Hello class!
So for this blog post, I have to propose my story and visual evidence for making a short documentary about the COVID experience for local nurses. My one caveat is that I’m not allowed into their hospitals with a camera. So what am I to do to gather extra footage so that the documentary isn’t just looking at the interviewed nurses from different angles for 10-20 minutes?
This is quite the challenge, as this means I cannot follow the nurses through a daily routine at work to help accentuate their words. But that wouldn’t provide much anyways, as according to the articles, that would probably be considered more as “B-Roll” instead of “Visual Evidence”.
As the article says, “B-roll is cover footage, pictures that run while someone is talking” (“B-Roll”, pg. 106). While visual evidence is more an example of telling a story with exclusively footage. Silent films are a great example of visual evidence, because, well, they didn’t have a choice. They were forced to use visual evidence because they weren’t able to use audio.
So with this knowledge, I can use my footage to help tell the story that the nurses give me. For example, I can film the nurses preparing for a day at work instead them actually working. A shot of the nurse rubbing down her scrubs can help paint the image of working a lot and staying dedicated throughout the cause. In addition, I would probably see if some local patients who were saved by the nurses could arrange a party with the nurses that they helped, as a chance to thank them for all of their hard work. There is a lot of potential with this type of footage, as it allows us to not only show examples of the grueling work they went through, but also the impact they had on their community and how much they did to save so many lives.
-Jeremy Sauter