Overall, I think the topic of “The F Word” is interesting. I have only really seen documentaries on in-vitro, surrogacy, or adoption. Most of the time foster care adoption is not highlighted. While I think the topic is not only interesting but important, I do believe the series fell short in some areas. For one, I did not like the music used throughout the series. Often it was used too much to instill emotion in the audience, rather than letting the audience decided how they felt about the situation. I also think they should have interviewed the two women separately more. I think they both had different fears and thoughts about the situation which were probably not highlighted when they were together.

One aspect of the show that I did like was when Nicole and Kristin interviewed parents who created their families through foster care adoption. I think that the vibes of these interviews were different, in a good way, then if the director or another member of the camera crew had interviewed these couples. I like how those conversations focused on both advice and personal experience which was an unusual combination of emotions and feelings.

I refrained from posting on Brooke Gladstone’s talk until I (somewhat) accomplished this goal. A week ago I decided to log off Instagram. I didn’t directly take her advice and delete the application because I wanted to test myself. I was curious to see how many times my fingers would gravitate towards the application. As I waited for my food, as I walked to class, as I had a boring meal with a friend, I’d keep opening the application and stare at the log in sign, fighting the urge to reenter this superficial world where people are portraying their lives as what our generation would call “#goals”. Later in the week, the struggle was a lot less and I felt liberated from Instagram. The time I’d spend uselessly scrolling, I give that time to a book, a friend, or myself. I was saving time and energy. I kept telling my friends about this challenge and most of them would respond saying that they were proud of me, but they’d go back to the application after our brief conversation. For everyone: It’s better than a food cleanse and I recommend that everyone should try it, you will feel great.

Gladstone touched on very important points during her talk. She reminded us that we have the power to choose the media we consume. We can choose to read an article from NYTimes, CNN, Fox, or Independent. But, as we read, we must question the information being given to us. Many sources give us information, and most readers accept them as facts. But that, is in fact, not true. It made me think of what my Corporate Finance professor keeps reiterating. “Don’t accept any statistic on a website until you know how the person reached that number. The statistic will most likely be a number pulled out of a hat.” We are wired to be distracted, but we are not forced to be. As a documentarian, we need to find the truths and present it to our audience. Making a documentary is a form of reporting; the differences are that the documentarian engages with the interviewee, focuses on certain perspectives, and is in film form.

Her comparison of Orwell 1984 and Huxley Brave New World got me excited because I remember painfully reading both pieces in high school. I love how she contrasted the concepts of both books and related Brave New World to media today. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance, and here we are today. We need to filter out today’s junk media and save our culture from becoming trivial. Going back to Junot Diaz’s point, she emphasized how we need to allow ourselves to get bored to have great ideas and think about the future. We shouldn’t allow media to keep distracting us and encouraging our brains to develop this short attention span.

I initially didn’t enjoy how Gladstone was a stationary speaker, especially after seeing KJ float around the room. But, her tone and insightful talk suited her body language. She wouldn’t have been able to read her lecture if she was moving around the room. I am glad we were able to hear her talk, especially after reading The Influencing Machine two years ago.

I really appreciated Mr.Seidman’s visit to our class. As a person who prides himself in being interested in a lot of things and also having a lot of projects going at once Bob’s story is inspiring.  As we get older we are often encouraged to heavily specialize in a small set of things, but Bob’s story defies that idea. In addition to defying an idea that many of us take for granted, Bob show show rewarding it can be open to chart your own path.

Of the projects we viewed in class I enjoyed watching the documentary about the young homeless men and women of the Great Depression the most.  The director of a film obviously plays a role in the direction of a doc but Bob’s discussion highlighted truly how much of a group effort every film is. As a person still learning about documentary and story making, it was important for me to hear truly how much people like Bob do to make sure high quality work is done. From writing grants to putting together scripts, it was great to learn more about the role Bob played in making some really great documentaries.

I also appreciated the conversational tone that Bob approached his presentation with. As Bob’s remarks continued I began to see him almost as  a grandfatherly figure.  His talk wasn’t necessarily  packed with facts but I derived a great amount of value from Monday by simply soaking up the anecdotes Bob shared us about his experience as a screenwriter and producer. Bob is a remarkably personable guy.  In short amount of time I felt relaxed around him, and I got the sense that he just makes people around him comfortable. It is always nice for me to just listen to someone who has done cool things, and Bob has no doubt done some really cool things with his time.

On Monday, Rob started his talk by reminiscing about his and his friend’s liberal arts experience at Williams College. Rob kept reminding us of how lucky we are to be at such a school where we have the privilege of being around minds that are disciplined, exciting, and to take advantage of our professors and friends. This gave me a little flashback to Junot Diaz’s talk I had attended a few weeks ago. For those who don’t know, Diaz is an amazing Dominican American author and everyone should read his books. Diaz had concluded his talk by telling us how the liberal arts education is great BUT very economically driven. This education doesn’t give us the opportunity to sit down and reflect on what we’ve learned or how to approach situations because we’re constantly so busy with assignments, papers, tests, and what not. Diaz kept telling us to live our life and to stop putting too much pressure on ourselves. By the time we’re 23, we would have put so much pressure on ourselves in trying to be a “writer, a filmmaker, an engineer”, that we realize we haven’t spent anytime enjoying doing what we love in a non instrumental way. If we’re doing something that will produce a future, we won’t love it, but if it has no purpose, we’ll love it. Diaz said, “let your art have no purpose.” These are some questions he asked us about our education – these questions received a lot of claps from students but a lot of awkward looks from those who work in administration. “Why don’t students have enough time to deliberate over the important issues of their day? Why are we to the point of breaking to get college degrees? why are we so busy? There are so many important things we don’t think about because we are so busy. How do we allow a free exchange of ideas? Why corporate boards are running our university?”

This has forced me to think about the type education we all are receiving here at Lafayette – or at Muhlenberg and Lehigh. I think it’s important to make time for things we enjoy and allow our brains to breathe a little. We need to make time to reflect on important issues in our community and our world. After all, we are citizens of the world.

Tension sentence : DACA students are working towards a college degree while constantly fearing deportation.

Andrea, Yannick, and I are looking forward to working together on this extremely important topic, DACA. Our goal is to make this piece specific to our generation college DACA students. I think we are very lucky that Andrea is a part of this group because the perspective we will receive from her will change our whole approach to this piece. The motivation towards working on this project should come from within, and I feel that at this point, I want to help tell Andrea’s story. I want to help tell DACA students’ story. Before we could start talking about interviews or B-roll, Andrea insisted that she wants us to do full research and be aware of the entire policy, what does DACA give students? We need to be so well informed because we can’t afford our interviewees getting defensive when being asked about this sensitive subject. We want our interviewees to be comfortable in front of us before we can present a camera in front of them, which is why we all need to be well researched (NEED – WANT). With this piece, we also plan on clearing all misconceptions rotating around DACA. Andy reiterated this by reminding us that the camera is powerful, editing is powerful, and we aren’t here to hurt people. The way we choose to edit these interviews will be the only way the audience will perceive them. We are responsible of the way our interviewees are presented.

Hopefully if you haven’t gotten a chance to check out the interview from Professor Smith’s email, this blog post can highlight some of the noteworthy points from my read through. Here’s the link for reference: https://webmail.lafayette.edu/service/home/~/?auth=co&loc=en_US&id=18334&part=3

This article frames interviews with a simple broad stroke: “human identity is not fixed, but something constantly negotiated through interaction with others.” Many of the article’s non-technical points were to help interviews set their interviewees at ease, and extract the most relevant, honest information. We have our interviewees on camera for a closed window of time. In that small period, their human identity is quite dynamic; however they choose to present themselves, or how we edit their responses, will in many ways define their humanity to our viewer. There are obvious burdens of responsible representation on film makers here, but I thought this point was an excellent way to frame the article.

In addition, this article made multiple references to Errol Morris who makes The Thin Blue Line, and it was extremely helpful to read this text and watch the docu-drama in tandem. Although I didn’t notice this immediately after watching Morris’s film, he does many inventive things with his framing. Most of his shots are statically framed, in that we don’t see numerous angles and zooms of the same interviewee. In other films, there might be three levels of zoomed shots, and a couple different angles. Having all of these different variations allows film makers to cut more dynamically in the editing room, giving distinct visual variation as pieces of the interview are woven together. Morris uses graphics though, such as newspaper clippings, to cut back and forth between different parts of the interview. This inventive approach makes the documentary seem more real because the role mark of choppy camera editing is less apparent.

Here are some noteworthy thoughts on interviews:

1.) Keep things general when you explain the project to your interviewee. This will help you remain honest with your pitch if the story changes.

2.) If you’re conducting a research/scouting interview of some sort, try to ask people to save a significant sounding thought for when you have a camera on them. Asking them to repeat themselves runs the risk of having a removed, emotionless, and unauthentic response to your initial question.

3.) Interviewing people on the street. ie the documentary we just saw about the Hasidic communities in Brooklyn, which had a segment of people saying ignorant things. The approach here is to ask the same questions to each individual. Make sure your interviewer stands on different sides of the camera, so you can cut the in rhythmic/diverse way.

4.) When interviewing it is critical to keep the conversation as natural as possible, as this will often help your subjects open up and feel comfortable. One excellent way to do this is to user non verbal facial expressions to give your interviewee feedback. Nod your head in amazement when they say something wild. Give them signs that you are following their story emotionally, and silently encourage them to keep talking.

5.) On axis interview: position the interviewers head directly below the lens of the camera, so that your interviewee is essentially looking into the camera when they have a conversation with the interviewer. The article says on axis interviews “place the audience in direct relationship with the interviewee.” This seems especially important to me considering the article starts with a statement about the dynamic nature of human identity. What better way to shape a human identity in your film, then to position your interviewee to have a direct and personal relationship with the audience.

6.) A really creative solution to the jarring nature of jump cuts and cut aways is to tell multiple story tangents in parallel. This achieves the effect of giving your shots visual variation, but it also allows you to pick the most significant portions of the interviewee (as we would always do). Yet, the need for jump cuts is eliminated because we can simply cut back and forth between people.

7.) When asking questions, if you hit a wall with someone, but sense there is an emotional charge behind a certain topic then ask them to tell a story. When done well, stories actively engage both the interviewee and the audience. The interviewee should use the active voice, and it will also be a more interesting way of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’.

We are attempting to determine whether or not students who are’t in a gifted program are worse off.

-Donterrius, Mekhi, Lauren

As soon as they filmed ended I had to google the characters names to see what happened to them. I felt as though the film could not end this way. How could an innocent man sit in jail for the rest of his life? I shocked to learn that film help to bring about a retrial for Adams and eventually exonerate him. To think that documentary has enough influence to free an innocent man from a life in captivity, is a powerful thing.

Beside that I found the film to be very captivating. It kept me engaged and critically thinking throughout. There were a few things that I thought could have been done better. I felt as though some of b-rolls were somewhat cheesy and felt as though were unnecessary place holders. For example when talking about hypnosis of the female police officer there was this b-roll of a pocket watch swinging. I felt as thought this was very cheesy and unnecessary.

I felt like the film and storyline was choppy, and didn’t always flow. And at times, I found it difficult to follow the storyline. It almost felt like Morris was stretching out the story to make the film fit a certain length. This choppiness mostly refers to they way he cut interviews with witnesses and officers. My least favorite part of the film was the choice to react the scene in the officer was killed and play in again and again throughout the film. I understanding portraying the act allows viewers to better appreciate the brutality of the act, but just the way it was acted out and the constant replay of this scene almost made it feel insignificant. Each time I watched I felt as though I began to loss the appreciation that innocent man killed point blank. If I was the film maker I think I would have focused a bit more on the police offer who was killed and his story. I don’t think I would use this imagery again and again.

But overall I think the creative choice to leave the confession and later conviction of Harris till the end of the film was powerful and made for a great story. The film focussed on an interesting story and told it well for the most part, and given the film is almost thirty years old I think the overall film was a great success.

Page 335 of the book, “A New History of Documentary Film” by Betsy A. Mclane, describes Werner Herzog as “a force, a genre, a mode, a style, a voice, a type all his own.” Herzog has a desire to put his audience back into a position where they can trust their eyes and ears. This is something I think all documentarians should strive to achieve as well. The audience should trust both the filmmaker and the film.

When watching Grizzly Man, I really admired and valued Herzog decision to narrate the film and insert himself into specific interviews. In Grizzly Man, there was so much footage from Treadwell and I feel as though without Herzog narration the significance of the footage might have been lost on the viewer. I also found that Herzog inserting himself into the film at times made the situation feel more genuine and real. The terrible circumstances surrounding the death of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard in Grizzly Man, made the film a difficult story to tell in certain scenes. I think Herzog narration and insertion of himself made the film more powerful and respectable. We could feel the impact the story had on Herzog.

I was surprise when reading that Herzog generally narrates his all documentaries in this way, asking questions of himself, and appearing on camera. Obviously I found this approach to be moving and valuable in Grizzly Man, but I wonder if it has the same effect in his other films. The book talks about Herzog 1997 film, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, where Herzog takes the main character back to where he was taken as a prisoner of war. Herzog goes as far as hiring locals to play the part of his captors to renact the events and retraces the main characters steps together. Herzog enters this man’s life and makes him recite and experience his own horrors again for the camera. I feel like I would have to see the film to make any real moral judgements about it, but it seems as if Herzog approach in this flim may probe a bit far. As a film maker, I don’t think I would be willing to pay people to “recapture” a prisoner of war just for a good shot, even if he agreed to it.

The thin blue line is a documentary free of voice over. One of the most noteworthy parts of this documentary was the way scenes were reenacted, and the way graphics were included to communicate information to the viewer. Using these two visual mediums to communicate information, which is traditionally done through omniscient sounding voice over, gave the film an added aspect of objectivity. In a digital area in which dubious sources should always be considered, I thought the first hand perspectives from the interviews were effective at creating a convincing sense of reality. Similarly, the newspaper excerpts used eye catching fragments of words to creatively string together ideas. Rather than giving us the standard sentence format, there is more cognitive work required, and therefore reward, by asking viewers to contextually piece together words like “work all day”. Combining these newspaper graphics as B-Roll, as interview audio played over it, lended an added sense of legitimacy to the veracity of the statements made by first hand witnesses. Furthermore, it allowed the film to casually highlight a single part of a witnesses statement in real time. This unobtrusive tactic maintained the guise of objective reality, while also functioning as the guiding voice over that is necessary to help viewers piece together the complex story and case. In addition, it helped the content of the interviews be as exciting as possible; newspaper graphics were also used to communicate simple but significant information like the dates events took place. Overall, the combination of newspaper graphics and first person interviews ensured that a sense of legitimacy permeates throughout the film. In addition, it also gave The Thin Blue line a unique aesthetic style, especially with its crime scene reenactments. More than anything, they seemed to toe a line between the cinematic appeal of film, while also maintaining the objective reality. The goriest details, like blood on the ground, was saved for the visual medium of crime scene photographs, which is one of the main ways Errol Morris was able to pull of the dynamic objective reality effect in a film riddled with reenactments.