Doc Mode 3

When considering what subject matter to document, I was randomly impressed to consider the case of homeless individuals in nearby Salt Lake City. I wanted the documentary to be as least staged as possible. It was largely of the participatory mode, as evidenced by the questioning that I used to reveal the inner thoughts and experiences of the subject. Of the films screened in class, it might be most closely compared to Sherman’s March. While the object of focus never really shifted onto me like it did the filmmaker in that documentary, my engagement is extremely obvious, almost excessively due to the volume of my speech being greater than that of the subject. That difference was unintentional; I used my phone camera and did not have equipment with which to better capture the voice of the interviewee.

This documentary is actually an extremely small fraction of a much longer video that encompasses discussions with three different homeless individuals who were all in the same general vicinity. I intend to use the whole video for the final. My hope was to do the whole thing in a single take for artistic creativity, but the whole video is much too long for that to work for the final so it will have to be edited down. Since I will not be using the whole continuous take for the final, I used a continuous portion of the single take for this doc assignment, without editing the clip beyond selecting its in/out point.

The questions themselves were not well thought out in advance; the answers were not influenced in any way beyond the presence of the camera. It may be worth mentioning that the camera’s presence did not appear to inhibit the participants from saying what might be considered controversial. Though I did not include those more irregular comments in this cut, they were there. The participants were almost excited to be filmed in fact. They were very much like the mother and daughter in Grey Gardens, feeding off the attention of the camera. This cut features the second of the three individuals, and each person was more enthusiastic than the last.

I believe that with more extensive editing, the very mode of this documentary could be morphed. By cutting down on the questioning, let alone eliminating it from the final product altogether, the mode would transform from participatory to observational. Observational was what I was going for, but since I could not spend enough time with the subjects to see them forget about the camera, the interview format was necessary. Ultimately, the experience was most rewarding for me because I had to overcome a superficial and irrational fear that proximity to the homeless community would inevitably lead to me being caught up in the middle of some violence. Though the third participant - not featured in this clip but planned for inclusion in the cut used for the final - said being homeless is immediately tied to a heightened level of danger, the particular setting I was in felt somewhat less severe in that sense. I got the chance to simply relate to people who also have hopes and dreams but are just on a different point in the same path.