The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 135
ist” students because the “pre-scripting” of what they wanted to be
their film felt for them like a natural part of the development
process. But it was harder for the “docmentarists,” especially early
in the development of their documentary projects.
Nevertheless, I continued to encourage them all, before and after
field research – indeed, throughout the whole development process
and during the filming itself – to go on imagining concrete film
scenes, but to always keep these provisional. They were encouraged
to pre-imagine how to film scenes in considerable detail, in spite of
knowing that they would have to reject most of these imaginings as
the project developed. I wanted them to think of the imagined
scenes as highly detailed sketches that were going to be rejected as
the process developed. I tried to help them design parts of their field
research to investigate whether these pre-imagined scenes were
filmable “out there” in the real world. Almost invariably they were
not, but I believed that having tried to imagine how to film it was an
important preparation for actually having to film it. Later in the
development process I would encourage them to imagine several
ways of filming possible scenes – a series of “what if” scenarios –
and ways of testing these possible scenarios and how to film them in
the next stage of field research. In this way they could begin to
appreciate what parts of the coming film were more predictable
with regard to how they could be filmed, which parts were less
predictable, and which parts were largely unpredictable.
An important restriction in this “filmic imagination” training
method was that they were not to spend too much time trying to
imagine the whole film. I encouraged them to pre-imagine individual
scenes and groups of scenes and to think of these as the possible
building blocks for the film. But they were not encouraged to imag-