Community access TV documentary class

My criticism of the course I took in documentary video production at the community access TV station is that they showed examples of professionally made documentaries, but they didn't show any made by other people who had taken the class. The result was that I don't think we had a clear understanding of what we were doing.

They followed a simple enough formula. You had to pick a subject that lent itself to this. You'd interview an expert or someone who knew about the subject, then you'd go and film what they talked about. It had to be a subject that you could get some cinema verite footage of and something with an expert you could talk to about it.

There was one such documentary I saw about a singer. Sang religious music. They interviewed him in the TV studio and he loved to talk, then they showed him in a recording studio doing some songs. They also played some tunes from his previous CDs and showed shot from a car driving through the country.

The video my class made was of a glass business. They recycled glass, melted it down and made it into knobs, medallions, trophies, ornaments. We interviewed the manager in the studio. We carefully tested out the sound set-up. Then someone asked a question and the instructor pulled out the plug and stuck it back in. And we started shooting without testing it again. And, when we looked at the footage----the sound didn't get recorded.

That was okay----we'd interview him again when we went to the place.

We walked around interviewing him. I just tried to stay back and keep out of the picture. Then they gave me and a kid in the class the camera. I filmed some nice close-ups of the glass objects, of the kid talking to one of the employees.

The gave the kid the camera and he walked around----did tracking shots going over the glass items on the shelves.

They weren't actually working the furnace that day, so some of the others went back later and filmed them actually doing the glass stuff.

The results were pretty good.

One of the people in the class was an older woman. She was the brains behind the whole thing. She was the one who picked the subject, contacted the people and conducted the interviews. She was good at it. She wanted to make another documentary of her own, but she needed to find someone to work with. I offered to help and gave her my number. She never called me. Later I saw she had advertised on Craigs List for someone to work with. I took the hint and didn't contact her.