Why I chose to abandon my strengths as a visual story teller and deep dive into the world of audio documentary
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s the philosophical currency of sound?
My latest documentary The War Less Travelled has me away from my creature comfort of using camera to tell stories and relied on the very medium I usually put at the bottom of my skill set totem pole — audio recordings.
The War Less Travelled is an audio documentary that revises the history of the war that began in 1955 that continued in Vietnam for 20 years. The Vietnamese call the war The Resistance War Against America, and explores the understanding of the war and the intergenerational trauma families still feel to this day.
I was approached by the main contributor of this documentary, Tran Doan, a PhD candidate and former colleague about covering this topic in summer 2020. I was interested in creating something around addressing these issues she shared of revisionist history, intergenerational trauma and racism but my gut reaction was to pause and think about how best I could tell this story until a productive social media scroll inspired me.
The Whickers RAFA (radio audio funding award) had just opened up for submissions. Created by the legacy of Alan Whicker, a renown British journalist and broadcaster (but someone this American quickly familiarised myself with and began to admire) last year it offered 50% of the overall funding for a one hour audio documentary that was to premiere in September 2021.
Taking in my skill set totem pole with this new information and inspiration from Alan Whicker still living on finding ways to keep seldom told stories being told, these are the reasons I took the plunge into a seldom used storytelling style:
Screen time overload
As a documentary director who films and edits everything herself my screen time is usually pretty high in general but during the pandemic it overtook my personal life as well. I had such gratitude for technology but tried my best to gravitate towards other mediums for a healthy break for my brain which included printed books and podcasts.
In the US, adults spending six hours or more of screen time per day have a higher risk of depression*
The pandemic of podcasts
Everyone and their dog started one, I myself am guilty of that. But starting my podcast was a safe way to begin to build a different way of storytelling, one that was always secondary to my visual strength of using cameras. Once I built up my confidence in what I considered was one of my weakest skills using audio, I felt more comfortable to suggest what I felt would evidently be the best method of telling this story.
The visual paradox of interviewing people from South East Asia
I’ve spent a lot of time in Cambodia filming interviews with sex workers, surgeons, patients, etc. It’s been a challenge to me to capture on camera the feelings and emotions people from Southeast Asia must have on the inside because they are almost always exhibiting some form of a smile. While recording the interviews for TWLT, I had to pose a really hard question multiple times to Tran’s father Thanh before his smile finally faded.
The over-smiling nature of Southeast Asians can be disarming to visual audiences who are unfamiliar with the cultural understanding of the region, and even discredit the most harrowing of stories.
The practicality
We weren’t going to be able to get out of this global pandemic anytime soon last year and have still months to go before there’s enough vaccine equality to make my worldly travel and filming days a reality again. Using new online platforms like Zencastr that records the raw audio from the side of the interviewees and sends it back to me made it possible to conduct interviews from my office in Bermuda without putting the contributor’s or my own health and safety at risk.
The platform
This is possibly the most important part of my decision to commit to this documentary. Alan Whicker left behind so much more than funding, he left his legacy in the capable hands of a visionary team that work to see the projects they select through to the very end. I can write, I can film, I can interview, I can edit, I can colour grade, I can even now say I can do some light sound mixing but what has held me up on my last few projects and gets me fatigued in the end is…the end. It’s what happens after I make great content, it is having it seen — or in this case heard and giving purpose to all those things I am capable of doing.
Last year, TWLT was made a finalist for the RAFA and participating in the workshops and personal development of the project made the start of the documentary possible — along with the £1000 given to all five of the finalists. Ultimately the documentary wasn’t the final project selected to continue on with The Whickers, but it continued on nonetheless through independent fundraising efforts.
That once in a lifetime experience became twice in a lifetime, when it was accepted again as a finalist this year but with a world of progress including some high profile interviews that can finally begin being edited with the additional finalist contributions of £1000 going straight to the sound designer.
But what I am looking forward to the most ahead of this weekend’s workshop is that last ‘P’ in my audio doc defence list — platform. I’m looking forward to hearing how other productions are creating a platform for their projects and brainstorming on how we can all support each other in this unicorn sector of the audio world — not quite podcasts, not quite visual, but some where in between where for an hour we can be transported to different places and people by what we hear.
Join me on this audio documentary adventure and listen to the trailer for The War Less Travelled and follow on instagram.
