Class produces five-part film, "Making Richmond Work"
“They’re such a bright and motivated group—they learned a lot and they learned it fast,” said journalism professor Robert Hodierne of his documentary journalism class. “I wasn’t sure how I was going to pace the course, so I decided to be ambitious and push them, and every one of them rose to the challenge.”
Ambitious may be an understatement. Hodierne, who has just wrapped up his first semester as a professor at the University, undertook the kind of course that engrosses Richmond students: one with both a liberal arts and a vocational component. In the first half of the semester he had his students viewing, discussing and writing about documentaries. Then he walked the class, many of whom had never used a video camera, through the technical ins and outs of how to make a documentary film of their own.
Hodierne is a veteran military journalist, who began his career as a freelance photographer and the youngest, fully accredited foreign journalist to cover the Vietnam War. He came to Richmond to teach journalism with a special emphasis on documentary journalism.
“The same concepts that the students are used to using in journalistic writing can be applied to making documentaries,” said Hodierne. “These are visual stories, so you need an opening, middle and closing, you need transitions and you need the right vocabulary.”
His students learned both technically and artistically about the visual and audio “vocabulary” necessary to tell a story through film. Hodierne assigned practice exercises before his students attempted a documentary. These exercises included filming a sequence of shots to compress time and telling a two-minute story with an animal as the lead character.
“That was my favorite exercise,” he said. “It was a difficult task and the students struggled a bit with it, but I wanted them to be able to tell a story without dialogue. The film that featured a squirrel was probably my favorite.”
After the students had spent a good deal of time watching and discussing documentaries and were comfortable with basic filming and editing techniques, Hodierne presented them with the topic of their class documentary.
“I wanted the topic to be something relatively simple but I couldn’t just assign one story and expect everybody to learn something,” said Hodierne. He split the class into pairs and assigned each group to do a profile on one person. That way, Hodierne says, they could avoid the more complicated tasks of conducting multiple interviews and tying the story together with narration.
The person that the students chose to interview couldn’t be just anybody. Hodierne wanted them to focus on people in little-known or under-appreciated jobs in the city of Richmond.
“I wanted them to be exposed to people they don’t normally spend time around—people most of us take for granted,” he said. “Besides learning about documentary filmmaking, it was also a project to help them grow as humans.”
Proud as he was of his students’ progress while in class, Hodierne was even more thrilled with the final product they turned out at the end of the semester. The five-part documentary was titled “Making Richmond Work” and featured a hotel housekeeper, a paper mill worker, the owner of a Gettymart convenience store, the teacher at an after-school program and a waitress in a sub shop.
“We got hands-on experience learning about the importance of finding the right person, asking good questions, capturing the right sounds and visuals and telling the story in a compelling way,” said Jacki Raithel, ’10, who co-produced the vignette on Gettymart owner Enara Kaba. “Featuring ‘average’ people in our final projects was the embodiment of what our journalism professors frequently say: ‘Everyone has at least one good story to tell’.”
“I jumped at the opportunity to take this class. It was everything I hoped it would be and more,” said Sarah Blythe-Wood, ’10, Raithel’s documentary partner. “Professor Hodierne shared his wealth of knowledge with us and created an exciting and fun learning atmosphere.”
“I thought the class was a fantastic learning experience,” said Michael Gaynor, ’09, who co-produced the vignette, “Mr. Jimmy’s Class,” on after-school program teacher James Spurlock. “Professor Hodierne took us step by step through the process of making a film and I learned technical intricacies of the medium that I never thought I’d master.”
Next semester, Hodierne will teach Documentary Journalism II, in which, depending on the number of students enrolled in the class, students will make thirty-minute documentaries. Along with conducting more in-depth research and learning more advanced editing techniques, students will also have the opportunity to pitch film ideas. Hodierne hopes that they will be able to enter the final documentaries into local film festivals.