Lights, Camera, Alabama

A six-week immersive Doc+ summer program gave rising sophomores a crash course in documentary filmmaking

A group of people with filming equipment in the woods, with the sun shining

This is a summary of a story by DaManuel Richardson on Center for Documentary Studies. 

Three Duke students boarded a plane to Alabama with almost no documentary filmmaking experience. Five days later, they came home with something much bigger than footage.

As part of the Doc+ six-week immersive summer program at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies, rising sophomores David Anderson, Alex Atkins, and Daphne Zhu joined filmmaker Elizabeth M. Webb on the production of “Artificial Horizon,” a feature documentary exploring the social, racial, and environmental history of former plantation land in eastern Alabama.

After three weeks of preproduction training and planning at CDS, they expected hands-on experience in cameras, sound equipment, and production schedules. What they found was that sometimes the best laid plans don’t always come to fruition. 

Rain disrupted carefully planned shoots. Light changed. Interviews took unexpected turns. The students quickly learned that flexibility is part of the job. “The first thing we learned is that you've got to be ready to adapt at all times,” Zhu said.

The experience also challenged them to look beyond first impressions. While interviewing people with different perspectives, they saw how documentaries call for subtlety and complexity. Atkins reflected on one interview that changed her thinking: “Initially, our clashing viewpoints made me write him off as one-dimensional. But the more I spoke to him, the more I discovered … he contained volumes, and underlined the value of digging deeper."

By the end of the trip, the students were anticipating the needs of the crew and contributing to and observing the research process — which blended history, ecology, genealogy and storytelling. For example, one afternoon the students interviewed and filmed a dendrochronologist, whose research uses tree rings to understand environmental change and the passage of time.

The experience inspired two of the students to pursue a Certificate in Documentary Studies and gave all three a deeper appreciation for curiosity and collaboration.

Read the full story on The Center for Documentary Studies.