I'm doing my documentary on my friend Percy Manthey, who has an alternate rap persona called MadD G.
I think this will be an interesting concept for a documentary, as it explores why someone has to portray themselves differently online. I think I could also learn a lot about why he does the rapping, what motivates him, what his goal is.
One thing I could focus heavily on is his new Fiverr service, where he is essentially payed to make bad music
I was thinking of bouncing between interview clips of him in persona and out of persona. As B Roll I would shoot him recording his tracks, him "mixing and mastering".
Secondary Research
Although popular, soundcloud rap has negative connotations, with the term mumble rap being thrown around constantly. Mainly from oldheads. I could ask G's opinions on this.
detailed below
look below for poll results, answers and summary of all that
on the surface, articles and publications on the SoundCloud and Internet Rap generation seem to be positive. There's a lot of praise for the innovation, as seen in my social media research too. But occasionally you find the odd stinker, and of course its from an old man working for the New York Times of all things.
It's not necessarily the things he says, it's the way it's said. Like, its description of how its "disruptive" energy in the hip hop world, "low-fidelity" and "malevolence"
Picks out the quote "it sounds so unpolished" to make it look bad from a man who's trying to defend SoundCloud rap if you think about what he's saying, but with how they've presented the quote, it looks so negative.
To gather research, I took to Instagram and used the poll feature to gather responses on some questions.
social media research
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planning
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questions for MadD G
The answers to these questions helped me form questions specifically for MadD G
Based on my social media and article research, I have quite a few questions to pose to MadD G, and a structure that flows pretty well.
Some of the questions will be pretty much identical to the social media questions, but some will be based on the results I got from asking these questions.
- Would you consider yourself a "internet rapper"?
- Do you think the separation between internet rap and "normal rap" is fair?
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- Out of the 50 people that answered my survey, 80% of people haven't heard of you. That's 40 people. What do you think of that?
You can find in the blue boxes that on the left side I've described how the audio will be presented and what form it will take, and on the right I tell what visuals will be presented.
Note how question 3 for MadD G is written provocatively, to gage a reaction on something that is a touchy subject for him.
On the final page is my notes for interviewing Percy Manthey. He is the same interviewee as MadD G, but I wrote his bit separately as in the second half of the documentary I was looking to explore the fact that MadD G is a persona, and talk with the man behind it all.
We were given this template to help plan our documentaries in detail. Obviously as it is not a mockumentary it could not be scripted, so here we have these tables, where I've presented what questions I will ask my interviewees, and the order in which I will most probably end up editing them.
production diary
day 1
On day one, I shot the main content for my documentary, the interview segments and B Roll of MadD G and Percy. I ran full 20 minute or so interviews for each of them, so that I had a lot to work with, and I could pull the most interesting parts. On top of questions, I let Percy tell annacdotes from being MadD G, just so I had a variety of content. When I got to his room, I made
the concious decision of shooting MadD G's interview handheld. I knew how sporadic MadD G acted, so I wanted to capture the nature of this by being able to follow him round in a "The Office" fashion. This made the interview different from a talking head. I also filmed him recording a new song, just as some action, rather than having 10 minutes of talking. For Percy's interview, I did it as a static tripod talking head type shot. I did this, as this interview would be very chilled out and less chaotic than MadD G's.
day 2
day 3
Today I needed some secondary interviews, so I chose to focus them on my friends Jake O'Flynn, who has known of MadD G since the beginningand was heavily involved in one of the stories Percy tells to get his perspective. I also got Alexander Markovich and Blaise Jones, who had been there for the school performance and the live performance. I got these because they provided different viewpoints and experiences, and also cutting to them occasionally makes the film less boring visually, as the constant talking head of Percy was beginning to shut people off after a while. For this I just used my iPhone as the camera and sound are of a pretty good quality, and they would feel more comfortable with a phone rather than a professional camera. I went back to the handheld style especially for Jake's as his clips acted as comedic relief or sorts. I also found myself trimming quite a lot because across both MadD G's interview and Percy Manthey's I had 30 minutes of footage, when the film is supposed to only be about 10.
I edited a bunch of the interviews the next day in class, and when I came home from that, I dug up my dad's old laptop, and ported over all of the archive footage I needed for the project.
editing
Due to The Brit School's policy of updating Premiere Pro, the school's version which I did most of my editing on when starting wouldn't let me put the project on my home computer, so I had to edit every opportunity I got to at school.
When editing, I knew that the talking heads would get boring past MadD G's interview, so when Percy talks of anecdotes, if I had the footage for it I'd cut to archive footage for insight and to mix things up visually. There's also a moment where he describes a disgusting place we filmed, so I thought an interesting visual piece owuld be a screen recording of me getting up the location on Google Maps.
THE FINAL EDIT
CLICK TO WATCH
EVALUATION
I have now finished the documentary and I can say now that it's a real success, and it is so close to being exactly how I hoped it would turn out.
First let us talk about the interviews. My interview choices were good ones. Fist of all, obviously, we have MadD G. As much as you can try and argue this is a mockumentary of sorts, it isn't. A mockumentary is totally scripted, but this interview wasn't at all. I had my questions, I asked them, and filmed him answering. Now, do I wish I had got some more feasible answers from MadD G? Yes. But I think what I git instead was a highly entertaining interview where we truly saw MadD G's personality. I prefer this to a professional and boring interview. The people I showed this piece to were wildly entertained by this "interview" too. Choosing to do this off the wall interview also gave me the oppertunity to flex my story telling techniques, by having this interview handheld, and having the proceeding interview be professionally shot and on a tripod. I like the contrast.
I'm also really happy with how the interview structure played out. Doing MadD G, and having people notice a couple minutes in that something isn't quite right, and then cutting to Percy Manthey's interview that essentially just tells you you've been lied to and this is all just an act. I thought this was an interesting, funny and unique way to structure and tell the narrative of a documentary.
My other two interview pieces were Jake O'Flynn, and then a joint interview with Alexander Markovich and Blaise Jones. I wanted to choose at least one of these guys, as they have a tie to the character and to Percy, but after filming Percy Manthey's interview, I knew it had to be these guys, as they could give alternate accounts and perspectives for tales that Percy told towards the end of the interview.
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The stories that Percy told gave me the opportunity to use the archive footage I had on hand more contextually, instead of it just being to overlay interviews for more visual flair. I like how I edited these, having relevant audio fade in and out, but ultimately still have he interview be audible
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