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

David Bowie Scrapbook: Jeanne and Pat Pope

David Bowie Scrapbook: Jeanne and Pat Pope

David Bowie Scrapbook: Jeanne and Pat Pope

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.

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.

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!

That little Qingdao shop memory. Photo: Constance Pope