Research of Documentry style filming

Research of Documentary style filming
We decided in our team meetings that as cameraman I should do the research on how the camera should be used in documentaries.

To find out this information I started by watching documentaries, firstly by watching a series called Victorian Farm, aired early in 2009. I thought watching this series would be useful as it followed the daily lives of three people for a year with regular interviews of them as they lived and ran a Victorian Farm just like it would have been run during the Victorian era, using only the tools and implements used during that period. Throughout the whole year the team were regularly interviewed about what they had done, how they had achieved it, and how they felt about what they had done; as well as filming them doing these activities.

The next documentary I watched was the Ice Truckers episode ‘The Big Thaw’. I thought this would be a useful one to watch because they were filming in confined spaces such as in the cab and under the ice; and as filming in confined spaces is something we would likely experience at some point, it would prove to be usefully gained knowledge. In this documentary they used lots of wide angle shots and some 3D reconstructions where it seemed appropriate; for example it would be inappropriate to break a hole in the ice road and drive a truck into it for real.

The next documentary I watched for the project was an Expert lead documentary called the Aztec Massacre which followed the presenter taking us through the documentary and interviewing others about the Aztecs and the town of Zultapec.