Documentarians?

[fuzzynormal]

Anyone here specialize or enjoy documentaries?  My wife and I made a doc for our small community and were wondering if it had any viability beyond in-town screenings at the local film fest.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/gorqbss1yxq6lufl81x44/HAWK_WATCH_SCREEN_DRAFT.mp4?rlkey=x5d8vcd4igr3bix0cdsgajq0b&st=mt1xzunz&dl=0

The 1st draft here is still loosey-goosey, but if you're so inclined, take a look and see if the story intrigues you enough to say, "Yeah, you might be able to get this out there other places."

We feel it's such niche topic that distribution isn't much of a reality, but maybe being niche is a positive in a certain way --and with a significant cut down it could have opportunities?  Not sure.  As one work on these things one gets rather myopic.  As you might imagine, feedback from folks in the community is too biased.  They're just happy to see themselves, colleagues, and friends in a film.  

Any advice is appreciated if you have time to watch. 

[QuickHitRecord]

Someone on this forum is actually producing work and putting it out into the world?! I had to watch and I am glad that I did. I thought that the visuals and editing were really nice. I loved the energy you created in the opening; it was riveting right off the bat. Hal is a memorable and interesting character. I tend to think of raptors as generally solitary so seeing such a magnificent series of "rivers" was a real treat -- I had no idea.

I am by no means a wildlife documentarian, but I'd like to offer a little critique. You've got a great setup but then I was waiting for an obstacle. Something that raises the stakes. Is the solar farm or other development being pushed through? What happens when Hal steps down? Or (and I really hope that this doesn't happen), what effect will the new strain of avian flu have on these birds? I think it might be worth keeping in touch with these folks because any one of those scenarios would add the drama that a piece like this needs to get into the bigger festivals or broadcast.

Or if it just doesn't look like the story will evolve much more (or you're just ready to move onto the next thing), I'd recommend cutting it down to a very tight 20-25 minutes. Maybe the climax is when the influx of birders come out in response to the email. There was good tension in that scene, like the citizen scientists were about to lose control of the mob.

Now a couple of questions. I saw in another post that you shot this with something like a dozen different cameras. What was the reason for that? Did any of them prove to be particularly documentary-friendly? It seemed like you had a LOT of people wearing lav mics and you caught some really choice soundbytes that added a lot to your story. What was your approach to audio? And how many times would you say that you've been out there for a shoot?

One last thing. The screener was only in 480P but that didn't stop the story from coming through at all. 4K be damned.

Great job on this and thanks for sharing. It was the most compelling share I've seen here in quite a while!

[fuzzynormal]

It's a work in progress, yes, so the feedback is appreciated.  

Your suggestions align with our thoughts as well, so the affirmation is encouraging.  There were a few different storytelling tacts we considered.  We ultimately decided to not deviate from their reality much and stay true.  Our usual tendencies would have been to play up some of the challenges  to heighten stakes, but their thing is actually rather modest and somewhat mellow, so (this edit for our locals anyway) is character study and a slow unfolding of their situation.

We expect to ultimately make a short "TV" version where the tighter and conventional storytelling stuff is in play.

So many different cameras were used simply because that's what we had on hand.  Also, there was a perverse pleasure in knowing we were using a ridiculous mix of cameras and then trying to unify IQ in post.

So much of what my wife shot was on an old Fuji XPro2.  Which is kind of a really dumb thing to do if you know that camera.  But oh well!  I often used a Olympus EM10iii --with a 1970's 50mm on it.  That's the camera that caught alot of the people shots.  

For the hawks, my severely banged up GH5 had a super cheap vintage Toyo 500mm lens and a 2x extender on it.  That was the rig that caught the most bird footage.  Rented some things along the way, but the timing of the rentals and nature didn't yield much.  Having that old lens was the silliest thing ever for capturing clean nature shots, but there was a lot of fun in the challenge of trying to make it work.  Manually trying to focus while panning at an effective 2000mm fov?  That was difficult.

I should have bought a real tripod, like a Sachtler, for trying to get birds in flight.  Not doing that was a mistake.

The Oly cam was the most doc friendly.  Small, unobtrusive.  Easy to use handheld kuz of the decent IS.  Looked good most of the time.  Trying to film on my Xiomi 12s Ultra was...meh.  Got a few pretty shots on it, but missed so much while fiddling with the touch screen.  No thanks.  Not doing that anymore.  Also, the phone's IS induces unwanted image jitter.  Bleh. The phone camera can look really great.  On par with the other cams in a way.  Not a practical tool though.

As for audio we just put 3 lav recorders on the main characters and let it rip.  Typically 2 hours in the morning, 2 hours at night.  x3 x60 days x2 years.  No monitoring of the audio.  We got what we got.  Keeping impressionistic field notes helped when trying to find good phrases later.  The standard grind of doc editing there, mitigated with the novel AI assist of transcribing.  Every once in awhile we'd pull out a blimp/deadcat/shotgun thing and rip off some quick interviews, but only a handful.

The days in the field were not really working shoots, per se.  More like us hanging out with friends, so those numerous hours were not a problem whatsoever.

Cheers!