Urban Exploring Documentary Treatment

Urban Exploration

Length: 10:00

Format: 16:9 Full HD

Hook or tag line: Just because it’s abandoned, doesn’t mean it’s empty.

Short synopsis (25-50 words):

What is the film about?

Our short documentary will focus around the sport of Urban Exploring, following a small group of urban explorers as they photograph the Stanley Tools warehouses.

Mid-Length synopsis/outline (250 words):

What is the core subject matter of your film? How will the story unfold? What are the themes/issues/arguments you are trying to uncover? Who are the key contributors? What makes them interesting? What will we learn about them? Use visual language the aim is to bring the story alive and the characters off the page.

The core subject matter of the film will be explaining the sport of Urban exploring.

We are currently thinking the story will take the full 10 minutes of the allotted time and will play out in a structure similar to this;

·         Introduce the urban explorers and urban exploring through VO

·         Follow the explorers as they prepare to go ‘explore’

·         Explore the Stanley Tools and other sites with the explorers

·         Intercut this interviews from Stanley Tools site owner and VO and images from the explorers

·         End with future of Urban Exploring

Some of the arguments we will look at will be that buildings shouldn’t be left to rot because it’s a waste of space and resources, but as they are rotting why not take the opportunity to admire them in a temporary state while trying to adhere to the law.

The key contributors throughout the piece will be the Urban Explorers we follow and the site owners,

What makes them interesting is a very unique and uncommon hobby on the edge of the law with an insight into a world most people don’t know exists.

Our two main contributors are Matt and David. Their both in their early twenties and are friends who met at university.

Both Matt and David were born in small towns, growing up in tight-knit communities in which it seemed that not a lot happened and not a lot changed. For both boys, they found entertainment not on the streets but in abandoned buildings in their local area. Unlike the everyday pattern of their lives, discovering these buildings offered a new sense of excitement. Gradually discovering and seeking out these sites became a regular occurrence and is something that helped seal their friendship.

Matt is an eccentric individual with an artistic flair. Whereas others may think these derelict sights are a waste of space, for him it’s a blank canvas. The unique aesthetics of the sites offer a new, completely different space to work in meaning that every piece is unique.

David is a much quieter character with attention to detail. For him, these places are a haven of undiscovered secrets waiting to be captured through a lens

We hope that this will give a glimpse into the wider urban exploring movement.

Analysis of approach (500 words):

How will you make this film? What will it look and sound like? What is its style? What are the techniques used? What works were inspirational to the film? What works does it resemble? What is its mood? Its ambience?  Demonstrate enthusiasm and a distinctive visual/aural voice here. Include references to TWO films that you have watched as research.

We will make this film by getting our footage partly from interviews, b-roll and hopefully archive footage, while also gaining observational footage from following the Urban Explorers.

It will have an urban gritty feel to match the subject matter and environment we will be shooting in, while at the same time implementing many cinematic style shots such as large sweeping pans, wide angle shots, extreme close ups and possibly time lapses to help convey the emptiness and vastness of the location we are filming.

Its soundtrack will be entirely instrumental, we are thinking something with a strong beat but relatively simple with not too many individual instruments or sounds because a cluttered soundtrack wouldn’t suit the mase en scene and would detract from any voice over’s from interviews.

Some of the techniques used will be expository and observational, archive footage, interviews, voice over’s, still images and montage.

Some of the inspiration we have gotten for the style of our film is from a short 30 minute documentary on a new drug that is appearing in Russia called krokodill. It is an incredibly potent drug far stronger, and more importantly for the addicts much cheaper, than heroin, but it literally rots the body from the inside out. The documentary focused largely on the fact that it is the poor who are succumbing to the urge to try it as a cheap alternative to heroin.

They really drove this message home by getting a lot of b-roll of the poor areas of the city, and doing interviews with the inhabitants on location in the run down dangerous looking areas. Seeing the extreme poverty really drove what they were saying home, and we want to implement this in our film by interviewing on location if we can.

Its mood will be exciting and light-hearted but with serious undertones regarding the legality of the things the explorers do and the future of Urban Exploring as a sport.

Its ambience will generally make it seem like a quiet piece that focuses on the artistic side of the abandoned buildings, trying to show the viewer a world they probably have never seen before, but also trying to illustrate why the Urban Explorers risk getting caught just for a chance to explore these strange locations.

Filmmaker biography (50-100 words) :

What kind of documentary maker or filmmaker are you? What are the themes in your work? How do you approach work? Do you have any awards?

This is the second documentary in which I have been the main camera operator and I already feel a strong visual style coming through my work. I strive to create artistic shots utilising the specific visuals within the documentaries subject to show the beauty of the mise en scene and engage the viewer. I also personally enjoy making documentaries about peoples passion for their individual hobbies as they are positive and give audiences a chance to understand each other better as people. When working on documentary I look for the most interesting and eye catching cutaways that give tone and meaning to a film. I work both to shot lists and in an improvisational way grabbing shots of unique and interesting moments quickly and efficiently to ensure a comforting amount of B roll footage.

Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, Narration, Film and its Voice

Stella Bruzzi New Documentary, Narration, The film and its voice.

New Documentary by Stella Bruzzi works to redefine and critique more classic versions of Documentary theory and bring them into a new age, using new and old documentaries to prove wrong some of the theories of the past. Unfortunately I feel that it has itself fallen victim to time and many of the arguments it makes are either no longer relevant or are painfully obvious. Whilst many of the observations she makes about Bill Nichols’ modes of documentary in her introduction are astute he himself says that the modes and all of documentary is a “fuzzy” concept to define thus making his modes more like helpful guidelines, like genres in fiction, than set rules. The chapter of New Documentary I have focused on is Narration, The Film and its Voice. In this chapter Bruzzi champions the voice over as a valid tool for documentary film making rather than the “imposed destroyer of the ‘pure’ film image.”

Bruzzi believes is in “the 'problem' at the heart of the discussions of narration is the question of how one views the relationship between sound and image”. She cite many big names in early documentary that believe sound ruins image before again turning her sights on Nichols and his “expository mode”, she says “Most to blame for this negative perception of voice over documentaries has been Bill Nichols’ definition of the ‘expository mode” as didactic, the oldest and most primitive form of non fiction film”. She runs to the defence of the mode which she disagrees with by underpinning all of Nichols’ modes as ignoring many historic documentaries. However my fundamental issue with Bruzzi’s attack on Nichols is that he seems in his own book Introduction to Documentary to have no problem with either voice over or speech driven documentary, in fact he says “Speech fleshes out our sense of the world.” He also in discussion about the rhetoric language used by documentaries as well as when he talks about “evidentiary editing” he highlights the importance of a voice over or speech to tie together and sums up the importance of dialogue by saying “arguments call for a logic that words are better able to convey than are images". I therefore believe that Bruzzi's attack on Nichols is unwarranted, I do agree that the use of voice over in documentary is not a bad thing but I also believe that it has to be used in an interesting an well written way for it to have an impact.

I do agree on large with the examples of good documentary voice over that Bruzzi offers, her examples of voice over as ironic, emotional, political and even times when "words fail" excellently show that voice over can be a brilliant tool to enhance images. The other side to the argument Bruzzi fails to address is the cases in which voice over is used instead of or in lack of images, not to concrete or anchor their meanings and tie together an argument but to tell the audience what to think and what they are looking at.

I believe Bruzzi's general defensiveness gets in the way of her theoretical study however she does explain some good uses of voice over and well defines what voice over should do. Whilst she admits the basic use of voice over is to connect images that seem to have no link she recognises the importance of this role saying "The traditional voice-over form emphasizes the unity, and imaginary cohesion of it various elements; so the dominance of the narration covertly seeks to emphasise the incontrovertibility of the images by refusing to dispute and doubt what they depict." That is not all the voice over does and not all it encompasses, in fact she states that sometimes the voice over can do the opposite, ironically commenting on the visuals creating a juxtaposition that makes the piece more open and polysemous. Not only can it do the opposite but the actual "failing" of words within a documentary can be extremely powerful, she agrees that sometimes words aren't best but when there is a lack of words at a specific time, a silence or unwillingness to continue on the part of the commentator, it is more poignant than removing the voice over completely. "Voice over is no longer a controlling mechanism" this is also a point in which the direct mode seems to be broken and the audience identify with the voice and give it a kind of character, struggling with them through the experience of the film. There are many other specific unique and interesting uses of voice over which Bruzzi uses to create a stong argument for its use and I and I am sure many other film makers agree with those specific uses disregarding the "suspicion that a voice over has the capacity to violate the 'truth' revealed in the image" in these cases. However it cannot be forgotten that voice over as well as any individual element of a film has the "capacity" to ruin a film if done carelessly.

Final Doc shoot

Our final shoot was this Tuesday and we had 3 locations to cover so it was bound to be a tiring shoot. The weather was awful but as pressed for time as we are and as we are filming in winter we took what we were given, at least it didn't rain heavily.

We started in the church as it doesn't have a roof and it wasn't yet raining. There were two specific shots I wanted from this location and we managed to get both. First a long shot from the stairs (that and at the top step to the second floor which no longer exit!) of the guys walking across the precarious floorboards. Secondly there is some really cool apocalyptic churchy graffiti in a small square room, I wasn't sure how to shoot this and after a little practice managed to get a 360 pan of the room with one of the urbexers walking round. I went through the floor a few times whilst filming and ripped my jacket on the way in but apart from that the first location went pretty well, the light levels were better than we expect and we got quite a lot of footage.

The second location was a little tricky to get into, on our reccie only me and the urbexer got in, this time we gor our lighting woman through but whilst our director was outside someone approached us in a car and questioned him. The negativity of the guy worried our director so we decided to move on and cut out the location. We still had to get all the kit out which would take 5-10mins so I quickly grabbed as much footage as possible with the urbexers. Fortunately this location wasn't going to have a lot of screen time anyway and I knew the one shot I had to get, an out of focus shot of them on the bottom floor from a broken window on the second. It was however all hand held, hopefully I wasn't too shakey and some of it can be smoothed out in post but we should be able to get maybe 30secs to 1min of footage from the rushes. It was only going to have 1min tops anyway so thats not too bad, just a shame the shoot got a little usurped by a nosy bystander.
This is me setting the shot through the window

The third location was my least favourite but we had a lot of time to spend there after location two was cut down. I got a nice repetition of a stanley tools shot of a long room with one urbexer knelt in the foreground on the right and the other stood in the background on the left. I also got a really nice shot of one urbexer walking down a corridor and knocking the loose paint off the wall, this looked really nice and has the kind of motion and imagery that fits the doc perfectly. Steve (director) had a lot of shots he wanted to get from the location, it inspired him a lot, so I left him to work whilst I got some basic coverage as I couldnt see that much good in the location. This is one of the shots an urbexer got, we are hoping to use this pic and others in our final piece. The colour, contrast and focus of this pic are awesome!

So oveerall a mixed day but the footage has been pro res's and looked through and nobody thinks we need to do any more shooting so I guess THATS A WRAP!

Tutorial, reccie and a new shoot!

Last monday we had a tutorial on our documentary project, we had a small structure planned in which we use 3 locations framed by a urbexers "getting ready" scene however after discussion we decided to remove it. This meant that our Monday filming session was open so instead we went on a reccie and recorded the urbexers interviews.

On the reccie we looked at 4 different locations, unfortunately we felt only one of them was big enough to spend a whole section on. After talking with our producer and director it was decided that as the doc. is split into 3 parts, the past of urbexing, the present and the future of urbexing, mixing the three smaller locations would work really well for the final part, the future of urbexing.

We spent Wednesday filming in the best location, so we wanted to get a lot of stuff, we hope to fill a whole 3 minutes with the location so good coverage was important. Here is my shot list for the day:

X	#	SHOT	Action	Notes
	1	LONG	Urbexers walk up the top stairs	Into the main graf room Could try track up the stairs
	2	MED	Urbexers past window	Only see the mid
	3	CU	Urbexers face through window	So out of focus you cant see the face
	4	Long	Establishing shot
	5	2shot	One urbexer either side of the top staircase	Camera position in the middle
	6	Med	urbexer defacing something
	7	Long	Ext. shot of urbexers outside in doorways	One point perspective (like shot in SToolls)
	8	CU	Cam infront of face shot	Should get at least 2
	9	Long	Urbexers walking outside	Through the hole in the wall, track to hole.
	10	MED	Urbexers coming out of the basement	Show urbexers from the back as they come out.

We got most of the shots from the list as well as a lot of others, Steve also had a shotlist he forget to bring but worked of the photographs from the reccie to give him an idea of what to shoot. We also happened to bump into a graffiti artist that does a lot of work in the building. Although it wasn't planned it will work brilliantly in our doc as in the interview both urbexers mentioned occasionally bumping into people.

What I really loved about this location was that it has the same abandoned feel as Stanley tools but it is on a completely different scale. The whole location feels more homely and small, less industrial, it gives the location a different identity to Stanley Tools. The graffiti in the place is awesome, meeting the artist was really enlightening, it was great to see him work but the building itself has a lot of awesome features to exploit. For example we found a hatch in the top floor that we could see through, the stairs are perfectly centrally composed and look brilliantly cinematic, and the decay of the paint in some areas reflect the amount the building has withered in time. The flaking paint is something I really wanted to see in Stanley tools but never found so I am really happy with getting it in this location.

Hopefully we got enough footage to fill the 3 mins in that location as we are filming the three other locations next week. I need to make sure that in these locations we get;
More tracks
Defacing
Camera in front of face shot
Pans

Fingers crossed the next shoot goes well as the editing needs to be getting done as soon as possible with the deadline in a few short weeks!

Presenting the Poetic

Over the week/ weekend our sound man and our editor worked with our director to complete the poetic doc. We presented it yesterday. The feedback we got was largely positive, everyone thought it looked cinematic and worked really well. There were a few issues with the sound but they are easily fixed. Overall I am really happy with the way it turned out. I would have like there to be more contrast between the start and end as far as motion and editing speed is concerned but within the 2 min piece it was always going to be difficult to have a large development in style.

Here is a version of our poetic from youtube:

Shooting and sound documentary workshop

In our shooting and sound workshops we looked at two separate ways of shooting and recording sound, in a constructed environment, and on the go. To do this we mocked up an interview on graffiti and recorded our editor drawing and walking whilst being interviewed. From this I learned that if we were to do something similar in our project it would be best to use some kind of track or steadycam or at least practice the camera movements before recording the subject for real.

In the other half of the lesson we looked at how to record in a set or house and the things that can effect it. We talked about positioning of the camera, the subject, the interviewer and of the background, including windows and doors. These offered good insights and tips into filming interviews that will help to make our work look professional. The tip he gave to us specifically was about masking our subjects. He suggested we just set the exposure to match the outside and then film them infront of a large window, turning them into a silhouette.

Doc Shooting Day 2+3

We have been shooting our poetic doc for the last few days at Stanley Tools, here is my shot list for the shooting days:

X	#	SHOT	Action	Notes	S.
	1	MED	Urbexers go down the stairs	Ariel shot	2
	2	CU	Silhouette goes past round window	Expos for outside	2
	3	MED	Urbexer walks from behind cam into darkness		2
	4	MED	Urbexer walks from darkness over cam	Opposite of sh3	2
	5	CU	Aaron with cam in front of face	Background should be 1 point perspective	3
	6	CU	Aaron with cam in front of face	Background should play on square motif	3
	7	LONG	Aaron Defacing a window. Shot from behind him to hide identity.	Try exposing for outside and inside lighting	3
	8	MED	Track of urbexers looking at graffiti timed cam flash and walk away	DOLLY	1/ 3
	9	LONG	Light version of chair and tv tracking shot	DOLLY	3
	10	MED	Lighter shot Peacock graffiti or urbexers shooting the graffiti	PAN	2
	11	MCU	Tracking shot of the windows	DOLLY (like the practice shot)	2
	12	LONG	Long shots of the large rooms, position urbexers CU and LONG	One urbexer left+close Other right+long	2/ 3
	13	MED	Bathroom, peeling walls and vegetation in better light		2
	14	LONG	Shot of the outside of Stanley tools.	Show the urbexers entering	2

So how did it go? Really well, the lighting was a lot better, much more helpful, and we had lots more time with the urbexers to get more relevant footage. We were a little restricted on the first day as the Airsofters that us the pace were using a few of the rooms however we got to move about during different times of the day so that was great. On the second day we were a little short on time but we had long enough to get the last few shots we needed so it went really well. After the first day me and Steve, the director, reviewed alll of the footage we has shot and were really happy with what it all looked like, we used the final day to get the last few shots noticed we needed and wrapped yesterday.