So, I'm back from Virginia. I'm working for Ian Hirsch, Producer Extraordinaire right now. I worked with Ian a few years ago when I was freelancing as an editor at a company called
Winston Davis & Associates. It's cool after not working with him for a few years to catch up and work together on a series of
Baby Einstein spots.
Cutting commercial and trailer type projects is in many ways the same as cutting documentary or narrative - you have a story to communicate and you have to figure out which pieces, in what order, and with what kind of pace and style, best communicate what it is you are trying to communicate.
All film making is pursuasive on a basic level, even if we are only trying to pursuade you to emphathize with the main character and believe their story.
However, both documentary and commercials are trying to pursuade you to change your thinking - either to spend money on something, or change how you think about some documentary subject.
I sometimes see people write ignorantly about documentary and see it as presenting the "truth" or that it should be "unbiased."
All film is biased. Period. The film maker chooses what to film, what direction to point the camera, and which pieces to include. In excluding everything else, he or she is inherently expressing a bias.
Documentary is NOT the same as journalism. Journalism, like the evening news, for instance, purports to be objective and merely report what happened without editorializing. Of course, because someone decides which stories will be covered and from which angle, there is inherent bias and editorializing. For instance, when was the last time you heard mainstream news in the United States say anything positive about socialism? They are not unbiasedly representing all viewpoints, but only a few of them.
Documentary, on the other hand, ought to wear it's POV on its sleeve. It has a point of view - a perspective from which it is making its point. Unlike an objective stance, documentary inherently has editorial content. Whether Michael Moore, or Errol Morris, or Supersize This, or whatever - it has a inherently subjective quality, and an express or implied editorial content.
When I saw people condemning
Fahrenheit 911 as not being a documentary - they were really saying it wasn't JOURNALISM. It most certainly was a documentary and very much in the tradition of the form. I mean, hell,
Nanook of the North was one of the very first documentaries, and Robert Flaherty, the director, CAST eskimos to pretend to be a family for it (they were all unrelated) and apparently had to teach them to hunt walrus, as their tribe had stopped doing it some years earlier.
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