practiceOur digital story is a short interview based documentary about Chinese students and the troubles they face when they come to Australia like cultural shock, language barrier and mixing around with people. The idea is quite simple but we did face quite a lot of problems while making it.
- The first major issue was related to our proposal. It was our own mistake actually. We are just two people in the group and we decided to make a 3 minute documentary with 3 to 4 interviews with the topic of difficulties faced by Asian people (students and workers) when they come to Australia. The feedback we got was that we had to be more specific to make our film short. This topic was quite vast at this includes food, culture, religion, language and also aspects of student life and work life. According to the short documentary guideline paper developed by the makers of Jutta Ravn (2000): the most important quality in the making of a film. […] just as important as clarification, I think, is the need to simplify.
- Another problem we faced was developing questions for the Chinese subject in a way that we are not being rude or disrespectful towards him and politely ask him about his struggles and difficulties. You have to make sure your interviewees are comfortable with the wordings you use to ask your questions and it is not disrespectful in any way. So what we did was that we sat down with him and explained him the concept of the film and took some of his suggestions as well. Also I found some interesting tips for interviewing on the Wild class room documentary interview page which says: Remain flexible during your interview and let the person being interviewed go where they want. Pay attention to their emotions as the story unfolds and when you see new information appear that deserves attention, shift gears and refocus your questions on the heart of the story.
- Last but not the least we had some issues during production which pretty much everyone has every now and then related to audio and lighting. One of the interviews was shot outdoors and we could constantly hear noises in between of traffic or some machinery in between. We had to take some retakes. Also the sunlight kept changing literally every 5 minutes because of the cloud which were moving quite fast. So there were some major delays in between. We managed to go through it somehow and the end result was great. According to this article by Arthur Aiello, clouds act as diffusers when they come in between the sun and they soften and spread the light to give a balanced light effect.
References:
Guidelines for producing a short documentary:
http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_13/section_5/artc1A.html
The Wild Classroom:
http://www.thewildclassroom.com/wildfilmschool/gettingstarted/interviewquestions.html
Article by Arthur Aiello on Videomaker site:
https://www.videomaker.com/article/c10/7501-getting-started-shooting-on-sunny-days
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