Dogs from Joe Bourekas on Vimeo.

Dogs-Faux Documentary. Cinematographer/Camera Operator. A budding documentarian provokes directionless losers into becoming violent criminals in order to exploit them for his “masterpiece”.

This film required a lot of staging and thinking about how best to seem like a single camera documentary crew, while still providing an interesting film-like aesthetic. The big challenge to this film was finding a way to look like a believable one crew documentary. This meant picking apart the script with the director to find natural “cut points” in the script where the character of the filmmaker would cut to a differnt point in a conversation. To make the video feel real, we essentially had to make each cut feel like something happened between the last cut and the next cut that the filmmaker chose not to show the viewer. The hardest challenge technically, for me, was to find a way to fight my cinematographer instincts and appear to look “professionally homemade”. My favorite shot in this piece has the be the turning point with the gun. The long build up and the character break within the camera really set a precedent for how out of control the narcissistic filmmaker’s project got.

The Good: This piece screened at UCSC for a combination of the classes Senior Exit Narrative as well as Senior Exit Documentary. That means documentaries and narratives were played without a break separating docs from narratives. When this piece played, and the character shoots at a house, people thought they were watching an actual documentary. A funny story, but it also proves I nailed the doc aesthetic!

The Bad: I should’ve gathered more insert shots of the havoc they wrought. This would’ve showcased their progression better, from petty vandalism to real crime. As it stands, the vandalism they do does not look that drastic or grand, and thus makes them look less intimidating.