In general I feel that the overall plot of my documentary is using the typical forms and conventions of a documentary in the sense that a documentary conveys the reality of a situation or action, additionally my short film is portraying the reality of the situation happening in Palestine/Israel and is informing the audience with facts and statistics of the difficulties. For example: I show the conditions that many Palestinian children are living in everyday.
I chose to stick to the usual conventions of my genre type film otherwise it would not fall under the category of a documentary, as it would then contain perhaps a minimal amount of characters, usually a plot twist and either a happy or unpleasant ending. I feel that genre types such as: romance, horror, comedy, thriller, action etc. come under the theory of Stanislavski in which allows the audience to follow a story and make a connection with the characters, on the other hand my documentary follows the conventions of Berolt Brecht in which is also a theatre practitioner, although he does not consistently allow the audience to become attached to the characters or plot of the performance/film, Brecht goes by the purpose of making a political point and making the audience aware or to recognise a certain situation.
Firstly I believe that my short film documentary uses the conventions of a short film in terms of character within my short film. Typically there is a minimal of 1-3 characters due to it being a short filmand the duration of the film usually being up to 5-6 minutes long. Additionally my film contains only 1 main character who stands as the protagonist, this is somewhat different to the typical amount of characters in a political type of documentary as there can be a wide range of interviewee's or opinion leaders. However as my film was an extremely personal topic for me I decided to include only one interviewee and someone of who I trust and value the opinion of, therefore I feel as though just having 1 character conveys this to my audience members are they are able to recognise that this is an important subject in which I feel passionately about.
In terms of my budget I believe that again here I followed the forms and conventions of a short film as the budget is usually low. Evidently I did not have the budget to pay well known actors or to afford expensive and efficient equipment to film with. Therefore I used people that I knew and were willing to be apart of my film documentary and made the most of equipment that I already had, such as: my own camera and I Phone, all of which I was happy and content to work with. When it came to location the majority of my filming was done inside of a house and features my main protagonist 'Samir', this was where I interviewed him as I feel that I needed purely a plain and minimal setting in order for the focus to be mainly on him so that my audience members can listen to the information and opinions of the main character and not become distracted by anything else within the scene. Moreover I used a lot of split screening and parallel editing therefore I felt as though the filming that includes my main character needed to be simple in order to contrast with the busy and visual actions in which were happening on the other side of the screen. This allows my audience members to see the main character as well as seeing the visual element to my film. Moreover part of my filming was in public places for example: London Oxford Street and Westminster.
Again forms and conventions that I feel I have followed is that I have used traditional elements such as: a voice-over, interviewees, a strong opinion, a chronological order of events and more. I simply felt as though these were relevant and appropriate for my documentary as it conveys the order of events from before 1948- to this living day, the effects that certain events have had on people and a two or one sided opinion.
In addition I consider my media product to have developed the forms and conventions of a short film as I attempted to structure my film purposely in a way that is suited to a modern audience and to sustain their interest through out the duration of my short film. I feel that I have done this with the use of the filming of the protests in which were recent events therefore maintaining that relevant interest.
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