Our final project for year 1 is all about documentaries. We have to produce a documentary essay, as well as an audio/visual response to the essay. Then will be the final documentary based on communities, and the writing to go with that. Before we started with the final piesces, we learned a bit about documentaries. First of all, we learned about the history of documentaries. The history of documentaries can date back to 1895, when the Lumiere brothers, creator of the “Cinematographe”, created their first “Documentary”. This camera could hold 50 feet of film stock. Their first documentaries captured everyday life from one perspective, because if you wanted to move the camera, you would have to move the whole rig, and it wasn’t very manoeuvrable. The documentaries were named “actualities” as the films were just showcasing everyday life, such as workers leaving their own factory, as well as a train entering a station. The next advancement in documentary history came in 1922, when Robert Flaherty created ‘Nanook of the North’. This documentary captured the lives of Nanook and his family, who lived in the Arctic Circle. The documentary didn’t include Robert Flaherty, and it was just about how Nanook lived, using text and video. The word ‘documentary’ was short after created by John Grierson after watching Nanook of the North. John Grierson came up with the concept of “The creative interpretation of Reality”, which means that the scenes are planned, so that the documentary comes across as more dramatic and exciting. From here, cameras and equipment became more afforable as well as manouverable. From here documentaries started to bloom, with new genres and types created, of which I will explain in a separate blog post.
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