In our documentary "Conventions of art", the main social group represented is artists part of one of the unconventional art forms, specifically street art. At first, our plan was to represent both a tattoo artist and street artist to show the different and same aspects that come with both "unconventional" art forms. For instance, how they can both be seen as a less classy form of art, compared to the typical museum art. Our documentary ended up only focusing on a high school student named Kyle, who has been in the graffiti and street art world for most of his life. He mainly expresses his art in his numerous sketchbooks throughout the years, as well as occasionally around our local city with a secret tag. As Kyle mentions throughout the documentary, an important aspect he specifically asked us to represent is how the stigma around street art can be painted as negative, and the impressive aspects behind it can be erased. Often, street art in films is represented as careless spray painting and vandalizing private property. For instance, a common game that our generation grew up with is called “Subway surfers”, and it involves a character running away from a cop after “vandalizing” an old train with spray paint. This is an example of the typical representation our generation gets for street art and graffiti. The questions we chose to ask Kyle aimed to express graffiti as a legitimate art form of its own. We contributed to this by making most of our B-roll shots Kyle simply flipping through his many sketchbooks and explaining the story and meaning behind all his art. He talked about the inspiration he felt when drawing certain designs, the nostalgia behind some of his notebooks, the inspiration of his tag, etc. This genuine dialogue helped contribute to the representation of street art in a way that stems from emotion and inspiration, rather than a place of wanting to vandalize. This also helped the audience to sympathize with him as a regular high school boy who is into his art, rather than a criminal.
We used numerous techniques to engage our audience in the documentary, such as lighting, editing styles, and music. We attempted to make our interview more engaging to watch by setting up two different camera angles for it, one from his side and one in front of him. We continued to switch between these two angles during the interview to add variety and keep the audience engaged. However, looking back, this was poorly executed, since the second angle was too much of a side profile, and did not have a pleasant background, but rather a cluttered one. Our teacher and peers also agreed that this would have been a good angle to keep out, or in the future angle it better with a different background. The lighting we set up during this interview was purposefully blue. We thought that this best encapsulated Kyle’s typical art style, which includes a lot of blues and vibrant colors. We had also asked him in advance which color he thought would best reflect himself and his journey with art, and he chose blue. Whether it was subconsciously or noticed, this lighting helped engage the audience, because it wasn’t typical, boring fluorescent lighting, and it added to the visual of the interview in a subtle way. The music we had throughout the different parts of the documentary was specifically chosen in order to add context for the audience and bring life to Kyle’s words and the different B-roll and interview clips. For example, when Kyle started talking about how his art is heavily influenced by his Brazilian culture, we started to play a traditional Brazilian song to show the audience a taste of the world being talked about.
Some typical conventions of a documentary that we chose to exclude, and therefore challenge, are things like narration to add context and an introduction to the documentary. We decided to start the documentary with Kyle immediately speaking, which was a way to immediately engage the audience. However, our research in class watching numerous documentaries inspired us when it came to the interview process. Like the documentaries “Exit through the gift shop” and “The American promise”, we interviewed our subject by giving him broad questions that he could expand on, and excluding our voice from the interview, so it seemed like he was speaking to the audience. The different sound bites and pieces of music we used throughout the interview helped prevent the “talking head” effect that we were advised against and therefore kept things interesting for the viewers. Had we not included these various editing techniques, Kyle’s words may have been lost and not understood as clearly as we wanted them to be.
