Karen Nakamura: November 2006 Archives

The students in my Visual Anthropology course are busy in production on their ethnographic films about various aspects of life in New Haven. We talked on Monday about common pitfalls and guidelines when filming and editing an ethnographic film:

Rules when making an ethnographic film

1. Don’t expect anything to go right. Don’t expect informants to get back to you. Informants will avoid you. Informants will get kidnapped or arrested.
2. Sound is CRITICAL.
3. Think about your storytelling. What is primary: the audio or visual channel? Choose a primary channel and then watch your film with the sound off or without any visuals and make sure that your primary channel works w/out backup.
4. No one cares how difficult it was to get a particular shot/interview. If it sucks, it sucks and you shouldn’t include the vestiges of it in your film for sentimentality’s sake.
5. Pacing is very important. Understand what beat your film is at and try to maintain it, or use change of pace/beat as a deliberate creative element.
6. Short is good. Shorter is better.
7. Storyboard. Storyboard. Storyboard.
8. Think of your film in terms of shorter sequences that work to establish your story. No sequence/section should be more than 3-5 minutes long.
9. You will run out of tapes/film/batteries/power cables at a critical moment.
10. Talking heads suck. Sometimes it’s better to condense a 10 minute interview into three or four points that an overlay, intertitle, or VoG (voice-o-God) can summarize.

Thoughts? Comments? Please post!

Following up on my earlier blog entry on why to avoid photo sharing sites such as Picasa, a post on OpenVision.tv blog notes that Google's YouTube service also requires you to sign over distribution rights to them for free:

In short, when you upload a video to YouTube, you grant them a license that allows them to do with it as they please. They can sell it, license it, remix it, make t-shirts, put it in a movie or on a cereal box - whatever fits their business model, without even an email message letting you know.