Patrick's DAT Capstone Blog

I recently watched the film Rust Creek, a film about a girl who gets lost in rural Kentucky and is stranded in the woods after accidentally getting involved with a local crime syndicate. Before I watched it, I had no idea this would be inspiring to my completely unrelated documentary. The aspects of the film I enjoyed the most were the audio and cinematography aspects, which translate well to documentaries no matter what the subject matter is.  Relating to the blog post on audio I read a couple weeks ago, audio was a very important part of the tension in this movie. Not only did the music push the film in this direction, but the soundscape made anxiety levels rise for me. As I said then, our documentary certainly won't rely on building tension, but this does serve as an example of how sound can be the most important factor in building a mood. If I watched the movie on mute, it would be a completely different experience. This lets me know that while sound may not be the biggest fact...

I recently read an article about documentaries in 2020, specifically about gaming. They talk about several different ones, and how important these are to video game culture. Reading this both helped me understand what aspects of the documentary are important and helped me feel good about the theme of the film. It was encouraging to read about successful and "feel-good" documentaries and imagining that ours can be in that group of being beneficial to video game culture. One of the things that stuck out to me in this article was the discussion about timing. This is timing not in the sense of documentary length, but timing in the real world. A lot of projects don't get off the ground because they're about things audiences wouldn't care about decades later, which means the relevance of a subject is important. This made me feel a lot better about ours, because it's not only about a specific game that's still relevant, but also gaming culture in general, which w...

Today I read a blog entry on sound design in documentary. Sound is always something I've been fond of working with, and so it's something I recognize the importance of. However, sound design in documentary is not something I've ever been super familiar with so I wanted to do some research. The post goes into detail about the documentary Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable  and the sound design that went into that. It talked about the importance of sound in capturing mood in the shark attack sequence. This is an aspect of film I've always admired; the subtle bits of audio that are used to create tension. This isn't necessarily anything Ross and I will need to worry about in our documentary, but using sound and music to create a mood is exactly what we will need to do in our documentary. Instead of building tension, we'll need to consider other sounds that will help create a light, playful mood.  The post also mentions music. This will be a big part of our audio track, ...