At the Creating and Consuming Media for a Better Future conference I attended at UO this week, one of the panelists was filmmaker and journalist Ifanyi Bell. His short video, Future: Portland, made a big impact on me when I saw it earlier this year. I produce a lot of short docs about social issues and I was inspired by the unique and beautiful approach that Bell took in this piece.

The central character of the video is the city itself, and the b-roll of Portland is beautifully shot. Bell makes liberal use of slow motion, raindrop close ups, and cool blue color tones to evoke emotion from what are mostly scenery shots with few people in them. Choosing b-roll for a piece like this would be a challenge, because there’s not really any specific action to illustrate the ideas people are talking about. Bell could have used historical photos and footage, but by using only contemporary city footage, it emphasizes that this piece is about what is going on right now, not what happened in the past. As filmmaker, I often struggle with finding b-roll to fit abstract ideas, and this example helps me to remember that it’s possible to connect some pretty disparate video and audio together by matching tone and emotion, rather than literally illustrating what people are saying. The glimpse of blue skies at 4:42 after seeing so many rainy day shots is a nice way to bring a subtle sense hope in at the end.

I also like the use of video portraits of various members of black community. I don’t think there’s a much more powerful way to make your audience connect to a doc subject than a portrait shot of them staring through that fourth wall and right into your eyes. I especially like the portraits Bell uses at 1:34. Having the subject walk into the focal plane is a great technique, and a nice metaphor for bringing a person’s story into focus. I also like the one at 2:43 which uses two shots and subtly matched action. There’s another nice one that uses a jump cut at 3:26.

Bell told me this piece has been successful for him as marketing piece because other organizations that are dealing with complex and difficult issues want to use his techniques to tell their own stories. I’m hoping to do the same.