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27: How to Kickstart Your First Documentary: Scrapbook your Materials to Refine Your Aesthetic and Organise Your Visuals

3/11/2022

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David Bowie Scrapbook: Jeanne and Pat Pope
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David Bowie Scrapbook: Jeanne and Pat Pope
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David Bowie Scrapbook: Jeanne and Pat Pope
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A page from a Smith College student's scrapbook circa 1906. A day in the life of the student. Author: Alexandrabush5 - Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
In today's lesson
I'm going to show you how to brainstorm your creation on paper.  
Are you feeling stuck and overwhelmed? Filmmaking is so heady, isn't it? Sometimes it's good to take a break from our imaginations and put things down on paper. Lesson 27 from my course How to Kickstart Your First Documentary will help you: gather your ephemera (that means movie tickets, postcards, letters, and photos)

  • give you an overview of your film's "look"
  • help you see what you've got, and maybe what's missing
  • provide you with an idea of how compelling and convincing your materials are and if you should include them
  • show you how they appear visually, when collaged together

A snippet of history first

  • Scrapbooking began around the 15th-century in England. It was a fun way for people to compile everyday information such as poems, letter, sketches, quotations; each book was personal to the creator. They were the first amateur documentarians.
  • As the years went by, these books became Friendship albums, where the creators would personalise the book, which would have been about an event the owner had attended, or a place. It was similar to journaling, with doodles, and sometimes painting, you name it, whatever could be stuck in it went into it.
  • The Victorians started the real craze of Scrapbooking in the UK. Memorabilia from family, trips to the sea, to an aunt in the country, to a new city or town, would be preserved in beautiful bound books and arranged in a way to tell a particular story.  There might be humour and anecdotes, even a story arch.
  • They wrote about desires, disappointments, and their life. They cut and pasted with scissors!

The scrapbook could be about life at school. The life of an educator. Life of a mother or father, artist, writer.
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Court sitting during Qing dynasty, 1889 Date 1889 Source academic.ru Author Unknown author

So how does this apply to film?

In many ways a Scrapbook is a precursor to a documentary, this is the way I see it. Often there is a
  • theme
  • a story
  • a style
  • a genre
  • and then each page tells its story

Have a go:
  • Tell your film story first in your scrap book. Collect the archives you need.

Use:
  • photos
  • glue
  • scissors
  • and your synopsis, either hand-written or printed and stuck

This will help give you that hands-on feeling, that earthy, cut it up feeling.
  • Cutting, 
  • sticking,
  • pasting,
  • manually-making.
  • Write your summary/synopsis.
  • Cut it into moments,
  • scatter them along with the other elements.

​Have fun!

Thanks for passing by. I wish you all well in this arduous and hard time we are all living in.


Jeanne

  • Do you want a face-to-face chat? Do you need some extra help with your work?
  • Read here how I can help and work with you
  • Contact me below with your questions.
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This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
 Did you ever scrapbook? I did.

My first book was of David Bowie - ​see above photos - then later my travels in France. Wrappers, old tickets, a lock of hair, a trinket, all these made up our scrapbooks. 

From there I progressed to travel scrapbooks which were smaller, with a lot of journaling when I lived in central Asia.
  • Scribbled are people's addresses,
  • names,
  • old phone numbers,
  • doodles,
  • train tickets,
  • ferry tickets,
  • plane tickets,
  • a lock of hair 
  • a small feather from the Ganges 
  • rose petals from Iran
  • All these are documents of a time and a place. These are all my precursors for documenting.

To finish with ephemera. Three of us curate the website of Stanley Lewis, an old and dear friend. His story is long (as all stories are long) complicated and a shame. He was cast out, long ago, by the Canadian art world and he never having liked self-promotion once it all went to Social Media.

​Stan scrapbooked. Kept bags of clippings, letters, receipts. Thank God he did. When he died he passed many of them on to me to keep for the day they might be important. They were vitally important when we made our films with him, and continue to be today, as an art museum is finally going to curate a show of his stone-cut prints. The first since 1997!

Scrapbooking for posterity!

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That little Qingdao shop memory. Photo: Constance Pope
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    Jeanne Pope

    Filmmaker, teacher, traveler and storyteller

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    Links to the Workshops
    1. How to find your documentary idea
    ​2. How to find your documentary approach
    3. Understanding the documentary genre
    4. Creating hybrid documentaries
    5. Understanding narrative storytelling
    ​6. How to film an unscripted documentary
    7. Tips and techniques for interviewing
    8.Why you need a release form
    9. How to use free public domain archives 
    10. Why write a documentary synopsis?
    11. Find funding for your documentary film 
    12. What documentary film equipment do you need? 
    13. Camera shots and techniques
    14. The Long Shot
    15. The Long Take
    16. Why you should use your cellphone
    17. Documentary film ethics
    18. Ways to fund your documentary
    ​19. Research or No research ?
    20. Digital storytelling Part 1
    ​21. Don't-overthink-your-documentary
    22. Ten tips to fine-tune your documentary
    23. Don't let your idea slip slide away 
    24. Give us more creativity for 2022
    25. Ethical code for documentaries
    26. Why a Pitch Deck is essential 
    27. Scrapbooking your memory
    28. Scrapbooking podcast 
    29. Digital-Storytelling Part 2
    30. The Paper Edit
    31. Location Scouting
    32. Genealogy and Documentary
    33. Reflecting on why we want to make documentaries
    34. How to make your documentary journey exciting 
    Other Links
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    Substack non fiction Jeanne Pope Family Soaps & Sagas
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    National Film Board of Canada for fiction, non-fiction and animation
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    Journal for the homeless nation of Montreal
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    British Film Institute, UK

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    Tips to help you find funding, grants and great film festivals
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    JEANNE POPE - Documentary China Blog 2015-2019
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    Stanley Lewis Sculptor appreciation website by the FRIENDS OF STANLEY LEWIS
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    Rusthall Community Cinema

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    Andrew's Art History Blog
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Thank you dear Jeanne. It is an honour to have your creative thoughts which are printed in this film. With your love energy, passion and creative thoughts and encouragement this film can have its own soul finally. Thank you so much". ​Tao Gu - Taming the Horse
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"Jeannette taught me the tools I needed, never having made a documentary before. She gave so much time, patience to show me, guide me and share her creativity and skills with me."  Dr. Zou Qialing, Beijing Film Academy, Qingdao Campus
Free online streaming: English
ONF-NFB - National film Board
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Jeannette helped me find a path and create energy with my material which I first found so difficult to handle. With her help to become interesting and wonderful. She is interesting in class, lively in class, often in communication with students, very popular with students. Jeannette is a very conscientious documentary teacher." TianHui Li,  award winning filmmaker, Beijing Film Academy graduate. Concordia University graduate




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