Welcome to Soc Doc 294A!
This blog is a shared space for your weekly progress reports. Taking stock of how things are going (in writing) is an important part of any production process, and I will expect you to post a substantial written update every week before class (your updates will be due Tuesdays by 5 PM). I'll set up a new prompt each week and your reports can be posted in the comments, just to keep things organized by week and all in one place. If you also have a blog of your own, you're welcome to put your writing there as well, but for the purposes of this class I'd like copies of everything archived here week by week so I can find everything easily.
For your first post, since you are just coming back from the field, I'd like a more substantial piece of writing (around 5 pages), due by Tuesday October 7, 5 PM. The writing can be informal, but it should be detailed and descriptive. If you kept a shooting journal (hopefully all of you did!) you're welcome to draw from that writing.
In your field report, tell us about your summer production process. Besides telling us, in general, how things went, please address the following (in any order):
- What went as planned and what didn't go as planned? How were you able to respond to things that didn't work out the way you expected? A big part of any documentary production is staying open and letting your project evolve as you discover new things during the shooting process. How did your project evolve and change from the project you imagined in your written proposal?
- What are some of the technical and logistical challenges that came up while you were shooting? How did you work around them?
- How has it felt to watch your footage after shooting? What footage are you most excited about? What footage feels most disappointing?
- What are some technical issues that came up in production that you know you have to address in the editing room?
And some nuts and bolts: how many hours did you shoot? Where are you in your viewing / logging / backup process? Is there any additional pickup shooting that you will need to do?
Part 1 - Fieldwork Report: Los herederos de la crisis
ReplyDeleteJuan C. Dávila Santiago
On June 23rd 2014 I arrived to San Juan, Puerto Rico to start working on my thesis documentary project. My film is about the deregulation of labor law and the job insecurity experienced by young professionals due to neoliberal practices. By the time I arrived to Puerto Rico there were high probabilities of a general strike happening by the working class, mostly union workers. There were many threats of paralyzing the country and the government, if this was to happen, I figured that this would be the starting point of my documentary, following workers protesting at the government to secure their rights as workers. Good or not the strike did not occur, just a few manifestations here and there, but no real organization for a strike.
Without a worker’s strike taking place I needed to adapt my methodology to find contacts, resources and stories in another way. This represented a difficulty for me, I did not knew where to start. So, I decided to be on the street every day, talk to people, go to local cafeterias, bars, bookstores, coffee-shops, multinational stores and research the working conditions of the workers or the people who visited those places (who were probably workers too). At this point, I was not only talking to young professionals, but to anybody that I thought had precarious working conditions. I tried very hard to find organizations or people who were working the problematic, but found none.
Suddenly, one night I was having a few beers on a local bar in San Juan and I saw an old time friend named Robin and started talking with him, I told him about the research I was doing. It turns out that he was part of a group of young waiters that tried to make a union inside a multinational restaurant called PF Changs, after my conversation with him everything started to fall in place. Through him I met Jesús Salgado, one of my social actors in the film. Salgado is a graduate student of economics in the University of Puerto Rico and is making a thesis about the precariousness of work that impact laborers nowadays, he considers himself one of those persons. He is a transitory employee of the Board of Plans of Puerto Rico (Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico). I quickly arranged a meeting with him and we started to share ideas. We figured out that aside from a few articles, the subject has not being researched much in Puerto Rico.
A couple of weeks after being in Puerto Rico I finally came up with a list of candidates to appear on my documentary film. Paola Ilias, Efraín Cortés and Keishla Ramírez join Salgado’s appearance. Ilias is a cashier in a supermarket, Cortés works at the storage of a Sam’s Club and Ramírez is an actress/waitress, all of them have precarious jobs. The documentary also counts with interviews to Manuel Natal (youngest congressman of Puerto Rico), Nelson Escudero (Leader of an independent union) and my old friend Robin, among a few others.
I decided to film in a vérité form the daily lives of Salgado, Ilias, Cortés and Ramírez. I follow their procedure to go to work and doing other things of their daily lives while engaging into conversations with them regarding different aspects of their lives (social, political, cultural). This represented a huge challenge, specifically when following my characters to their workplace.
Part 2 - Fieldwork Report: Los herederos de la crisis
ReplyDeleteJuan C. Dávila Santiago
Most of my social characters in the documentary express feelings about their working conditions and sometimes complain about their jobs. They all see their current job situation as temporary, but still wanted to conserve because is the only opportunity of work they have. I needed to be very careful when shooting them getting to work, because they did not want to get into any trouble with their superiors. I needed also to be very smart on my shooting techniques and be able to improvise in the field, because most things were really cinema vérité and completely out of my control. I respected my participants request of being careful and I asked them to trust my judgment, so far they did. I would have liked to have more freedom in these types of situation, so I could had more footage at the time of entering the editing room.
Another challenge was shooting inside cars, I have a lot of footage inside cars, which I thought I would not have. Most of my main characters go to work driving, so it was fundamental to shoot them in their cars. Shooting inside vehicles was very difficult and mostly because the lens I used just opens up to 18mm. The scenes inside the cars are full of cutaways in order to deal the closeness of the lens to the persons face. Also Puerto Rico is a very hot country, so the characters needed to have the air conditioner on. Telling them to shut it off, will mean them sweating on camera, opening the windows worse. This air conditioner situation represented some audio problems, but I shot ambience sound to see how I can deal with this on the post-production. I am pretty confident that I’ll be able to lower the noise caused by the air conditioner. Even though I have this situation, I can say that I got something positive out of it. My participants most intimate moments were inside the car, it was like their comfort zone, they felt safe there and I believe that their most powerful opinions could come from the car scenes. Hopefully it was a wise tradeoff.
I did sit-down interviews with all of my participants; some of them were interviewed twice. I don’t expect interviews to be a huge part of my documentary, even though I plan to use them. I believe they will be used to support the story of the social characters. Also I understand that the sit-down interviews are my safety net. I think they are very complete and I can rely on them when needed.
However, I think I overshot. The reason I feel comfortable with my footage is because I understand that I shot enough material to pick the best of the best for my 20-minute piece. I have approximately 35 hours of footage. The only big concern I have is a decision I made the last week of shooting. I went out to shoot beauty shots of Puerto Rico to use them as opening, ending or transition shots and who knows, probably B-roll at some point. My worry with the beauty shots is because I shot them all in 60p. I have heard from some digital cinematographers that shooting beauty shots is better done on 60p and then converted to 24p to get the best results in image detail. Nevertheless, the footage I shot, even though it looks beautiful, I am unable to transfer it to Final Cut at the moment. Final Cut 7 will be my editing platform for this project. Hopefully I will find a reliable tool to convert the beauty shots to fit my Final Cut workflow.
I am very enthusiastic to begin editing the stories of my participants. I want to intercalate their stories as they go to work and do other daily errands. I think it will be very interesting process to show as they express their feelings of their current situation (good on bad) and struggle everyday to achieve their goals in an insecure and precarious environment produced by neoliberal practices.
Part 3 - Fieldwork Report: Los herederos de la crisis
ReplyDeleteJuan C. Dávila Santiago
I have tried to have dailies of everything I shot and it was very helpful, it helped figure out where I needed to put more emphasis and what things were exploited and/or over explained. Still, I need to have more dailies for editing purposes. I have backed-up everything on 2 hard drives plus the one I will be editing on. One is with me in the United States, another one stayed in Puerto Rico. I always like to have drives in different cities as a back-up strategy. I have 29 days of shooting, but have just transferred 7 days to Final Cut. I feel that I am behind in the logging and transcoding process. So far, everything looks precious and I cannot wait to start putting it all together. Hopefully I got everything I need and I do not need to go back to the field for pick-up shots or re-shoot any interview. Just in case I am leaving a window open for that during Spring Break.
Shooting my thesis made me realize that it was very likely that I will need to recur to archive material or footage. Most of the job precariousness happening nowadays is due to neoliberal practices enforced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and their philosophies about free market. I think this will also help me to show that what my participants are living is something bigger than them and is a macro problem that has being falling on them like a line of dominoes.