Documentary: Research

To begin, as a group, we divided up the research topics into 5 to go and find out about. Everyone's jump was to make a list of the websites they used to find their piece of information but we would all go about using the combined pages individually.

Documentaries Introduction

Documentaries are an interesting form of media as they tend to be very subjective and truthful. Documentaries are the finest form of non fiction media but at the end of the day the information contained is suited to a director’s vision so may not be 100% accurate. Documentaries have a series of codes and conventions that we as a team must follow for a successful interpretation. I have carried out this research into documentaries to more fully understand the principles of making one and how this conventions may influence how we go about telling our story down the line.

Initially, one of the conventions of documentaries is to use archived footage. A documentary tells the story of an event, person or issue so having external footage from our filming process is vital. Furthermore, there is a convention known as talking heads which refer to the interviews that happen during a documentary, also feeding into the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds demands how an interview should look, with the interviewee sat to one third of the screen and the other two thirds mainly blank, with aspects like the candidate’s shoulder and arm crossing into the middle third. An interview in a documentary needs to fit the tone of the subject with most interviews tending to be in people’s homes for a level of comfort and naturalism. Documentaries tell real stories and so people that appear in a documentary are acting as themselves rather than forcing a character. This also works in the case of facts and realism to present this information as a true event rather than fake characters. Ways in which this convention is able to be broken however are during re-enactments. In many cases, archived footage isn’t possible for the stories people want to tell so instead they may choose to recreating a scene in history or a simple act that changed someone’s life. The documentary needs to feel natural so a re-enactment has a lot of pressure to reflect the source material accurately. Furthermore, documentaries are less restrictive when it comes to filming and camera angles. The camera is allowed to be unstable in what’s called shaky cam for if a scene needs to move and still get that natural sentiment. Films often use this but in a documentary this is more likely to fit with the tone of a non fiction media. Another convention is the constant use of voice over to tell the story. This may be a continuation of an interview played over differing footage or simple just telling the audience what is onscreen to make things clearer. The voice over may also appear as a ‘voice of god’ which doesn’t physically interact with the footage but explains all the information to the audience, a prime example of this being the work of David Attenborough In a documentary, as it is delivering information, the voice over and ‘characters’ in frame are able to speak directly to the audience without it feeling out of place.

Mockumentary Style

This was very useful and insightful information that will help us more thoroughly understand the ways of a documentary. From this, it was time to put forward ideas that would fit to these conventions and our understanding of documentaries but was a genuine story we wanted to tell. Being a huge fan and avid player of the game, I wanted the group to consider doing a documentary about the game Dungeons and Dragons and the community and atmosphere the game brings about. In our group, Vi and I had played the game before and the other three were very interested, in that we were going to give it a go as a group soon anyways. Dungeons and Dragons is a fairly ridiculous game by concept, even I can admit, so we decided to do a bit of further research into the mockumentary style to see if this could better service our original idea.

A mockumentary is a hybrid that deals with the conventions of a documentary with a slightly fictional angle. The point of a mockumentary is to tell a story such that it appears to be a non fictional event but events in its duration are staged and acted. This format would allow us to tap into the more out there and nuanced material within D&D to tell a more appropriate story. The difficulty with this would be to balance the topic and the story, not to make it too fictional and story driven but also not to loose that in favour of a storiless exploration of the theme. Mockumentaries do keep up with many of the same conventions as documentaries, maintaining the voice overs, archived footage, etc. The reasons mockumentaries are successful is that they take the public perception and stay faithful to that, amplifying a story in way that may go undetected. Additionally, a mockumentary is able to play with the fact that it is a mockumentary, often not instantly revealing itself as such but an audience can quickly pick up that some of the content can’t be real. Many documentaries are considered satire and parodies, taking a well known concept and twisting it in an exaggerated medium. Examples of mockumentaries include The Office, Modern Family and Parks and Recreation. This seemed like a great choice to carry our story forward but Dungeons and Dragons isn’t as universally well known as subject matter within these existing projects so we were concerned that it may not land how we intend. Mockumentaries are also more feasible in a short period with less equipment as they tend to use natural lighting rather than forcing a mode to get an exact feel for the atmosphere.

Popular examples of Mockumentaries:

The Office
Parks and Recreation
What We Do In The Shadows
Community (Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking)
Modern Family
People Just Do Nothing
Total Drama Island

Codes and Conventions of Mockumentaries Summary:

Handheld camera (shaky cam)
Often there is a cold open (a short, snappy sketch played before the opening sequence)
No laugh track (more realistic, compared to other styles of comedies)
talking head interviews (talking one-on-one suggests that the characters are real people)
Minimal graphics used (fancy camera angles and lighting aren’t used because that would show the audience that this isn’t real, the boring way they’re shot shows that they’re real.)
Natural lighting (this makes it seem more real, and not like its artificially made)
Quick zooms/ pans
Characters looking into the camera (this never happens in feature films, so by doing so, really conveys the realism)
Bleeped swearing (this suggests that the footage is real, since it suggests that the camera team could only get one take)
Cutaways
Voiceover (voice of god) (preferably Morgan Freeman but i will settle for James Earl Jones)
Rule of thirds
Dry humour (straight- faced)
Awkward humour (this creates realism since it creates the sense that, given that the dialogue is so awkward, it won’t have be scripted, and that, there are moments of dead air, due to there only being one take)
Overall sense of realism
Skits
Casual dialogue (sense that it isn't scripted)

B - roll of location, characters etc (using “real” footage conveys the sense that it’s real’)

Documentary Analysis

In general, it was also vital for us to look into the different core types of documentary to understand which type we were aiming to achieve. There are six core modes of documentary: observatory, poetic, expository, participatory, reflexive and performative. The modes we were interested in were participatory, reflexive and performative so I looked deeper into them as they would impact my vision for the documentary. To begin, a participatory documentary is when the director actively interacts with the frame, presenting their impact on the event as much as the event itself. Next, we have reflexive mode which is aware of the documentary style and conventions but side steps these, making it a reconstruction and the audience becomes aware of the process making the documentary itself. And finally there’s performative mode which is once again aware of documentary conventions and focuses on social and emotional impacts of the topic in a subjective format, leaving audiences to question more about the subject matter. As a group, we leaned more into the angle of creating a performative documentary as are aim is to produce an insightful documentary into the nature of the game D&D and the community and presence it creates. As well as doing general research into documentaries and mockumentaries, I looked into the work of director John Pilger, a well known name in the medium of documentaries, to get a greater handle on what these conventions look like in practice. I also compared two other documentaries, the first documentary Nanook of the North and a 2020 documentary named Time. Both of these demonstrate the value of documentaries and by putting them together I was able to more closely understand how the medium has developed over time due to societal expectations that we would have to keep an eye on when making our documentary.

John Pilger - Director Research

Documentary Comparison Research

D&D Basics

To begin, fundamentally, Dungeons and Dragons (or D&D) is a table top role playing game created in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson during which a group of friends will sit around and tell a collaborative story. The roles in the group are split into the players and the Dungeon Master (DM) and a group would usually have between 4 and 7 players. The Dungeon Master acts as a form of referee for the game and will plan a session before the group come together to play it out and lead the telling of the story when everyone comes together for a session. Sessions of D&D can range in length but will always take a couple of hours and sessions may like together to form a campaign which may happen over weeks, moths or even years. D&D may have various rules and complications over the years but at the end of the day these are only guidelines and you are only really limited by your imagination. The DM starts a session, introducing a location, other characters and a plot hook before opening up to the players who can chose whatever they would like to do. This may mean going against the original plan of the DM and so you have to be able to improvise. The game uses different shaped and numbered dice to determine if more difficult acts made by the party are successful and so the game continues through role play, exploration and eventually combat. Each player builds their character through a process where they pick a race, a class, equipment and so on. As it is a fantasy orientated game, but not held down to that, there are many different options for players to try out and they can chose whatever they want, with a personal backstory to go along so the character truly feels real.

D&D History

Now that I established a basic premise for the game through my own knowledge of playing, it was time to research more in depth to get a true feel for the game in a more factual and historical light. The original version of Dungeons and Dragons was derived and inspired by Wargames, a game strategy and battle but without the role play aspect. D&D established the concept of a Table top RPG and as been very influential over many modern video game franchises. In first edition D&D, Gygax makes many references to the mechanics in Wargames and relied on it for his new game’s foundation but over the year found that it could run on its own feet. Originally, playable options for the game were very limited, leaving a player to the classes Fighting Man, Cleric and Mage, with Rogue being added fairly quickly. There were also some side rule books established for pre set settings such as Greyhawk and Blackmoor. Around 3,000 copies of the game were sold by 1975.

As of 1977, the owning company TSR thought to reskin their game into two versions, one being a cleaner version of the orignal for new players and the other being advanced for old players to move onto. At this time, the game got messy and lost its identity somewhat, trying to expand whilst staying to old methods of introduction. There were three core rules books (The Players Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual) that now held the overall game and a separate set called Unearthed Arcana which were more experimental rules. Over the 1980s the game continued to grow but still was missing a true identity. Over the following years, the game went through several rebrands and editions, introducing new settings and rules, eventually with TSR nearing bankruptcy in 1997. The game was then taken on by Wizards of the Coast who continued experimenting:

• 1981: Tom Moldvay’s basic Dungeons and Dragons

• 1989: Advanced 2nd Edition

• 1997: Wizards of the Coast buys D&D

• 2000: 3rd Edition D&D. Introduction of 20 sided dice

• 2005: 4th Edition D&D

• 2012: Wizards announces work on a new edition

• 2014: 5th edition D&D released

5th edition was opened to around 75,000 play-testers in 2012 and was a massive success when fully released in 2014. The game now had a coherence and identity it didn’t have as much before and was able to flourish for a new generation of players. By 2017, the number of players was up 41% of the previous year and 52% in 2018. D&D also picked up a greater influence due to digital media for the 2010s. With the platforms Youtube and Twitch, many people took their games online and began streaming, opening their worlds up to the world, giving people from across the world inspiration for the game and a want to play. Some of these streamers include Joe Manganiello and Deborah Ann Woll. Later on a group of voice actors lead by DM Matt Mercer became a big success on Twitch as Critical Role. Critical Role was able to generate a fanbase like no other, eventually launching a kick starter which, over night, was green light for its own animated TV show based on their campaign. They also began the highest rated Twitch streamers online in 2020. D&D has also been referenced in some TV shows and films such as Stranger Things and, in 2023, a Dungeons and Dragons film.

D&D also became far more accessable in 5th edition thanks the the digital age. Many websites such as DnD Beyond, Roll 20 and WorldAnvil gave players easy access to the source material and a place to log their campaigns and make everything more organized. This massively helped D&D to stay afloat during the time of the pandemic beginning in 2020. Many more people turned to D&D in the pandemic to find a place where they could still talk and hang out online. Since then, with now so much content under 5th edition, Wizards of the Coast has put forward a new scheme called One D&D to condense all established rules in 5th edition and rereleased the core trilogy of rule books once more, all things considered. This is set to release in 2024 for the game’s 50th Anniversary, following a series of playtest rules over 2022 and 2023.

D&D Outsider Perception

With and overview of the history and progression of the game, in my research, it was time to turn to what D&D means to people and society to get an even better feel for it as a theme to explore in our documentary. D&D was widely unspoken of by players in its early years as it had negative and unjust connotations known as the ‘satanic panic’. A possible start of this was in 1979 when a 16 year old kid named Egbert disappeared from his room. A private investigator was hired to look into the disappearance and blamed the game of D&D, which Egbert played, for causing an unnatural disappearance. In actuality, Egbert had gone into hiding due to an unrelated depression and drug misuse. A later found suicide from a gunshot was discovered in 1980 and all blamed this on the influence of the game D&D. D&D, as a fantasy role playing game, was only associated with the witchcraft and demonological elements which deterred many from the game and saw it outlawed. The game was also having to go against the rise in comic book and superhero fiction which was drowning out fantasy stories in favour of modern flashy stories to comfort people in a changing society. As a result, Dungeons and Dragons developed its personal subculture and identity mainly in shadow.

From an external perspective on the game, many just see it as a nerdy and pointless game and associate this archetype with people who play. The use of the property in the media doesn’t particularly try to argue otherwise unless it’s coming from people who have actually had experience playing. D&D isn’t just a game to many as it is a fundamental subculture in Fandom but this light isn’t seen by people who don’t play. This stems back to the negative associations of the game so now, although people see through the lies of a demonic aspect, the public stay back and don’t care for the game. We conducted a survey of non players to seeing their views on D&D:

• “I mean, I don’t know much about it, it seems interesting, it’s a different way to experience a game I guess.”

• “I think it- it seems like a really fun game. But it seems like it’s hard to get into, so you need like, someone to guide you through it. But it’s also like, really fun once you get started, once you get the ball rolling.”

• “Pretty confusing.”

• “I feel like, well I know most of it from Stranger Things, I know it’s the same, however its averagely the same. and that’s given me the view on D&D”

• “Not much I just know it’s in Stranger Things. I think it’s a game for people who like to act intellectually, and enhance their inner “brainial” skills”

• “My first thought is that it refers to some kind of fertilizer from the 1950s, but actually you’re talking about Dungeons and Dragons aren’t you, so I have an instant picture of a shop filled with small figurines and rather sad people in it hanging about pretending that the shopkeeper is their friend”

In terms of the 1980s ‘Satanic Panic’, in 1991, the American Association of Suicidology, the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Health and Welfare Canada ran tests and confirmed to the public that the game has no links to suicide, depression, etc. This ran onto doing similar studies around video games with the same on come. Gaming is seen as a freeing hobby and should not be looked upon as a cause of issue.

D&D Community

Within the community, there is a totally different story. Many people begin to play D&D as a way of escaping problems in real life and find a place where they can be accepted for who they are. Through my research and through being part of the D&D community, I have discovered that many minorities turn to D&D to truly be themselves and get away from the injustices of real world societies. Many people who play are sexual and gender minorities and like the inclusivity of a fantasy game to due its premise. This sadly turns some people to who discriminate further against D&D but inside the game there is a community ready to open their arms. Many players create characters of themselves but augmented to how they really wanna be as role play inside D&D is endless whereas others simply character a separate character to embody and not worry about themselves. The ways in which people play the game is often informed by their life outside and personal experiences.

D&D as a community is a fandom, a wide community of fans that empathies with a particular topic. These fandoms bring people closer together as they have a common interested and large events such as Comic Con are able to show off everyone's love of different sub cultures and fandoms at one inclusive event. People also get into D&D in a variety of ways so I did a survey to find out the thoughts of people within the community. We also, thanks to Vi, managed to get some information from inside the community online. This part of my research was crucial as I wanted to truly understand the people within the community we are representing with this assignment.

Community Q and A:

Q: Do you participate in fandoms/online communities? If you do, what are the main reasons for doing so? (ie to see more content for your interests, to talk to new people, ect)

A: I just like seeing more of my favourite characters/ show I'm into at the moment and all the art and stuff around it.

Q: Do you think that fandoms/online communities have helped you discover things about yourself (sexuality, gender, neurodivergence, ect), or given you space to explore these identities further?

A: yeah probably, seeing certain characters that you relate to being labelled as something and then later realizing you fit that label

Q: Have you ever made friends/developed relationships through fandoms or the fact you share an interest?

A: Kinda? I mean more with pre-existing friends that I discovered liked a thing I did

Q: Would you say that your overall experience with fandoms/online communities is positive or negative?

A: I think it's generally positive. It depends on the fandom and some are definitely more toxic than others but generally I've had a fun time.

Q: Do you have any thoughts about the role of fandom in building communities or self identity? It could be on a personal level or looking at the wider community- just any thoughts you have.

A: Fandoms are pretty good at bringing people together and just everyone having a good time. They also definitely can develop your sense of identity.