple cameras and get the shots you think you’ll need. Don’t just follow your list – if something unexpected and interesting happens while you’re filming, film it!
- Although the end result should be 10 minutes of footage and 5 stills (standard digital photographs), you may need to shoot 30 minutes and 20 images before narrowing it down to the best shots of the bunch, so don’t stop at 10 minutes.
