The struggles of shooting a purely observational documentary
While writing this I have spent the last month shooting a documentary about Stoke-born, boxer and Grime artist: Jamal Le Doux. Through this project I have learnt a great appreciation for non-fiction filmmakers, the passion and hard work that goes into their projects and as I prepare to sit down and edit this film, I have especially appreciated the work that goes on in post-production as the film goes from raw footage to having a fully-fledged narrative on the big screen.
Having a strong, compelling narrative is obviously vital to the effectiveness and success of a film but finding this structure can often be difficult, even more so when working with observational documentary. While an expository documentary uses the aid of either an off-screen or on-screen narrator, observational documentary does not have this crutch to fall back on and must tell the story of the film purely through visual imagery and the use of interview. To further burden the editing process, we decided to shoot this film without use of “Talking Heads” (a documentary technique which has the contributors sit and answer questions directly to the camera) without this technique we had to get enough coverage to be able to portray different aspects of our contributors life in a cohesive story with an introduction, a conflict, a climax and a conclusion.
Craft skills blog 