Smartphone Documentary Project

The Brief

Smartphone Filmmaking

Project Start Date: 16th November

Smart Film Fest

Smart Film Fest About Page

Research

Victoria Mapplebeck

Victoria Mapplebeck is a BAFTA award winning writer, artist and director. For the last two decades, she has been experimenting with different media and creative technology used in documentaries. She has previously worked with Channel 4 and she now uses her platform to explore the ways interactive technologies are evolving and immersing new audiences into fresh content on various platforms.

In 2015, she started specialising in smartphone productions and filmed a directed a smartphone short called '1600 characters', which was shot entirely on an iPhone 6. The film, which she submitted to Film London, followed the story of a string of texts she found on a vintage Nokia that was buried away. The film was very personal and followed her struggle when she became pregnant and the father was mostly absent and quite hot and cold about whether he wished to be involved, int the end announcing he was moving country in a text and never messaging again. The texts used where the ones shared between them over the period of her pregnancy and are mostly unfiltered giving the raw story, however due to data protection some texts where adjusted to hide the father's identity.

In 2017, Mapplebeck shot and directed the short smartphone production called 'Missed Call', which in a way was a sequel to 160 characters. The short followed this same theme of an absent father, but instead of being from the perspective of Victoria, the mother, it was now from the perspective of her teenage son. The short follows the journey of Victoria and her son when her son wants to reconnect and asks Victoria to text his father. This short again, is very personal, even more so because the young son is now involved in the film. After the film was released, it helped her son to a lot to see all the comments from people all over the world about how much they relate and it touched many people's hearts because in a way it is so relatable.

Victoria is one of the founders of the Smart Film Fest, and because of this we had an online meeting with her where she told us all about her work, explained why shooting on your smartphone is so great and introduced the brief to us, encouraging us all to submit to the Smart Film Fest. It was a great experience to talk to such an established director and I really appreciate the time she took to talk to us all. It was very interesting to here about her process filming with the phones and about her career in general.

Why would you shoot on your phone?

Shooting a documentary on your phone can greatly improve the content that you get because you can capture more personal interviews that you wouldn't get by having a big intimidating camera in the person's face. Following this idea of the size difference between a smartphone and a professional camera, you can get into more precarious positions with you phone that could provide you more visually creative shots than what you might get with a bulky camera. For example, you could climb a tree and get and interesting ariel shot with a smartphone, but you wouldn't risk doing that with an expensive, heavy camera.

Shooting a fictional short film can provide a very interesting finished product for certain genres. For example, shooting on a smartphone for a horror film can create a great grungy effect and really immerse the audience into the horrors that the characters are facing. A coming of age film shot on a smartphone can create a much softer, brighter and grainy look for montage scenes, which creates a sense of realism and again immerses the audience in the story.

Of course disadvantages of shooting on your phone will always be the stability of them and the lower quality, however, you can get many stabilizers for smartphones now and you can find attachable lens for phones that heighten the quality and allow you to have more control over aperture and ISO.

Examples

TANGERINE

Tangerine is a 2015 feature length coming of age film that was in Sundance's 2015 Film Festival. The story follows two trans women leads, who are sex workers. When one of them finds that her fiancee has been cheating on her with a cis women, she hunts this other woman down and causes havoc, her friend loyal with her at every turn. Tangerine was made by Sean Baker on an iPhone 5S with a steadicam rig and an app called Filmic Pro. Baker decided to use a smartphone as a camera because of the low-budget of the film and because of the versatility of using such a light and portable device.

I believe Tangerine's use of a smartphone production was very successful. The use of the smartphone really drew you into the story of Sin-Dee. Furthermore, the slight grain against the brightly colored streets created a very cinematic effect and matched the gritty personalities of the characters.

SEARCHING

Searching is a 2018 feature length thriller film in Sundance's 2018 Film Festival, directed and written by Aneesh Chaganty. The story follows a recently widowed father, who keeps in daily contact with his young daughter. When his daughter goes missing, the father uses various platforms like Facebook and Reddit to find any clues that would lead to his missing daughter. He does this with the help of a detective, who communicates with him solely through video calls. The entire film is shot through the perspective of the father and via screen recordings of computers and phones he uses to track down daughter. Aneesh wanted to do this because hw wanted to create something new.

I believe Searching's use of a smartphone production is very innovative and fits very well with the thriller genre because the audience only see the characters when they are on a screen and this creates a lot of suspense as the audience don't really know what's happening outside of that screen.

3,000 MILES

3,000 miles is a 5-minute short documentary about family and how distance and age can affect familial relationships. The documentary was shot on a Sony A7sii and was directed and edited by Sean Wang, who moved 3,000 miles away from his family to work in New York for a year. The documentary's narrative is told through a series of voicemails left by Wang's mum over the year period and is very heart-felt. While on the surface it seems the narrative is just about the distance between them, it's also about how that age of 20-30 creates distance with our parents as we are always busy with work or something else and find it hard to find a time to call our parents.

I believe the use of a smartphone production in 3,000 miles was very intimate and captured happy, heart-warming parts of life we often forget because of their simplicity.

Pre-Production

Developing Ideas

To begin with, I created two brain storms of the ideas I had to get a visual concept of my ideas to then better develop them. The first is a brainstorm about the narrative that I wanted to follow and the second was a brainstorm developing the stylistic way I would visually tell this narrative.

After brainstorming, I watched some videos of other student documentaries from past years and external ones to grasp an idea of what topics have been done before and the typical stylistic choices used. From this, I understood that I wanted to do my documentary about my experience with reputation in media and present through this with a spoken word. Also, I decided I wanted to have a more unsaturated look and dark colour colour palette because I felt it would stand out from the rest.

I searched about the typical narrative structure of a documentary and found the 'three-act structure'. I liked this concept and plan to use it in my documentary.

A lot of the documentary's I watched took place in the day with bright and warm lighting. I thought about what sort of lighting I wanted in my documentary and decided on having it with footage that is shot almost entirely at night or in the dark. I did this for two reasons, I wanted to show my love for German Expressionism and this would produce a quite simple, boiled down version of that. My second reason is because night is the time I am most creative and also the time that I think about hard topics, like the lack of representation I have had in mainstream western media.

Visual Moodboard of Existing Media

After having developed a rough idea of my documentary's focus and style, I took to looking through all my existing footage and photos taken at night in the last few months. I found quite a lot of useful footage and while doing this I found lots of memories with friends from nights out and developed that the first act of the documentary could be a series of photos and videos of me and my captured memories. I think this would provide a more autobiographical feel and keep me closer to the brief.

Moodboard

I then created a visual moodboard using some of my existing images that I had previously compiled and images related to key words in the spoken word I have written in relation to my narrative, which you can view below.

'Reflections' Spoken Word - Initial Draft

This is the initial paper draft of the spoken word, called Reflections, I will use in this short documentary.

Copy of reflections spoken word.pdf

Reflections is from my point of view and is about how I felt growing up in England, never really experiencing my own culture unless I was at my nan's house and living in two different cities meant I only went once or twice a month. Having days where you wouldn't interact or see anyone who looked like you apart from your mum... It's very hard to put into words.

Reflections starts off a bit deflective, using 'you' instead of 'I' because I find it very hard to talk about things like this in relation to myself and tend to try and disassociate myself from it. However, after having watched example documentaries, I saw that the other documentaries were very personal and so I moved into this use of 'I'.

Final Concept

My final concept is a documentary called 'Reflections' with a three act structure, which are called:

Act 1: Nightlife - This will be a photo montage of my memories of fun nights out with friends and family. This will create a connection between me and the audience and show me as a person, real and relatable.
Act 2: Questions That Haunt Me In The Dark - This will be a very casual interview between me and my mum where I ask her some questions that I've prepared and some spur of the moment ones as well. This introduces the topic of the documentary, which will be about my struggles with the lack of appropriate south-asian representation.
Act 3: Inner Monologue - This will be a series of photos and videos of transport and of mirrors that will have me doing a voiceover of the spoken word piece, which I mentioned previously, over it.

Treatment