Dramatic movie vs. Documentary, part 2 of 2

Another major difference between a drama and a documentary is that in a drama, you may need to shoot a scene, and indeed, the individual elements of a scene, many times before you get the effect you are after, and before you get enough material so that the editor will be able to put together a well-made finished product.

But in a documentary, you usually only have one chance.  Under normal circumstances, you can´t ask your interview subjects to let you ask them the same question over and over until you get an answer, or an image, or an angle, that you like.  If you don´t get what you want out of an interview subject, you usually have to find another one to provide what is lacking.

PHOTO


Another difference is crew size and cost.  In a drama, you generally need a pretty sizeable crew.  Even on a small production (like the kind I do) you´ll want  not just sound and camera operators, but also lights, director, floor manager, and their assistants. It gets to be very expensive, very fast.

Here are 4 crew members and one actor, from Domino.

But documentary filmmakers often do most of the filming themselves, especially the interview parts.  They get themselves a lighting set-up, some good microphones with a good sound recorder, and a decent camera and there you have it.


In both a drama and a documentary, post production is a very important element in completing the film.  Post production includes editing, and technical work such as making the sound free of unwanted background noises (such as the hiss given off by neon lights or air conditioners).

Background music usually gets recorded in a sound studio, like this one.

Having just completed one documentary (A Zest for Life) and having brought a drama (Domino:  Caught in the Crisis) to the mid-post production phase.  I am hard put to say which requires more work.  Certainly, a drama requires more money.

I am also hard put to say which is my preferred form.  Each one serves such a different purpose that it´s hard to decide.  But I will say that working on my first hour-long drama (Domino) was thrilling for me.

So there you have it.

OUR NEXT POST will be about Afro-Peruvian percussion instruments.

Dramatic movie vs. Documentary, part 1 of 2

NOTE:  My long silence is due to my daughter´s coming to visit me in Spain, followed by my preparations to return to California for a long stay, followed by the actual trip back to California.  

                                        ____________________________________

 My two major current projects, Domino:  Caught in the Crisis and A Zest for Life:  Afro-Peruvian Rhythms, a Source of Latin Jazz, are respectively a dramatic movie, and a documentary.  And this seems as good a time as any to talk about some of the differences and similarities between the two genres.

To begin with, a dramatic movie, or a dramatic narrative film, is fiction and a documentary is, well, "real life" (whatever that may be).  But as soon as you look closely at these two categories, they begin to blur.

Some of the actors from Domino.  I just love this photo!  taken by Ana Alvarez.

A good drama is good because it has a strong relation to "real life."  It may engage in enormous flights of fancy, but at its core, it speaks to real people in a way that real people can relate to their real experiences.

And a good documentary usually is good in part because it has a strong story line.  In addition, the documentary might look at something really unusual or weird-looking, something that almost appears to be out of science fiction (a form of drama).

But let´s forget all of that for a moment.  When creating a drama, you need a script.  The script can easily run close to 100 pages for a feature-length film.  The general rule of thumb is that one page of script equals one minute of finished film.  For your feature-length film, then, you´ll expect a script to be about 90 pages long.

Actor with script (from Domino).

 Why do you need the script?  Well, mostly because you need something that tells you who the characters are, that gives the actors their lines to memorize so they know what to say and when to say it, and that gives some stage directions so they know HOW they should say it.  Just the fact that you´re using actors is one of the hallmarks of a drama.

For a documentary, on the other hand, you don´t use a script.  Instead, you work off of a "treatment."  A treatment will often be only 3-5 pages long.  It tells who needs to be interviewed, and where, and why.  It gives a general idea of where the filming should take place, and where you should film any extra visuals.  But the people being interviewed, for example, don´t have lines to speak.  They have questions to answer, and you will only have a very general idea in advance of how they will answer these questions.

One of our interview subjects from A Zest for Life.

OUR NEXT POST will finish up this topic

"Domino" is becoming more relevant by the minute, and some good news, too

As the economic crisis in Spain worsens, Domino is becoming more and more relevant.  I see specials on TV about how some of the unemployed are moving back to the land, and raising vegetables or livestock.  In some cases, they are squatting on the land.  In others, it´s land that has been part of their family for decades, or that they were able to purchase for a song because so many people moved to the cities in the last several decades.

In some cases, it looks like these people (apparently, most of them former construction workers with their families) will do fine...until the winter comes and there are no crops to be had.

The countryside near Medina-Sidonia, in Andalucía (southern Spain).

There are also plenty of stories in the newspapers about people losing their homes, government workers being laid off, banks loosing millions and in some bases, billions of Euros (where do they lose this money?  did it blow away in the wind, or did someone carelessly throw it out in the garbage?) and getting the government of Spain to bail them out.

This used to be a branch of a savings and loan,.  No more.  It closed months ago.

In a related development, a couple of weeks ago, the city government got a big paycheck from the provincial government to be used to pay a specific set of workers who had gone months without pay.  Before the city could get the checks out, however, another government institution grabbed the money from the bank where it was--briefly--sitting because the city owed this government institution lots of money and what they hey, there it was, all that money, and....

A few peculiarities concerning the Spanish economy:

As I may have mentioned some time back, if you lose your home--if you´re foreclosed on for failure to pay the mortgage--not only are you out of your home, but in addition, you still owe the back mortgage.  This means the bank gets your home AND your money.  If you ever get another job (assuming you lost your home because you lost your job), your wages will get garnished until the cows come home.

Another peculiarity:  some statistics say that 95% of the Spanish economy is based on small businesses.  That´s an exaggeration, since other statistics will tell you that 10% of the country´s GNP comes from automobile production, but at any rate, a LOT of the Spanish economy is based on small businesses.

"Se vende" means for sale.  There are actually 3 in a row here, all former small businesses.

It´s not hard, or expensive, to START a small business, but my is it expensive to maintain it.  The sales tax, for example, runs at 18% for most goods being sold.  You must also pay sales tax on whatever money you give to professionals.  In addition, a self-employed person or a small business is required to retain 15% of the salary not only of employees, but also of professionals who do work for the small business.  Actors, for example, count as professionals, so if you hire an actor, whether you are self-employed or a small business, 18% of what you pay that person actually goes to one government organ and another 15% to another.

In addition, when it´s a question of goods, not only the retailer but also the wholesaler is required to collect the sales tax (so essentially, the government is getting double the tax).  AND you are required to file with the government the number of employees you have.  If one of them is out sick for more than a few days and you don´t hire someone to replace that person, you get fined.

This is just to cheer you up--some old-style farm implements in a museum.

 Under these circumstances, it´s easy to see why, once the bubble was over, the Spanish economy started running into trouble.  Add to this the willingness of the Spanish government to bail out its banks (which in some cases were/are being run by people with their hands in the till), etc,., etc.,  well--you get the picture.

Which reminds me of the American government´s tendency to bail out banks, some of which are just as corrupt or even more corrupt than their Spanish counterparts.

And now, Germany is requiring Spain to raise its taxes further, and to cut the number of government employees further.  The latter might make some sense because the cities are broke and the civil service is bloated.  but you also have to think ahead and provide some way the people who are laid off are going to make a living.  And the idea of raising  taxes..., it makes no sense to me, especially under the current circumstances.

So there.

And all of this, and more, you learn about in Domino, which puts a human face on the current economic crisis in Spain.  (We really have finished with the filming of Domino, by the way, which is now about 2 minutes over that magic number...meaning cut, cut, cut.)

OUR NEXT POST will be about music in film.