For my third doc mode activity, I decided to shoot something using the poetic mode. The point of this documentary was to give a poetic retelling of my journey on Black Friday.

​

I assembled the footage out of order. What was important to me was to tell the emotive and seemingly unending joyous cycle of my family’s tradition to go to the mall in Orem every Black Friday. Because of this reason, I decided to splice between clips that were going forwards in time from the start of the day and clips that were going backwards in time from the end of the day. The editing process for this documentary was heavily inspired by Christopher Nolan’s film Memento. I felt doing that would help push the idea of Black Friday being recursive in nature. I didn’t put the backwards moments because I thought that would be too much of a distraction for what I was trying to do with the poetic mode. Cutting the doc in this nonlinear fashion was also good for it showcasing the poetic mode because, as we said in our discussion of the poetic mode, the Poetic Mode sacrifices the conventions of continuity editing and the sense of a specific time and place in order to capture the poetic essence of a feeling. This is exactly what I aimed to do with my editing for this film.

 

The shooting process to my poetic mode doc was, of course, inspired by the concept of city symphony films and also travelogues. I guess it was somewhat inspired by Man With a Movie Camera, but I mainly had À propos de Nice in mind while filming this. I couldn’t fully do what I wanted to do for my ideas that came from À propos de Nice because I didn’t have the budget or ability to stage people walking zigzagging between each other at the mall like a stream of water or stuff like that, but I did with what I could. I was also somewhat inspired by the impressionism movement in art.

 

I intentionally didn’t edit the footage to the beat of the song. I did not want the music to have more control over the aesthetic quality of the footage than I did. Because of that, I was very selective on when things did match the beat of the song, which wasn’t often. It is usually matched to emphasize something that would come in again later near the end of the doc, or to signify a thematic shift in the narrative that the footage conveys. I know that poetic documentaries usually emphasize rhythm to help convey their meanings, but I chose not to do this because I wanted to integrate impressionism into my film. When I think of impressionism, I think of its wavy, moving, fuzzy dreamlike qualities. It’s chaos that flows together to form an image. I don’t associate rhythm with this, so I tried to stay away from it, but I did try to incorporate the sense of flow through my images by having strange repetitive motions in a single shot that could morph into the next shot, although it didn’t always flow as well as I would’ve liked it to in that sense.