How to Make a Documentary

Last week in class we watched a documentary that taught us how to make documentaries and all of the film techniques that we would use within our films. One thing that was stressed in the segments we watched was Montage editing. Montage editing is juxtapositioning of images to create meaning not found in either individual shot by itself. What this is saying is the film would show a shot of a freezing girl struggling to survive, then it cut to a frozen river, and then back to the girl. The audience can assume that the girl is contemplating suicide by jumping into the river. The film also talked about Kuloshov's Montage Theory. This theory was tested with several subjects. These subjects were asked to simply have a blank stare and look into the camera. Then the film maker went and filmed a dead person, food and another thing. He then used the blank stares and montaged them with every one of these things. The result made the person with the blank stare either seem hungry, terrified or any other emotion just by tying these two shots together. An example of the Kuloshov experiment can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTnUf4QoXo8 this has a girl sitting there as dozens of clips role by. I came to the conclusion the girl was either thinking or high on some substance.