The Boy With The Crown - Personal Reflection

Research

Personally, I was the last incorporation to the crew of the documentary. However, ever since the subject and the idea were pitched I was very interested in being part of the project. The reason why is because whenever I thought of the word “drag”, I could visualize the imagery for the actual documentary as well as knowing there was going to be an interesting person behind that persona we identify drag queens as.

What I was very pleased to find out is how welcoming the whole community was, and especially Elliot, our subject, who was always concerned about us feeling as comfortable as possible in the scene.

Also, coming back to my late incorporation to the group, I found extremely useful how Lena had already established the first interactions with Elliot. This did not only help us know what to expect from the actual interview, letting us making a much more tailored interview for him, but also enabled us to start building a relationship with our character. That is something I cannot stress enough: sharing a connection with your subject is the key for a good documentary, as the more comfortable the person feels around you, the more natural they will act around the cameras and the more trustworthy will be the footage.

Development

Apart from what I say above about feeling an engagement with your character, there were other factors that motivated and encouraged the making of this documentary. First and foremost, the more we knew about him throughout his email correspondence, the more obvious it was for us he would make a very interesting subject with a lot to say. Even in these early steps of the process we were able to pinpoint some of the most powerful statements that made it into the final cut of our movie.

Also, even though we were inspired by a lot of things, there were two that stood out from the rest. The first one was Elliot’s instagram, where we could catch a first glimpse of his looks that sparked the aesthetic of the documentary. The other source of inspiration was the movie Cabaret (Dir. Bob Fosse. 1972). Not only does this film serve as an aesthetic reference, by the use of such things as the persistence of dramatic lighting and the creative use of shadows in the movie, but we can also find similarities in the issues it portrays. One of them being no other than the representation of sexual liberation and the LGTB community, something our own documentary can definitely relate to.

Cabaret (1972)

The Boy With The Crown

The Boy With The Crown

The Boy With The Crown

Analysis

One of the main strengths I would like to highlight from our group is the extreme organization and detail of our planning documents for the shoot and, afterwards, the edit. This structured content has permitted us to work faster when actually shooting and during the postproduction of the film.

However, despite all this organized planning, there were still a few unexpected problems when doing the actual filming. First of all, we had to work with a space we did not know beforehand, so it was a lot of an improvisation choice of blocking. Also, because we did not know in what conditions we were going to shoot in, we also had trouble with the lighting, as it sometimes appeared too dark.

Nevertheless, the incident that affected the most to our initial shooting plan had nothing to do with that indoors scene, but was related to the shopping scene (that was cut out in the final version of the documentary). The anecdote is after finishing shooting everything we needed, two security guards came and made us delete all the footage that was filmed in that location. Thankfully we still had some other footage from other stores, even though in the end it did not matter as I said earlier we did not end up using that scene at all.

The Boy With The Crown

The Boy With The Crown

Deleted Scene

Evaluation

Editing, as the rest of the whole production has been a very collaborative process we have all taken part in. Thanks to our very organized and structured content, we were able to find the footage we wanted fairly quickly, which made postproduction a lot easier.

Also, one of the thing we all agreed on was that with all the amount of footage we collected we could have made a dozen different documentaries, depending on the direction we wanted to take with it. That was probably the most difficult part of the editing process, having to filter what was going to make it to the final movie. At first it seems like an easy task, but when you have several powerful statements to choose from, the decision gets more complicated.

After making the cut of all the footage we wanted and changing a few things from our original storyboard, like the discard of the shopping scene, we ended up having a rough cut of the documentary, which after adding a few effects and colour correcting became our final film.

I can honestly say I am proud of the work we have done as a group and the resulting project we have managed to achieve. For me, this was the first time I attempted a documentary project and it has been an experience I have learned a lot from. Apart from applying the skills we have developed in different modules, what I appreciate the most is the simple knowledge we have taught ourselves in the making of the project. Simple things such as “staying with the story” and “keep shooting” can and will make the difference in your present and future films.

On an ending note, I would like to add that the last and most important things this documentary has taught me have been: 1) The importance of being organised as it makes your workflow a lot more effortless, and 2) The positives of having a group you work well in. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, as you may not always work with the best of people, but as far as this documentary goes I feel very lucky to have worked with a group I knew I could rely in, instead of worry about.