Digital Documentary

Latest Version

This is the latest version of my video "A Faint Sound of Dixie." Sorry the file is so large (about 38MB) -- I'm trying to make it smaller but the smaller versions are are turning out below the loss of quality I'm willing to accept. I will post a smaller-sized file as soon as I can.
Download Video (38MB)

A Smaller Sound of Dixie

Hello and Happy New Year!

I got some tips from an Apple certified Final Cut Pro guy last night and this evening managed to cut down the size of the video to 6 megs. He told me to export the video in full size and use a software that comes with Final Cut called Compressor to size it down. He also told me to experiment with the formats and options. This time I used mpeg4 basic for modem. Of course the trade off is in size and resolution.
I'll begin testing new settings and post better-quality small videos if I can.

There are also lots of changes on this new version. Let me know what you think.

Download video (6MB)

This is it!!

Well Gang,

This is IT! Thank you all for teaching me so much and sharing your wisdom with me.
The video you are about to see (41 MB -- sorry! I'll try to shrink it some later.) is a product of those discussions we had in class. Without your input I would never have come this far.

Have a great holiday break!

Juliana

A Faint Sound of Dixie (41MB)

Rough Cut Delayed

Sorry for the let-down, but for a million different reasons, I won't be posting my rough cut until sometime next week. Thanks.

Storyboard

Hi Everyone,

Sorry it took me so long to post the storyboard. Rob was talking in his blog about how hard it is to write the script. I agree. I think this is the most dificult part of the whole documentary thing because you actually have to come up with a coherent way to tell the story. And there is no storyboard without some semblance of script, so there you go.

I'm not sure I have found the way to tell the story yet. I think the organization I have here works, but is very bland. I can almost hear the sleepy voice of one of those 70s documentary narrators! Any suggestions?

Short Video

A Faint Sound of Dixie

This assignment has been a great challenge because of the enormous temptation to just slap some video and forget the stupid photos. It is very hard work to make still images into interesting video and I'm not sure I succeeded. Probably that's the most important thing I learned from this assignment: movement is extremely important.
Another added challenge to this video was that sometimes the way I had a picture moving clashed with the movement of the next picture. This is the pitfall I found harder to overcome. To me, the fact that I know my images and my subject so well made it slightly easier. However, since my audience is made up mainly of historians, I tried to change the angle of my narrative to make it more relevant to you guys. The result was I didn't have many of the pictures I needed to cover the story.

Treatment

Sounding the Fight – Musicians of the Civil War

“Sounding the Fight” is a one-hour documentary that will explore the role of musicians in the civil war by telling the story of 10th Vermont Infantry band leader J. Herbert George. The idea is based on an article published in the Journal of American Culture called “More Work than Play” by James A. Davis, a professor of musicology at State University of New York-College in Fredonia.
Many songs are associated with the American Civil War. “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” came to represent each side of the fight. The musicians who went to battle evoke images of very young lads, or of the flute playing by the campfire at night. A romantic if unrealistic concept of, as Davis puts it, “an almost bipartisan hero.” Musicians for both sides took on their musical duties in addition to their more traditional soldiering work. George, for example, did everything from picket and guard duty to assisting the surgeons.
Our documentary will use family pictures and letters, museum pieces such as musical instruments and other pictures, and reenactments to tell the story of George and his band, their lives and routine at the 10th Vermont Infantry.
We will begin with a reenactment scene in color showing a soldier doing something typical, such as manning a picket. Then we hear an officer call to arms and while all soldiers are getting their guns, our character picks up his fife and takes his position as leader of the band.
The scene continues in black and white and narration explains that musicians were more than just amusement or pace keepers to the soldiers. They had many other roles and were regular soldiers as well.
Run opening credits.
We begin with George’s story, who he was. The narrative will be punctuated by his letters, which are well-written and offer a glimpse of the life of a musician soldier in either side of the conflict. They will be read by actor Matthew Broderick.
Davis has agreed to grant extensive interviews and serve as consultant to the video. He will also make available his collection of original pictures and letters from Herbert George to his family.
The National Music Museum in South Dakota, which holds an extensive collection of original Civil War musical instruments and pictures, has agreed to allow access to the collection as well as granted access to the curator, a historian.
The documentary ends with the end of the war. Narration will say the 10th Vermont was active throughout the war and was present for Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. George proudly led his band through the streets of Burlington, Vermont, on their final march home. (We have newspaper archival pictures of the event). His letter about it will close:
“The 10th arrived here safely this morning at 2 o’clock--Had a grand reception for the boys--it was rainy & dark but the ladies were out & as we came into the town hall (where we now are) they sang Union songs to us & showered hundreds of bouquets on our heads as we passed in to eat--Oh I tell you I felt--all over. Almost cried. I was so happy -- Our Band played home again "sweet home" "Happy are we to night boys" "When Johnny comes marching home" "Tramp tramp or the prisoners hope" and some others. Our music was highly appreciated I can tell you. We had to play so much all the way from Washington here that my lips are awful sore, but I don’t care I'm home -- almost.”

Scene Analysis

Select a scene from one of the four documentaries that we have viewed. In a 500– to 750-word blog entry, analyze both “what” documentary does in terms of history and “how” specifically in terms of video does it make the point. Conclude your entry by evaluating how effective the scene is in furthering the documentary as a whole.

Murder at Harvard

“Murder at Harvard” by Melissa Banta and Eric Strange is unusual in many ways. Documentaries, from Lumière to Ken Burns, are normally a non-fiction, in-depth look at one theme. This piece explores two different subjects. One is the trial of John Webster, a Harvard professor accused of killing and dismembering George Parkman, a prominent man to whom he owed money. The documentary, which is hosted by historian Simon Schama, also is a discussion about the value for a historian of mixing fiction and history.
Schama wrote the book on which the documentary is based. The book, “Dead Uncertainties,” mixed fiction and historical fact, causing some historians to question its validity as a study. Schama performs all the transitions between the account of the trial and the discussion on how to best study the historical facts surrounding it. He does that by chronicling how he looked at the evidence available and how and when he allowed himself to use fiction to fill in the blanks. And here lies what seems to be more oddities in today’s documentary. First, the use of fiction, which, to be fair, is always clearly labeled and serves the second discussion. More salient is the hearing first-person narrative coming from the host. Documentaries use the word “I” sparingly if ever in the text. This is especially true if the piece is based on academic knowledge or research. There are exceptions such as Michael Moore’s works and the increasingly popular video-diary format (to see an example, go to http://www.offcentertv.com/raynarrative.html).
Strange and Banta rely heavily on reenactment and interviews with historians to try to reconstitute what happened at the trial and what really happened to Parkman. They achieve, for the most part, surprisingly good flow in weaving the two subjects of their video, thanks to a combination of careful text and visual cues. Reenactment scenes, for example, are black and white. In “Murder at Harvard” this not only helps the viewer separate the narratives; it also contributes esthetically to the visually beautiful final product.
Reenactment scenes in this documentary are unusually detailed and include full scenes with dialogue. “The trouble with reenactments that rely on the camera slowly panning across interior spaces where something important once happened and hazy shots of quills, weapons, and detached body parts is that they leave viewers feeling distanced from the action instead of closer to it,” Strange writes on http://www.common-place.org/vol-01/no-03/stange/ . The choice of black and white for his reenactment, however, lends it some of the haziness, which has a purpose. In many points of the narrative, Schama stresses the absence of hard information on the events and introduces a reenacted speculation based on the circumstantial clues we have from the time when the action happened.
The narrative in the documentary follows a whodunit model, stating with the murder and the trial, then introducing the suspects, and exploring the possibilities. In the end, Schama issues his opinion and, as in a good whodunit, he picks the one we would not think about at first.
The scene that shows this best is when the school janitor Ephraim Littlefield finds Parkman’s body under Webster’s lab. He goes into the “bowels of the school” and digs through sewer-filled passages and brick walls to get to where supposedly he thinks Webster hid the body. But the music, the comments by historians weaved into the scene all point to the idea that he had something to do with the murder. “Why would he go through so much trouble?” “How did he know it was there?”, the historians ask. “It rather suggests that he had put it there. And I believe he has,” says the last one.
Instead of pinning the guilt on Littlefield, this scene marks the turning point – the plot twist – when events start turning and we will soon see that Littlefield (according to this version of the events anyway) did not kill Parkman.

Welcome

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