On the first day of discussing documentaries, specifically viewing the doc previously discussed, I Think This Is the Closest to How the Footage Looked, my teacher brought up a question to the class, "How do you guys feel about feet?". This started a slight outburst of energized disgust from the class, which I expected. I personally have thought about this topic before and have a good amount of opinions on it, specifically speculations on why a sense of genuine discomfort is now maximized by the exposure of feet, as well as about how much it slightly saddens me that it's happening. While that may sound strange, it's true. After my future partner for the project, Zach jokingly brought up the idea "We should do a documentary on feet", I proceeded to write ideas on my paper for a possible future documentary...
After taking notes on "Documentary Production Tips/ Techniques" in class and diving into the requirements for the project, we began to brainstorm documentary topics and form into groups. Sticking to my word and genuinely wanting to have an excuse to indulge in the concepts that came with exploring Generation Z's relationship to feet/ their feelings towards them, I initially wanted to work alone. As a control freak and having such a specific focus in mind of approaching the topic with depth not just as a joke/ in a surface-level way that seems to cover the truth behind the reactions that occurred in class, I ended up changing my mind as we had about 2 weeks to research, plan, film, and edit the op-doc, and because I knew that the two people interested in joining my group, Dani and Zach, would be intentional, dedicated, and also just make the 2-week process fun.
Tips & Techniques
Brainstorming Approach
We immediately began to brainstorm ideas on our approach, which would largely define how the audience approaches the concept of feet and the possible ideas we were going to be bringing up through our interviews. This was the hardest part, along with b-roll during production, as there isn't a specific layout for this, or any topic. As stated in my last blog post, we had to figure out WHAT we wanted to say/ WHY we were all going to be showcasing this "snippet of life", as well as HOW we were going to translate that purpose in our approach. A LOT TO THINK ABOUT!
Some immediate things we landed on were that we wanted to develop a comedic tone to allow the audience to get comfortable with the topic, as that would build their openness to considering our future observations, founded on research and our own "research" interviewing a range of people on the topic. While it took a while for our approach to be tightly secured, we ended up taking inspiration from Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop documentary and almost "splitting doc in half". As his production shifts in "narrator" and begins to steer the audience's perception of the main subject of the doc, I really wanted to create a shift in our production of "funny" with consideration of the responses happening to more "thoughtful" with more grounded and focused interviews. Being that we wanted to dive into Generation Z specifically when viewing their reactions to feet and what it alludes to about their generation, we knew that we wanted to consider other generations in the conversation to have a source of comparison and bring this "issue", or observation of reactions, to light, which we hoped we would get in our interviews.
Planning
In the midst of brainstorming, we began to plan. We did a pre-documentary planning assignment that allowed us to organize ourselves including our title that Zach brilliantly came up with, possible shot-types, and more. It is linked below:
We also created a separate document for our structure/ outline that ended up becoming our hub for ideas, critiques, and research. This document holds our interview questions as well, a key part of not just how to approach our own topic, but for any documentary. Our "unofficial planning documentary" is linked below:
Our planning consisted of us trying to fully understand our approach and go from there, with our filming schedule looking like this:
- Asking our wanted interviewees if they would be available to film at any point in the week
- Setting up interviews and securing time slots for those who agreed
- Filming those interviews (serve as a more focused and personal outlook on the topic for the audience)
- Filming "Man On the Street" style interviews
- Filming our own interviews (that idea came later in the process)
- Getting b-roll after our interviews
Our topic needed a comparison of different generation's reactions to feet, so brainstorming our interviewees began with wanting to interview people of different ages who could have different relationships to feet (ex: In terms of occupation- a doctor, a pedicurist, etc...). Once we talked to our teacher about these examples of possible interviewees, with each group member searching for connections for people with these specific jobs, we settled on focusing on age.
Regarding interview questions, we came up with a set specific questions that allowed for internal and external reflection on the current day reactions to feet, using them as a base with our interviewees but also allowing for any follow-up questions to their responses. For the MOTS as we would call them (interviews filmed on the street), we asked our interviewees the first and third question from the list below, being that we didn't want to stop them for too long and weren't depending on those interviews to get more thoughtful, rather as an entertaining beginning to our doc. Below is our draft of interview questions (we changed up the wording a little bit when asking our interviewees these questions, but stuck to the same idea):
First-day ideas
Notes on us playing with and securing our outline
A reframing of specifics to include after filming some interviews
Research
The research is linked above in the "unofficial planning documentary", including links to websites that we thought had relevant information regarding observations and even lack of conclusive "answer" as to why so much of Gen Z (studying about Gen Z in U.S.) could/ does have a more amplified reaction to feet as compared to other generations. We thought it was important to investigate the prior reasons for discomfort with feet, such as the idea of a foot fetish/ the sexualization of feet. We researched the relationship between the discomfort of feet with Gen Z's current-conforming state, and how being on social media is a huge contributor and influencer of their opinions and awareness of perception. This all developed my want to hear from the interviewees and put these ideas of extreme awareness/conformity to avoid judgment and fear of being judged to the test, as it's something I have seen in my day-to-day life.
In addition to research on the topic, we were still trying to put a finger on what approach we wanted to take so we looked into some documentaries, with A Vulnerable Conversation About Attractiveness, a docu-series on Tejas Hullur's YouTube channel coming up on my homepage, and opening my eyes to a type of way that we could possibly insert ourselves into the narration (also inspired by Exit Through the Gift Shop) to better clearly communicate and drive the concepts forward to get to a purposeful place in the end.
Reflections
This part of the process was essential in grounding our similar ideas, as well as bridging our ideas and actions. This part was also probably the hardest, as trying to set a distinctive plan meant we had to get to the core of what we were trying to "shed light" on ABOUT the Gen Zers reactions to feet, and be extremely focused on the bigger picture while filming, editing, etc... It took us a while to get to the final product in terms of approach, with it honestly falling fully into place during editing.
I now know that having a clear path (that can end up changing during the production process) from the start aids in making decisions about what to film, so the more planning we can do beforehand the better, as we don't want the story to take a life of its own. While it wasn't an extreme issue in the final product, it's a takeaway for future projects as it made me feel stuck at the beginning, being that we didn't have a quickly established group outlook on how our choices were contributing to what we wanted to leave the audience with in the end.
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