For this week’s research, I looked at various forms of documentaries and narrative techniques used in. I found a LinkedIn Learning course called “Introduction to Documentary Video Storytelling” and learned about the history of the genre and the main philosophy behind it. One of the facts that stood out to me was that in most other forms of film, a director has a specific vision for the story and often there is about a 10:1 shooting to finished product ratio for narrative films. However, in documentaries, there can be up to a 100:1 shooting ratio, since the goal of a documentary is to take available footage and edit it to fit the specific narrative that the filmmaker has in mind. What this means for me is that I will need to shoot as much footage as possible, then determine which footage best fits the “story” that I am trying to tell (the story of five TCNJ Smash players as they compete throughout the semester) and edit out the rest. This falls into another fact I learned from the course, which is that documentaries are never really “true”, and that there is always bias involved when creating documentaries. In order to create a compelling film that audiences will actually want to watch, you cannot include absolutely everything, because the film must have some of cohesive structure that the audience can follow along with.

Of the types of documentaries that I learned about, I feel that my video will fall into the participatory type. In this type of documentary, the filmmaker is a character in the film and interacts with the other characters. As I am a competitor in TCNJ’s Smash tournament myself, I regularly interact with the other players that I will be following and I will likely continue to do the same during filming. In fact, I have already done this while filming. Last Sunday I went to Rutgers for Scarlet Smackdown 3, a tournament where TCNJ’s Smash Ultimate team competed. I filmed each player on our team participating in the match against Drexel University’s A team, and I also filmed myself participating in a team chant after our team lost the match. I will most likely use this footage in the prototype for the Fall Fair, where I will dramatize each 1 on 1 matchup between each player on both teams.