Our documentary, ‘The Conventions of Art’, was based on Kyle Dutra, a high school student who partakes in graffiti and expresses his artistic side of himself through his designs. Throughout the documentary, we delve into his personal life and how he came to be the amazing artist he is today.
How did research inform your product and the way it uses or challenges conventions?
A documentary is a nonfiction product that illustrates a ‘slice of life’ to communicate a specific message or story to the audiences. Most documentaries are shorter than full length films, have narrative format, interviews of subject progress throughout the movie, and a biased point of view. Our documentary takes on most of these original conventions of documentaries, with indirect interviews, narration through the interviews, and a bias towards the artistic side of this certain art form. The research I used to get an understanding of documentaries was watching some top tier productions. I watched, “I think this is the closest to how the footage looked”, “American Promise”, “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, “Abstract: The Art of Design”, “To Live in a Wild Sea”, and “The Case Against Torture”. The first five productions were all full-length documentaries that were phenomenal and captured me in every way, despite me not being fully interested in all of them. They told stories with such emotion and detail to their subjects, and it really inspired me on how to tell people’s stories. The last two productions were Op-Docs, they were much shorter documentaries by amateur film makers that were very moving and inspiring towards me as I was tasked to do a smaller and shorter documentary. I took most of my inspiration from the Op-Docs and “Abstract: The Art of Design”, as these productions focused on specific people and telling a story in a shorter time frame through a documentary. These also inspired me to choose the type of documentary I wanted to create, which was one that focused on one individual. Finally, we watched projects from the years before us, and I got an idea of how to format my production in the amount of time that was given, establishing a beginning middle and end.
How does your product engage with audiences?
Our ideal target audience for this production was any gender kids, ages 13-21, and active artists of any form. We were aiming for this target audience as our subject really wanted to spread his art to inspire others and speak his message to them, explaining how important it is to keep trying with your art and to always persevere. I believe we could have done a better job at engaging our target audience. One component that was very capturing to our intended group was the actual topics. Dutra's drawings and messages appeal to younger audiences as there are many cartoon drawings that kids his age grew up with. Additionally, him being a younger subject in high school gives relation to the target audience as they can connect with him due to his experiences from being an artist in high school currently. I believe we could have come up with a better name for our production to appeal to younger audiences in general. It is a very general title that doesn’t capture the interest of our intended group. Additionally, I feel if we got him to speak more about his high school experiences and how they relate to his artwork it could have appealed more to high school artists.
How does your product represent social groups/issues?
Our project represents the diversity within art. It exemplifies the different aspects of art, specifically graffiti, with the way Dutra speaks on the topic. He makes a statement about how he gets frustrated at the people who seemingly taint the name of graffiti by making vandalism of rude topics and matters that have nothing to do with ‘art’. We made sure to ask questions that specified about true art in graffiti, and I believe it represented graffiti artist well as they put in so much effort and time into their work. I became inspired from the documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, when it created a controversial question about what defines art. We wanted to uphold this question and create a biased point of view on the specificities of graffiti artists and how certain ones are artists. I believe we did a good job of this by giving an example, which was Dutra, and displaying his beliefs on the matter as well. We also explored a bit of Dutra's Brazilian background and incorporated certain Brazilian aspects such as the music choice we used and the b-roll that was displayed. Although we didn’t make this piece about ethnicity within art, it still displays how it is a big part of what makes him so unique. I believe we could have delved more into the representation of the struggles with school and how daunting the art process can be while coping with school. I would have asked questions about how he personally handles both and finds the time to utilize his creativity while also dealing with the mental strain of school. Overall, I think we communicated our main representation well but could have developed a couple of different aspects of smaller representation matters.
I think our documentary was a good starting point for what we are trying to accomplish in a production educating people about art forms and what truly makes them art, but we could have dived deeper into the specific representation while also relating our topic towards our intended audience more.
