As I work my way through Part 4 of the course, Assignment 4 looms at the end. The big challenge for this assignment is finding a topic for the documentary that:

1. Has enough visual material to be interesting
2. Has enough of a story to keep the audience attention

In addition, whatever topic is chosen, it can only be realistically completed if I have the agreement of the people involved and access to the location/s where I need to film.

I chose to focus on the harvest period in the Moselle Valley. Originally I had planned on doing the grape harvest because this valley is well known for wine-making. Unfortunately the timing was not going to work out as I am aiming to go for the November assessment and therefore need to have all my work complete by the end of September. The grape harvest takes place for two weeks during September and the start depends on the weather. Since this year has been a particularly bad year for the grapes; a lot of rain and not much sunshine, my estimate is that the farmers are going to leave the harvest as late as possible. So, scrap that idea and think of something else!

There is another harvest taking place at the moment – the wheat harvest. The Moselle Valley has huge expanses of land given up to wheat fields.  The difficulty has been to find a story around the wheat harvest.

In planning my documentary, I have been relying on Michael Rabiger’s book, Directing, the Documentary. In the chapter dealing with research, Rabiger states that “a director’s point of view does not materialize with time; it is something you must actively seek and decide, and what helps is to start making a working hypothesis straight away.”[Rabiger 2015:116]

Rabiger also provides a template that helps to guide the development of the working hypothesis. I decided to use this template [2015:117] to develop my starting hypothesis:

1. I believe that people who are prepared to do things differently will ultimately reap the rewards of daring to be different.
2. When doing something differently, intellectual and practical skills are used to work out the best course of action.
3. My film will show this in action by exploring wheat farming methods used by an arable farmer in the Moselle Valley, Germany.
4. My central character is Markus, the farmer. Other characters may include his family. Rainer may be filmed operating the drone.
5. Markus is trying to use available knowledge and technology to improve the quality and quantity of the harvest.
6. My films main conflict is between Markus who is having a difficult harvest and the boars who damage his crops.
7. I expect my films structure to be determined by the processes that are used during the frantic week when the crops are harvested.
8. The resolution is that the boar damage is identified by drone before the wheat is harvested, recorded and compensated.
9. Ultimately I want my audience to feel that intelligent use of drone and camera technology is benefitting farming.

I have managed to obtain the agreement of the farmer to film him, both while out harvesting the fields and back at the farm where the wheat is analysed and stored.

I spent most of this week out filming and can already identify one of the challenges of documentary film-making – you end up with a staggering amount of footage to go through and even though the footage may look good, it still remains important to use footage that supports the story.

To manage the overwhelming amount of film that I had taken, I made a point of reviewing all the footage each evening, stripping out the unusable parts and saving the usable footage in a catalogue. This was a useful exercise, not only from the perspective of managing my data, but also it gave me an opportunity to see what shots I was missing.

For example, it became clear to me that I was getting a lot of shots of the harvester in the field and not many of Markus interacting with people, machinery or nature. This could lead to very boring visuals because although a harvester is fascinating to watch – it ultimately will become boring if nothing else is happening. However, the difficulty is that the harvest is critical in terms of time and Markus only agreed to this project on the condition that it did not interrupt what he was doing.

Time has been especially important this week because the forecast has been predicting rain and Markus wants the crops harvested before the rain comes. This has meant that so far, he has spent two nights in the fields working until three in the morning to try to beat the rain.

To work around this, I take opportunities as and when they arise to film Markus close up – even if it means getting into the harvester with him and chatting while he works. In addition, I made sure that I got a lot more ‘people’ shots when back at the silos.

Another lesson that I have learnt is that interviewing someone takes a bit of skill. One of the big mistakes that I was making when asking Markus questions (when in the harvester cab) was that I would acknowledge what he was saying verbally – and this can’t be removed easily from the sound track. I need to learn to acknowledge what he is saying non-verbally.

In the documentary, Markus will talk about the damage that is done to his crops by wild boar and I will be able to show some footage of this damage. However, it is close to impossible to film the boar actually doing the damage as they come out at night and are very people shy. To solve this problem, I found a ‘wildepark’ just outside or Trier that had wild boar and went and filmed them. Clearly they are not in the fields or the forest, but the footage should work nonetheless to show the ‘villains’ in this documentary.

All I have left to do is the ‘talking head’ interview with Markus and potentially Rainer, the man who flies the drone. This will have to wait until Markus is available.

My experience of making this documentary is that it can be very difficult to make a compact and interesting story with visuals that support the narrative. Not having the ability to ‘stage’ the action means that you have to think on your feet as the action unfolds. It also means that if you miss something – it’s gone and you don’t get a reshoot opportunity! I also realize that the narrative does change as I spend more time filming, watching and listening to what is going on.

Bibliography:

Rabiger, M.(2015) Directing, the Documentary. Sixth Edition. Abingdon: Focal Press.