*All tickets include a light lunch

Fiction filmmakers acknowledge that at least half the meaning of a scene, and often more, comes from the soundtrack. But the documentary soundtrack is often ignored, left as a technical aspect of post-production or caught up in debates about different styles of documentary production – observational, single-shooter, personal essay, reality, current affairs, and so on.

Documentary filmmakers often ask how to sound design a documentary. I’ve never found an answer for that. Is it different than for a fiction film? Clearly there is a belief that sound for a type of filmmaking that has its basis in real life events must be different than that for fiction filmmaking. So, how should the documentary filmmaker work with sound?

The way you consider and plan your use of sound – from pre-production through the final mix – determines how you and your production ‘speaks’ to your audience.

In the workshop we will cover:

·       What a soundtrack is and how it’s made. What are the components you work with when recording, editing and mixing a documentary soundtrack?

·       The relationships between pre-production, shooting and post-production in creating a soundtrack. How does the way you plan your shoot and spend your budget affect the soundtrack and, ultimately, how the audience perceives your ideas?

·       The workflow from recording to mixing.

·       The relationships between editing and sound design and between image, sound and music.

·       How sound changes the audience’s perception of images.

·       The variety of techniques for documentary sound including location recording, miking techniques, voice-over / narration, metaphorical sound, synchronous vs asynchronous sound, and the crossover between fiction and documentary sound styles.

·       Consideration of the audience or client.

·       The ethics of sound: What are we allowed to hear and what is kept silent?

The workshop is organised in two halves:
The morning begins with a 90-minute talk laying out the main ideas of what a soundtrack is and what a filmmaker is trying to achieve through sound. This will be followed by a Q&A session where you can follow up ideas presented in the talk along with your own concerns.

The afternoon session covers specific uses of sound in documentary, alternating talk with clips, prompting an open discussion in which you can discuss your particular interests.

This workshop is aimed at anyone who wishes to gain a more in-depth knowledge of how to use sound in documentary films. The day will give you an understanding of creative and technical approaches to documentary sound as well as a broader awareness of how soundtracks (of all sorts) operate. Whether you are a director, editor, producer, sound designer or location recordist – and no matter your level of experience – you will be able to immediately apply the content of the workshop to your projects.

The workshop is led by Larry Sider, an editor and sound designer known for his work in documentary, fiction and animation, including Patrick Keiller’s London, Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins. He leads the Sound Recording and Design MA at Goldsmiths and was previously Head of Post-Production at the National Film and Television School. Since 1998, he has run the School of Sound, a forum exploring the creative use of sound in the arts and media. He is a visiting lecturer at film and art schools in Europe and the UK.

Interactive reports that hold short-attention spans online are the holy grail for web editors. Loc Dao, an executive producer and creative technologist at the National Film Board of Canada’s digital studio, has come up with a few recipes for success.

At the Frontline Club on Wednesday 8 October, Dao shared the lessons learned on the road to brilliant projects like the NFB’s Seven Digital Deadly Sins partnership with The Guardian in June, and Bear 71, which challenged the nature of the medium with its mash of video, gaming technology and interactive installation at its 2012 Sundance Film Festival debut.

In conversation with his collaborator at The Guardian, Lindsay Poulton, a producer in the paper’s Special Projects, Multimedia division, and Janine Steele, Operations Manager at the NFB, Dao discussed how there’s still much to explore as technology opens up the merger of video, photojournalism, animation and multiple other forms to push the bounds of interactive storytelling.

Good stories transcend platform
Helping produce 630 interactive stories in three years at the Canadian Broadcast Company’s innovative Radio 3 division in the early 2000s, Dao staked out the vanguard of interactive reportage.

“Over those three years we learned a lot of lessons,” he said. “But the three I always remember and still find useful for digital storytelling [are]: Good stories transcend platform. Users will read, listen and watch all at once. And don’t play videos in a small window unless you have too.”

Interactive storytelling @frontlineclub with @locdao "users will read, listen & watch" #digitaljournalism

— Kathleen Prior (@KathleenAPrior) October 8, 2014

Hunting for new mediums
These lessons have held true in the blend of photo essay, soundscape and interactive animation of The Last Hunt, the NFB’s first photo essay created for the iPad’s touch interface and gyroscope.

“We started with photos and text and with this project have now added interactive animation,” said Dao. “You’ll get a sense, especially when you get to the animations, of being a lot closer to the story by actually physically being able to manipulate it. I think we’ve stumbled onto something that’s a nice marriage of the tactile experience with the storytelling experience.”

The interactive documentary
With the launch of Bear 71, which followed the life a grizzly bear and her cubs through motion-sensitive cameras as they came in contact with humans, Dao believes his team struck on a new medium: the “interactive documentary”.

“We wanted to get off the screen . . . and move into the physical environment. When we launched our first StoryWorld at Sundance, we were actually on the street at Sundance and had an interactive installation,” Dao said. “We installed these surveillance units. You would come up to these and it would recognise your face and take a picture of you, and then all of a sudden you would be connected live to someone at another unit.”

The Living Story
“We were really interested in working with the NFB because they’re . . . at the forefront,” said Poulton, of the Seven Digital Deadly Sins partnership with The Guardian, which pushed forward the notion of ‘interactive documentary’ when it launched in June.

“The videos pull you into the project,” Dao said of the interplay of seven short segments filmed with characters like Bill Bailey tied to data journalism and first-person narrative writing which document the negative side of behaviour online. With equal experiences on desktop, smartphone or tablet, the project became a living documentary that continues to collect data through its shareable polls. It was spread through short video snippets on Vine and Twitter and has so far attracted 315,000 unique visitors and 30,000 shares from 218 countries.

The reason for its success, said Steele, wasn’t the technology, but the stories it told.

“We try not to let technology lead our project development,” she added. “We really try to be technology agnostic. We really try to start from story and build the best form, the best platform technology to tell that story.”

Do check out NFB's interactive documentaries: https://t.co/Mt4WGgT57Z Thanks for great talk @locdao @frontlineclub yesterday. Inspiration!

— Enable The Great (@annabeltroost) October 9, 2014

Where there are borders, attempts will likely be made to cross them in the hope of reaching greener pastures. But the individuals who try are not necessarily welcomed by those who live on the other side. Fences, walls and legislation are thrown up to at least regulate the influx of migrants. And in some cases, borders are made dangerous.

One such place is the border between the US and Mexico, which is now at its most militarised in US history as the US embarked on its “war on immigration”. Mexico, in turn, is both a destination for migrants, as well as a stop on their way north. Ten thousand migrants every year (according to an estimate by Amnesty International) attempt to cross that border, the majority of whom are Central Americans (from Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador in particular). It is not known how many more of these irregular migrants enter Mexico to settle there, or what percentage cross into the US undetected.

Those who do succeed, however, may find themselves in the Arizona desert, or are detained and deported. What is more, these migrants are not only kept from getting into the country: their very journey is thwarted along the way.

Those who are crossomg the Americas towards the US border will often do so on foot, undertaking a dangerous journey. As many of them are undocumented individuals, they must dodge the strict migration controls within Mexico, which means they find themselves on obscure, unsafe routes, along which they may face assault or abuse, or encounter smugglers and traffickers. Large numbers of people are reported missing along these routes and the number of kidnappings is high.

Across the border, migration calls to mind other issues: of employment, housing and social standing. Migration is a complex issue, interlinking the factors pushing people out of their home countries with those that pull them into their new one. Poverty, the lack of opportunities and insecurity at home are reasons for people to leave – while their arrival can have economical, political and cultural consequences. One strong fear is that migrants will take a toll on the local economy and impact the job market. (Although, historically, Mexican migrant workers have been welcomed – as far back in 1850s as field hands in the Southwest, and when the US entered in WW2 in 1942 – albeit on temporary contracts.) This image, of “the other” coming in and “stealing” the locals’ livelihood, or “spoiling” their culture, can become part of polarised political debates, as it has in the US. In a more recent development, many of the policies designed for the enforcement of immigration law, especially detainment, have become privatised, along with the increased militarisation of the border.

This comes down to 650 miles of fence and 21,000 Border Patrol Personnel. In 2012, a total of $18 billion was spent on the enforcement of the border. While there are no hard numbers on the (undocumented) immigrants, their flow towards the US border seems to have slightly decreased – probably partly because of this securitisation, and partly because of the bad economy. Nevertheless, the dangers en route remain. The heightened enforcement along the Mexico–United States barrier does nothing to bring safety to their journey, let alone a solution to the circumstances that made them search for their fortune away from home in the first place.

Migration is a universal occurrence: people have moved away from their homes to settle elsewhere countless times in the course of history, in mass migrations due to wars or natural disasters or as individuals looking to escape poverty and a better future. Human stories are needed to gain a deeper understanding of the issues that come into play in the lives of those who have decided on the perilous undertaking of crossing the border.

In the documentary Who is Dayani Cristal?, Mexican activist Gael Garcia Bernal traces back the trail of one such unfortunate migrant found dead in the Sonora Desert, Arizona. The film, a mix of documentary with fictional elements, was the winner of the Sundance Cinematography Award in 2013. It was screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 7 July, followed by a Q&A with director Marc Silver. For further details of this event, see here.

But when you’re not free to invent plot points or character arcs, how do documentary filmmakers tell strong and competitive stories?

This one-day workshop will address the challenge of storytelling in documentary. Breaking down the concept of storytelling, it will demonstrate how approaching your film with the story in mind will enable you to:

 – Cast and scout locations more carefully
 – Make more effective shot lists
 – Waste less time filming scenes that aren’t necessary
 – Be better prepared to follow the unexpected
 – Recognise the elements that will make your film even stronger

Using examples of existing documentaries, we will explore how storytelling techniques have been successfully (or unsuccessfully) employed, and how that makes the documentary what it is. Participants be will be given a recommended documentary viewing list before the workshop, so that they are familiar with the documentaries that will be referenced beforehand.

Participants with work-in-progress documentaries are encouraged to bring their projects to the table. At the end of the day we will have an open forum where we will discuss how to apply storytelling to projects that are still germinating. If you would like to bring your project along, please email Merryn Johnson with a brief outline explaining your film.

Schedule:
10am – 11.30am: What is story?; What drives a documentary? Types of story; How a story begins in the mind of the film maker: Tapping into your creative instinct, and extracting the story; Choosing the right approach.
11.30am – 11.45am: Break
11.45am – 1.00pm: Creative arrangement: Structure; Shooting with the story in mind; Editing: saving a documentary that was shot with no story in mind.
1.00pm – 2.00 pm: Break
2.00 pm – 3.30pm: How to use story to write a treatment (and get commissioned); How to use story to pitch (and get commissioned)
3.30pm – 3.45pm: Break
3.45pm – 5.00pm: Open forum – Brainstorming about your projects.

Run by filmmaker, director and lecturer, Yolanda Barker. She has lectured in Documentary Film at the University of East London and co-created a module to include documentary storytelling in the syllabus. Outside of teaching Yolanda is a documentary film director with over eight years of industry experience.