Final Major Project Unit: Project Brief

Finding Serenity

The last film I'll be making at UCA, and it's going to be a documentary. The decision behind this came early on in the year. I feel that I've fulfilled the experimental fictional piece with Poppy, which showcases my camera skills, lighting, working in a studio, working with actors, and making a drama to music. I now want to show my skills in shooting real events, whilst bringing together my shooting style. After university I'm hoping to start up a media company where I will be directing and shooting documentary-style films. So this final piece will aid this as it's being made for a company (Bipolar UK). 

Following on from our past collaborations, Lauren and I met over the summer to share ideas. She had been brainstorming stories and topics, before telling me about one in particular, bipolar disorder. We both share interests in mental health and documentary films and in making experimental and expressive visuals to music. So we combined that aspect and flipped the documentary to combine the two. The partnership with the imagery comes with the recordings we will take when interviewing the participants (as opposed to the typical sit in front of a camera and speak), and combining their voiceover with imagery which can act as a metaphor for their emotions, so it becomes a visual journey of someone with bipolar disorder through disembodied voices. Showing their ups and downs, the highs and lows, and so we get a feel and a better understanding of what it’s like to live with the illness. We realise that there are so many styles and not one set way of approaching a documentary, shown through the very influential documentary The Imposter. However, there are some typical documentary styles:

• Expository Mode: a narrator tells you what’s going on in the visual
• The Personal Voice: as above but in the first person of their perspective
• Observational/fly on the wall
• Cinema Verite

We’d also explore how the illness can also benefit to life’s successes and how many successful business people live with the disorder, and how it makes them who they are today. Our starting point was collaborators, as they are the people who are the main focal point of the film, it’s vital that we find the stories to tell, someone who speaks visually. We started by contacting various charities in which Lauren drew up a list of. Our initial aim was to seek 2-3 participants and perhaps an expert view and family members. There is the option, if we find that there is more interest, to include various voices combined at certain moments in the films, especially if we find similarities between each individual’s experience. 

We’d also like to look at the effects of treatment of this disorder and how it is diagnosed. We expect to find some controversy around this subject, but the aim of the documentary is to explore this and benefit people’s understanding of the disorder and how to spot it and deal with it without affecting the individual so dramatically that they lose the quirks which make them who they are. 

We accept that the style is not conventional, but we feel the stories we take will be more effective in a different light the way we tell them. There are various options we could do to overcome some problems such as, who is this god-like voice speaking to me? We could show the person in their personal time, their hobbies and habits, but shoot it in a way where the close-ups are extreme or they are a blurred figure in the background. 

Our inspirations for this that has helped us see that it can be done are taken from documentaries such as: “The Boy Who’s Skin Fell Off” (e.g. he told his story in parts where he was talking over visuals of clouds when talking about dying). And generally, in documentaries I see, it seems more effective when you are hearing someone say something important but not necessarily having to look at them speaking, I feel you pay attention to them more when you’re looking at something which is more relative to what they’re actually talking about: i.e. talking about serenity, their words are much more powerful when accompanied by a waterfall, calm waters, nature, or a night sky, as opposed to staring at them talking in their living room. 

In terms of narrative flow, we would control this by weaving between the stories of the individuals we cast, and as I mentioned before, we hope to find similarities in the disorder and the narrative peaks will be in the form of their highs, before bringing back down to their lows, with a hopeful, thoughtful and positive message towards the end. 

I think it’s important to note that this isn’t a factual documentary, we aim to inform the audience through the real stories of people’s experiences of the conditions so we get a much purer sense as to how the condition affects people’s lives.