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.8.Contact the public relations or advertising department of a local company and find out if the department hasany corporate video needs.Submit a proposal to write a script for them.9.Contact the public relations or advertising department of a local company and find out if the department hasmade any corporate videos.Ask to see them and the script and see if you can get some background on thedevelopment of the project.10.Find an organization on campus that you imagine needs a video.Interview the staff and design a videoconcept for them.This page intentionally left blankCHAPTER 7Documentary and Nonfiction NarrativeKEY TERMS3-D historical documentary realityactuality interviews reportagearchives inverted funnel researchbiographical documentary investigative documentary science documentariescommentary location research scratch commentaryconcept narrative documentary travel documentarydocumentary objective documentary treatmentdramatized documentary photography truthexpedition documentary picture research voice-overexpository documentary point of view documentary wall-to-wall commentaryfiction propaganda wildlife documentaryfunnel proposalDOCUMENTARY COMES FIRSTEverybody has seen a documentary.The documentary is an important program format that has rootsin photography and painting.If you think about it, the most fundamental urge we have is to recordreality.Some 25,000 years ago in the south of France, Cro-Magnon man struggled to document thefauna of his world on the walls of caves.There are no portraits of the painters of those exquisite rockdrawings.At the site of Pêch Merle in France, there is, however, a prehistoric signature in the form ofan outline of a human hand.The need to record ourselves in the form of an image is central to all cul-tures, whether on Greek pottery or temple friezes, Roman coins or Egyptian obelisks.The portrait isour most intimate documentary.For centuries, painters have been commissioned to create likenesses© 2010, Elsevier Inc.All rights reserved2010Doi: 10.1016/B978-0-240-81235-9.00007-9 137138 CHAPTER 7: Documentary and Nonfiction Narrativeof people for public display, for family, or for posterity.Much of this function has been assumedby photography since the latter half of the nineteenth century.We have a photograph of AbrahamLincoln.We only have paintings of George Washington.We take our own photographs of friends andfamily.In this respect, we are all documentarians.What is our objective? We want to record reality sothat someone else can experience that moment either with us or without us at a later time.The first moving picture documentary was inspired by a $25,000 bet a tidy sum in its day.The chal-lenge was to prove that a horse either does or doesn t lift all four legs off the ground at a full gallop.In the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge rigged up a system of trip wires so that a galloping horse would1release the shutter on a line of still cameras as it passed.In this way, he could prove that a horse liftsall four legs off the ground and does not keep one hoof in touch with the ground as his adversarymaintained (Figure 7.1).What could be more essentially documentary than that?Others, 2 including Louis Lumiere and Thomas Edison, worked on capturing motion.What excitedthe first movie audiences was seeing realistic shots of motion such as a train rushing toward cam-era, which gave a feeling of such realism that the audience ducked in fear of being hit.The sameFIGURE 7.1 The Horse in Motion, photographed by Eadweard Muybridge in 1875.1The  zoopraxiscope was patented in 1867 by William Lincoln.Moving drawings or photographs were watched through a slit in the zoopraxiscope.2Leland Stanford, who was his patron, published a book in 1882, The Horse in Motion.The two quarreled over the credits, and Muybridge went on to pub-lish further works: Animal Locomotion (1887) and Animals in Motion (1899).See the video at http://photo.ucr.edu/photographers/muybridge/contents.html.Documentary Comes First 139phenomenon was repeated in 3-D movie experiments in the 1950s and 1960s.I remember going to aCinerama film and seeing a shot of a lion jumping at the camera, which gave the audiences of that day athrill such that we all screamed and ducked.If you have ever been to an IMAX theater, you will find thesame psychology applies.The huge wraparound screen on which a 70-mm film image is projected cre-ates a realistic experience of  being there. I remember feeling dizzy watching a shot from an ultralightplane flying over the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls or some other spectacular landscape.Not manydramatic fiction films are made in this format because of the cost.However, 3-D production is becomingmore popular for feature film production.In 2009 3-D television sets became available for domestic use.The first attempts to make moving pictures were documentary.Dramatic storytelling uses of themedium came later.In reality, however, the documentary format in film, video, or television also nar-rates stories, but of a factual kind.Early documentary filmmakers, such as John Grierson and RobertFlaherty, were, in a sense, reporters.Film quickly became a news medium, and television continuedthe use of the moving image to convey reports of people, places, and events.Recently, as happens from time to time, some documentary films have been distributed as theatricalfeature films competing with fictional dramas and comedies.The Academy of Motion Picture Artsand Sciences awards Oscars for both short and long documentary films; Bowling for Columbine wonin 2003 in the feature length category.Spellbound (2002) documents the agonies of children compet-ing for the prize in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee.Then there is an extraordinary wild-life film, Winged Migration (2001) that allows us to fly along with migrating geese and cranes andknow the life of birds that fly thousands of miles to seasonal feeding and nesting grounds.Otherslike Touching the Void (2004), a reenacted documentary of surviving a climbing accident, and TheEndurance: Shackleton s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2000) can command theatrical audiencesbecause they are extraordinary tales of human endurance.Other personal documentary essays byMichael Moore, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Sicko (2007) and Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), generatedpolitical controversy and also a record-breaking box office for the genre.Even though some documentaries may be shot on film, it is risky and expensive to distribute themon film.However, recent history suggests people will buy tickets to see these documentaries pro-jected as films in a theatre.We conclude that the desire to know reality or be told about reality is anabiding need of film and television audiences [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]