Inspiration For Camera Work On Documentary

Inspirations

Our producer had a good selection of material to influence or help inspire the composition of the shots, as well as the way to structure our documentary. During our second seminar, after we had pitched our intial idea to our group, myself and our director Amy Smith discussed various camera techniques, and creative ways of displaying visually the use of cannabis. I decided to see what the documentary was like, and would let that help shape my and the director's ideas when it came to filming. The documentary of choice was Brett Harvey's 2014 "Culture High". The two hour long documentary (available on netflix and youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA9Q6nDVR3s) was extremely informative, but incredibly lacking in terms of interesting visual composition and ideas. Visually it was very similar to an average documentary, featuring bland ariel shots of New York city, and unfortunately reused shots of cannabis throughout. I want to shoot a more visually interesting documentary, that captures both the feeling of being high, but also the paranoia that surrounds the use of cannabis. An example of an idea I had discussed with our director was to attach a GoPro to a spliff. We discussed the practicality of this as the GoPro would be too heavy for a spliff. Our producer mentioned how we could attach it to a pipe of some sort, something that would be able to hold the weight of the GoPro.

Vision For The Documentary

After having filmed the first interview we decided to get footage of people smoking cannabis. We believed this would be a more powerful image than just various shots of interviewees. After having collected this footage I volunteered to transcribe the interview having experience in that field. I also, for my own entertainment and with no expectations of using it in the final cut, edited together a small piece with music in the background. This encapsulates my vision for a experimental, and surreal look, the camera work done by myself and the director who was present on the shoot.

The edit is available here: https://vimeo.com/203711350