The shooting is a milestone in which the effort made during the development, writing and pre-production of the film is concretized. Working with reality, filming in documentary cinema is particular, often unpredictable and difficult to plan, even long-lasting or dispersed in time. It is therefore essential to reflect on the strategies that allow to capture the reality sought/dreamed, both from the point of view of the direction/production and from the point of view of the photography, camera and direct sound equipment. At this stage, the type of tools, techniques or materials used necessarily mark the planning, the staging, the light or the sound universe of the film.
When it comes to filming, each reality can be approached from a different strategy. And each film can approach reality in a more or less literal way. The filmmaker’s preparation for the shooting, including planning, staging or possible interviews, may be exhaustive or flexible, calculated or leaving an almost unavoidable margin for improvisation. Thinking about the shooting from the director’s point of view is not simply an individual exercise, but always involves a continuous conversation with the team, which will turn the film into a collective exercise.
The design of photography in documentary filmmaking is sometimes conditioned by the unpredictability of working with reality. Capturing the image requires proposing a practice that is coherent with the film we want to make. The work of the cinematographer and camera operator involves making a series of decisions prior to shooting, both aesthetic and technical, that are in line with this, formally enhance the film and, perhaps, discover new unforeseen paths in previous phases.
A documentary film’s sound design must be suggested early on in the writing process, with some support from the script. The work is expressively enhanced by the various aesthetic possibilities of sound, such as music, sound ambience, words, or silence. However, as with the rest of the technical contributions to the cinema of reality, shooting is primarily a space for creation and discovery.
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