Part 1: Documentary Research

    When starting the documentary portion in our class, we watched a series of documentaries to get us familiarized with this specific genre. Of the documentaries we watched, we watched two full length films, a couple of docuseries, and a couple of Op-Docs from the New York Times website.

The first we watched was a full length documentary called American Promise and followed two boys Idris and Seun as they make their way through their school years at the elite private school, Dalton. This documentary gave us our first example and really introduction to what a full-length film style documentary looks like. It gave me personally a really good idea of how indirect and direct interviews can be used in a documentary to make the narrative flow better.

   

   The second full-length documentary, and my personal favorite, was one called Exit Through The Gift Shop. It follows a man, Theirry, as he follows various street artists doing graffiti around the world, introducing the world to what goes on behind the scenes of the street art world. Even after the documentary shifts perspectives and follows Theirry on his journey to try and become a street artist of his own, the documentary still continues to show the behind-the-scenes of the whole process and shows what consumers may not have known during the initial opening of Mr. Brainwash's first gallery. This documentary was my favorite out of all the ones we saw in class   Looking back on it now, this specific documentary was the one that helped inspire the idea for my group's documentary of showing the behind-the-scenes that people may not be fully aware is happening or don't stop to think about. 

    The final piece that we researched through and watched consisted of select episodes from Abstract: The Art of Design. This piece in particular, along with the op-docs, allowed me to get a better understanding of how to make shorter, none film length documentaries, and showed me how to keep a shorter documentary concise, and straight to the point, which would end up being extremely useful for our first documentary project.