Month: February 2019

“We take care of the females if they are small.”

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From Dulce, a short film by Guille Isa and Angello Faccini on the New York Times Op-Docs channel.

Climate change poses a great visual challenge to filmmakers. How do you convey the imperceptible, an invisible gas that is slowly warming the planet and causing incremental yet monumental change? Its worst consequences haven’t yet happened, and many of the changes are subtle differences, not dramatic ones. Even the best visual examples – hurricanes, flooding and forest fires – are events that already happen, just with greater intensity than they once did.

Filmmakers also must convey technical information visually, without losing narrative momentum, which means relying on text within the film, explanatory voiceover and often, supplementary written material. And they must also grapple with a dark theme without overwhelming viewers: An end to everything that we now know as familiar.

We have one advantage as filmmakers interested in climate change, because it is happening, now. It is the ultimate in present-tense storytelling, the secret sauce that we’re looking for in narrative nonfiction. Impactful films about climate change tend to use present-tense storytelling to their advantage. The best fall into several categories:

  • Loveletters to a place or a disappearing ecosystem, like Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Coral* or the visual masterpiece of this genre, Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. *(A note: Randy Olson in Don’t Be Such a Scientist says the storytelling in the HBO Real Sports episode about coral reefs is much stronger. I’ll report back.) 
  • Reflexive pieces that use the filmmaker’s experience to inform viewers, such as Josh Fox’s  documentary about his family’s experience with fracking, Gasland.
  • Explanatory, journalism-based pieces that use interviews, experts and voiceover to convey technical information or explore a problem, sometimes by asking a provocative question. Jordan Brown and Derrick Jensen’s Forget Shorter Showers excels at this, in part because it started as an essay that dealt with the provocative question of whether individual action can make a difference.
  • And my favorite category, the films that use narrative nonfiction techniques and cinema verite to put viewers in a place they might not otherwise go, following the story of someone who is living with the changes wrought by the imperceptible. Plastic China by Jiu-Liang Wang is among them, as is Dulce, the film I’ll discuss below. (It’s noteworthy that both of these films use children as central characters, which allows us to understand who will be most affected by what is to come.)

Dulce, a 10-minute film by Guille Isa and Angello Faccini, is featured on New York Times Op-Docs. The film is in Spanish, with English subtitles – although dialogue is limited. It opens with sound leading the picture: splashing water and the whining tones of a young, distraught girl. We see Dulce, 8, learning to swim with her mother and a man from their village on the Pacific Coast of Colombia. The girl’s mother, Betty Arboleda, swims closer to the camera, with her daughter clinging to her back.

“If you hold onto me, you won’t learn to swim,” she tells her daughter in Spanish.

Within the first 30 seconds, we have been given a storytelling cue. Dulce, we understand, is a sweet, coming-of-age tale. It has an unanswered question: Will Dulce learn to swim? But the stakes could not be higher. She doesn’t need to learn to swim to play in the pool with her friends. Dulce needs to know how to swim to survive climate change. The filmmakers use a moment of time in a child’s life to illustrate a larger theme. This is not just a story about climate change, it is a story about how we go on as a species, how we will still have these coming-of-age moments, even as we live with what is happening to our planet.

The filmmakers use dialogue here to illustrate the menace. “This month the sea gets angry,” Betty warns her daughter. “And when it gets angry the boat always overturns.”

Notice the two gorgeous shots of Betty, which run from 50 seconds to 1:24. She is centered in them, in medium closeups. First in the water, trying to explain to her daughter why she must swim, and then we see her in profile in a more introspective moment, on a small canoe as it approaches the mangrove swamps where she works as a pianguera harvesting black clams by hand.

In the next scene, beginning at 1:30, we are in the muck with Betty, as she engages in the dirty and difficult work of a pianguera. There are excellent examples of matched action sequencing here. Tight shots of her gloved hand picking up a clam and then a cut to her other hand holding a smoking smudge stick of coconut fiber to keep insects at bay. There are medium shots of her feet in rubber boots, walking through the mangroves. Wide shots of her in the overall setting. Without words, we understand that this is difficult physical work.

The scene relies on the beauty of natural sound, no dialogue or music. We hear insects and bird life, the sucking sound as Betty’s boots pull away from mud, and the splash of her rinsing the clams she gathers in the brackish water of the mangrove swamp.

I wanted to deconstruct the storytelling arc and parallel editing techniques to better understand how an intimate story could be used to explore a wider theme. The film opens with Betty and her daughter together. We see Betty at work as a pianguera, and then at home, with a wide shot showing the home on stilts. The sequence cuts to Betty framed within a doorway with another daughter, hanging laundry. (See 2:40 to 2:50) Then, we go to a sequence with Dulce and other children sitting on a dock, with some splashing and playing. This scene uses dialogue to cast light on Dulce’s learning-to-swim dilemma. We eavesdrop on her conversations with her friends. The camera is close, using a shallow depth of field to focus on Dulce. Again, natural sound is at work.

At 3:44 minutes, we cut back to Betty’s daily work gathering clams. And at 4:30, we are back to Dulce. The scene opens with her centered in the frame on the dock, her back to us. Around her, other children jump into the water and swim. We come around to a close shot of Dulce’s face and her clear indecision about joining her fellow swimmers. By centering her in the frame, the filmmakers have echoed the early scenes of her mother. It reminds us of the question at the heart of this story: Will Dulce learn to swim and will she grow up to be as strong as her mother?

The passage of time is conveyed beautifully with wide shots of the tide coming in closer to the family’s house on stilts. We see now that waters are higher than when Betty was hanging laundry to dry.

At 5:08, mother and daughter reunite. Betty is combing Dulce’s hair. This is a tender moment and dialogue advances the emotional arc of the story. “Are you mad at me?” Dulce asks. “No. Whether you can swim or not, you’re my daughter,” her mother tells her. Then, though, she lays on the guilt. “When children don’t swim, their mothers get sad.”

Next, we see them swimming together. Dulce, reluctantly, but with her mother’s encouragement. The following scene is also together: Dulce goes clam-gathering with her mother. At 7:50, note the use of negative action in a wide shot of the clam gatherers walking away from the camera into the Mangroves, and the visual beauty of the smudge smoke. We cut to Dulce helping her mother. Of the eight clams she has gathered, she can keep only one, her mother tells her, while she and the other women linger on a break. “It’s the male. We take care of the females if they are small. We put them back.”

Next, at 9:20, there’s a wide shot of Dulce and her mother walking along the horizon, in silhouette at the edge of the mangroves. There’s a voiceover of Dulce’s version of events. “I go to the roots, to the mangroves looking for clams, and find but trash among the roots. Leave the small shells where they be, that they may grow and we may help them.”

The film closes with natural sound from the mangrove swamp and text, explaining how communities in Colombia’s Iscuande region are working to preserve the mangrove forests to provide a buffer against rising seas and to absorb the carbon that contributes to climate change.

No matter how visually stunning, how intimate the coming-of-age narrative, words are still necessary to explain the imperceptible.

– Erika Bolstad

Defending the Koshi

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http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/nepal-defending-koshi

 

The opening to this video is one of the most impactful ways I have seen still photos used in a video piece in quite some time. They set up a studio with hanging lights and string to clip the photos to. Then they moved through that space to capture video of the still photos. As someone that comes from a still photography background I am always looking for creative and natural feeling ways to incorporate still images. I think this method was very successful in telling the story, and made the photos even more tangible to the view because they are printed out. The rack focus and slow pans really helped to set the mood for the dramatic narrative that was about to be told. The ominous music and forlorn quotes from local people set the stage very quickly that all is not okay. I appreciate the fact that the photos are faces of many locals and we are hearing the thoughts of the locals. All of these factors, in the first minute and 11 seconds, lead the viewer to a basic understanding of the important issue we are about to dive in to.

We are immediately brought into this world through the music and natural sounds that they blended together. This sound design throws you right in the middle of the Nepalese jungle and really gives you a feel for the surroundings. They also use some landscape time-lapse and general scene setting clips to push this even further. By the time the narration of the film starts we have a pretty good idea of place (02:00). These beginning clips are certainly jump cuts from scene to scene, but the motivation is also to start wide with landscape, move down to the water, and then to an individual utilizing that water. Even when they do text on screen they use a nice dead space composition to house the text (02:27).

 

After we gain bit more understanding about the history of the possible construction of a dam, they move forward to show us a little slice of life. Again, jumping from scene to scene. They seem to go mostly between close up and medium shots, all focusing on details of every day life there. This focus narrows down again to everyday water use in detail shots (03:15). These shots are important to the story because it makes us care about the people involved. Shooting the places that they live, in close up detail shots, puts us in their shoes. This leads us into hearing from the people who live in the area via on screen interviews. They cut between a super tight shot, with virtually no head room, to grab at the emotional parts of the interview and a medium shot for the more general factual parts of the interview. They use this two-camera interview style throughout most of the interviews in the piece. The interviews seem to be naturally lit, which feels nice for an intimate story.

Cleverly they jump back to the studio shot still images as a transition to talk about the next part of the story (04:12).

The story goes on in this fashion for another nine minutes. They use each technique throughout the whole film, which to me greatly helps in making it feel cohesive even when they are traveling to different areas. They also tie up the piece using the same studio technique as the intro with the stills, as well as video portraits with dozens of people in close up that drive the pace of the last minute of the story (11:20).

 

Nigeria Struggles to Clear the Air

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https://undark.org/article/air-pollution-lagos/

I looked at a multimedia piece on UNDARK (a new site to me), partnered with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. This story is under their Special Projects: Breathtaking, a series focusing on air pollution issues all over the world, including China, India, Nigeria and Bangladesh.  This story has, to a degree, the “Snow Fall” treatment. The visual media guides you through the story and provides much needed slap you in the face photos to get the point across.

The opening photo fills the page, it’s grainy and dark, and powerful. A man tends to a burning pile of trash, surrounded by piles of trash as far as the frame can see, with black billowing smoke almost choking out the sky. This photo very quickly and effectively gets the point of the headline across. Obviously, we want to know more information, but it could be argued that this photo and headline tell a heck of a story. Many of the photos used as you scroll through the page are medium or wide shots. I think this really plays into the vastness of these burn areas, and the neighborhoods the toxic air is reaching. But when they do decide to use a detail shot it is done in a way to bring focus to an individual dealing with the harsh situation.

The written section starts by explaining just what is in this trash, in vivid
detail. They mix in scientific facts about the air quality with an anecdote about a young boy watching a goat being slaughtered and tossed onto the flaming pile. And that none of the workers wore protective gear. So even though they do not have visual media to match the anecdote, they tell it in a way that you can picture what happened. Next to these opening sentences is a world map infographic pinpointing the location of this part of the story in the series.

As you scroll down the page, through the story, there are clickable links that bring you to pages explaining some of the scientific things that a layman might not understand. These pages have tons of infographics and visuals to help get the point across. They also link to other news articles, I think this is because they are covering such a huge topic, it’s bound to have been written about before. So, they can link to this wealth of information which will save them having to add in unnecessarily detailed details. They link to other news organizations, but also to their own overall project, so that we can make those connections to the widespread issue.

Just one example of this is a link to the World Health Organization page, to help explain the correlation between air quality and health. This seems like a great way to be able to quickly explain something in the article, but also give people the choice to look more deeply into an idea/issue for deeper understanding if they so choose.

They are pretty good about taking a break from the block of text to show photos and short videos. This feels like a great way to zoom in and out of the story. They talk about the overall issues, and then zoom into the faces of actual people working and living in these areas. They also mixed in a beautiful short video, of drone shots, that show the area they are talking about. The camera’s point of view in these shots is very much motivated movement. It literally takes you over the burning landscape and through the clouds of smoke. It pans over a pretty large landscape and is cut together really smoothly. It almost feels a bit like a story without words. Then the video cuts in to the workers in these areas. And pans over the mounds and mounds of trash, through the black smoke. While drone footage can sometimes be overused, and feel disconnected, it works here because it puts you right in their shoes, no way out of it. This was a successful way to show a huge overview and to be able to move in and out of that space in a way that felt smooth and natural.

The visual storytellers seemed to have pretty intimate access to the people involved. This access is made even more clear when they also introduce a 360 video. It brought you smack dab in the middle of the villages that surround the burn areas, and into the heart of the burn areas themselves. As you look around in the 360 space different facts and information appear on the screen. It was an interesting feeling to have some control over moving around in that space. Lastly, they include a really great interactive chart. Tracked pollution data on any given day, that can also be broken into weeks and months to get a good overview. Everything in clickable and transformable, each dot has its own viewable data.

Having interactive media really keeps your attention and opens up the way you can tell a story, and the insane amount of information you can now provide to the viewer.

Greener Grass

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Greener Grass from Gulp Splash on Vimeo.

Recently, I learned about the SXSW awards, so I watched Greener Grass, a winning short film from 2016. The off-kilter comedy, written by Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, is awkward and surreal. The film pairs normal moments – like one couple asking another, “are you guys going anywhere for the Fourth [of July]?” – with totally bizarre scenes like when a child suddenly turns into a dog and no one bats an eye. It’s set on a soccer field, where two women vie for “perfection,” passive-aggressively competing over children, husbands, and more in a decidedly weird and paranoid world. The entire film feels nostalgic, with many scenes having soft light and blurred edges. At several points, but especially at 10:03, the audio amplifies this feeling through a cheesy 1950’s-esque soundtrack.

While the overall narrative progresses linearly forward, the film feels like a play comprised of numerous, self-contained acts. This is emphasized by fade-to-black transitions between each scene. The acting is likewise theatric. However, since one of the points the film seems to be making is that people – in the film and in real life – are just performing to avoid being judged, the stilted acting fits.

There’s also a gradual building of suspense. First, we learn that one of the main character’s friends has been murdered. Then, at 5:07, there’s a dramatic point of view shift that clues us in further. Vignetting (i.e. shading around the edges) paired with loud breathing noises and shaking convey clearly that we’re now viewing the scene through an outsider’s eyes, possibly through binoculars. This voyeur POV is signaled again at 7:25 where a scene between the two moms continues but on the other side of a hazy windshield. A few minutes later, the breathing and dark shading start up again with a shallow depth of field that contributes to the binocular feel. This pattern of POV shifts at intervals increases the suspense until it reaches a tipping point, when the voyeur is finally revealed.

The producers employed other odd editing techniques that contributed to the overall oddness of the film. For example, at 5:32 a rather jarring j-cut with dramatic music signals the shift from one day on the soccer field to another. Another POV editing trick the filmmakers used happens at 6:35, where the viewer understands that they’re looking at the main characters through a dog’s eyes because of an unusually upward camera angle. They also used super tight shots to boost the uncomfortableness of the film, like at 1:32 and 3:38. Here, the camera is hyper-zoomed in on the character’s mouths which emphasizes how they are striving for superficial perfection while nailing the producer’s apparent goal of unnerving viewers.

Another interesting series of editing choices was made at 4:05, where one character’s jealousy for the other is revealed. This is shown through over-the-shoulder shots where the viewer is tuned in to what the jealous character is focusing on, and then the camera slides slowly towards her envious face as the scene transitions into her pastel daydream.

There is so much to say about this short film. In particular, there’s a lot to learn from it about how to use a persistent editing style to convey greater thematic meaning. I think it’s also a clear case of people who know the rules breaking the rules. Many of the editing choices, from music to transitions, would usually seem corny and amateur. But because the filmmakers employed them consistently and deliberately, the result is as captivating as it is strange.

-Ashley

Taking Flight Repost: Love is Blind

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Love Is Blind from Dan Hodgson on Vimeo.

A repost just in time for Valentine’s Day!

I came across this film totally on accident on a website for an Oregon business accelerator. It won and was nominated for a bunch of awards, including receiving a nomination at the Cannes Film Festival and BIFA, winning the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival for Best Narrative Short, receiving the grand prize at the Fenêtres Sur Courts, and more. Not knowing all this, for the first forty or so seconds I’m thinking, wait, what on earth am I watching? Then you get a snippet of the first plot point: the husband is deaf. Ah, so there will be a story. It’s a classic will-they-get-caught setup for suspense. One thing I want to point out before getting too in the weeds is that I think this film highlights why diversity – in filmmakers, actors, writers, interviewees and so on – is essential for capturing new and innovative stories. How often do you see a film where a main character is deaf? Where they’re using sign language? And it’s not an aside either, not just included for the sake of being diverse; it’s what pulls the whole plot together.

In addition to being a captivating (and funny) story, there’s a lot of great things going on here in terms of composition. Even in the first twenty-five seconds of this film, there at least a dozen different kinds of shots. It opens with a whip pan which throws you right into the rush of events. Then there’s a close-up, an over-the-should point of view shot, two seconds later there’s a cutaway, more over-the-shoulder….you get it. There’s a plethora of examples of matched action, like at nineteen seconds where the guy starts to remove the girl’s shirt and then we cut to a medium shot where the shirt’s halfway off. Another example is at twenty-eight seconds where she jumps into his arms. The fast pace of the sequence works to make the viewer feel like they’re part of the, well, action.

At fifty seconds, the filmmakers use a series of cutaways to show the husband coming home that reveal part – but not all – of what the main conflict in the story’s going to be. Every few seconds it seems like there’s a new plot point that introduces a new unanswered question. At 1:13 the camera moves down to reveal a barrette, and the viewer’s asking, “are those two going to get caught?” or, “how’s the other guy going to slip out?” This is achieved in part with parallel editing, where you see the story as it unfolds for each character. The film rides on the witness point during each shot, and the viewer is jostled between the three. Part of the film’s brilliance is that I found myself rooting for all of the characters at one point or another. I think the ending is fabulous, and I hope you enjoy it, too (but I don’t want to spoil it). By the way, the director, Dan Hodgson, has some other videos that I haven’t checked out yet (but plan to soon). You can find them on his Vimeo.

-Ashley Baker

Taking flight repost: My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes

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I watched “My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes,” by Charlie Tyrell, an op-doc featured by the New York Times, and many other places. The 13 minute piece uses found footage, old videotapes and present day interviews to set an intimate tone that pays off when the stakes rise midway through the film.

First off, I should mention the importance of a good title. It’s probably a main reason why the documentary has the most recent views on The New York Times website. The filmmaker uses the title — and the porno tapes — to hook into the viewer’s more prurient nature. There is little payoff on that front in the narrative, but by the time we realize that, we are already invested in the outcome of the film. The pornography is not just a red herring, however. It, along with the father’s other “stuff,” help show he was a strange and complicated man. The details help show his unique character in a more cinematic and literary way, instead of just “telling” that he was strange and complicated.

The film has a cinema vérité feel for much of the first half, with found footage providing much of the foundation. But it also relies heavily on interviews with family members, and a more journalistic approach to uncovering new information helps to push the plot forward. Late in the film, many of the voices do turn reflexive, as well, reacting to new information.

The editing techniques are also unique. The cuts and transitions are quick but also soft, and they jump in time from remembrance to present day without jolting the viewer. When remembering the past, the film footage is often grainy and dated. (The first 2 minutes, mostly.) It communicates an era. When Tyrell films the present, everything is clear, crisp, almost immaculate. (4:38, for instance). That visual difference is a cue to the viewer that life has changed, and it helps make the absence of Tyrell’s father more pronounced. The quick cuts, both from found video and animated photographs, help tell a big story in a short period of time. Some of those scenes are composed (like at 7:22) both with materials and old photographs, which helps connect the main character’s childhood and adulthood.

It’s near this time when the film takes a tonal shift. To this point, the film had felt like a son lamenting his father’s death and almost humorously probing his leftover stuff to find clues of who that man was. But when he stumbles on something actually meaningful — a devastatingly sad yet crucial audio recording  — the film takes on a more serious tone. The reflexive outlook also emerges as the cuts slow down and the viewer gets a long, uncomfortable glimpse into one specific moment in time (7:41). Everything screeches to an uncomfortable halt, and the weight of that information feels heavier because of that decision by the filmmaker, who also quiets all the background noise. It makes you feel like you are listening through a peephole to something you’re not supposed to hear.

In addition, I think using the young photographs of the filmmaker’s siblings to animate their particular audio was a smart idea. (3:53, for instance). It imparted the idea of family, and because they are remembering their father from their perspective as children, it put the audience into that frame of mind.

Overall, I’d say the short film does an effective job of eliciting deep sympathy and understanding from the viewer, while also asking and answering big questions — but in a quick and airy way that keeps the audience from being overburdened. It’s a worthwhile piece that reflects well on the filmmaker and his capabilities.

-Tim Trainor