Topical history involves recording information about a specific subject, such as an interview with someone about the history of a workplace or occupation. I took this approach in developing my final project titled, Hip Hip in Japan. Through the interviews that I conducted, I was able to present the history behind the emergence of Hip Hop in Japan.
In choosing the subject matter for my project, I had initially planned on documenting the many faces of Disc Jockeys aka DJs, including on air DJ’s, club Dj’s, scratch DJ’s and mixtape DJ’s. One of the reasons that I wanted to document DJ’s was because I felt that their roles in music were taking for granted. In my opinion deejaying is an art form just as much as being a musician is. In all reality, DJ’s are the ones who play the music first, exposing an artist’s music to the masses. DJ’s have to entertain and interact with the crowd just as much as the artist does. Ultimately, I wanted to show all of the above in my work, while at the same time giving my audience a brief history about how the art form made is way to Japan. I would later have to change up how I would present this after I found my interviews, to be filled with information that I was not quite looking for.
To find the subjects for my documentary I logged onto YouTube and searched DJ ‘s in Tokyo. Several Dj’s popped up. I messaged about 6 DJ’s summarizing what my vision for the documentary was and how I would like to have them in it. The message looked something like this:
Hello, DJ(….) how's it going...Do you DJ in Tokyo? if so are you interested in being the subject of a documentary illustrating what it is like to be a DJ in Tokyo? if you are interested please let me know at your earliest convenience as i would like to meet with you as soon as possible.
Thank You for your time,
Danielle Johnson.
Out of the 6 DJ’s I message I would say that I got about two responses. Ready to work I decided to meet up with whoever responded first. Being that this was my first time ever doing a big project like this, I was hell bent on not letting it show to my interviewees. I set up dates and times for us to meet based off their schedules. I had no phone, so we stayed in contact with one another through email. Each time we were scheduled to meet, we met up at hachiko outside of Shibuya Station. Before interviewing each of my subjects I set up a day just to talk with them and further explain what it I was trying to do with my project. I asked them questions about themselves and couple of questions that I would ask when it was time to record. I took notes and when it was finally time to record I used those notes to conduct the on camera interview. In collecting my b-roll I used both the PD150 and the small Sony HD camera. PD150 was used mostly for the interviews and the Sony HD camera was used for club footage as it was small enough to carry around with me.
Once I finally had all my footage, it was time to edit and that was the most difficult part I must say. The outcome of my interviews ended up being totally different from what I anticipated. My subjects discussed hip hop more than anything, and with time running out I had no choice but to work with the interviews. My b-roll was also flooded with the Hip Hop in Japan. Now, I was no longer focusing on DJ’s, rather I would be focusing on the hip hop scene in Japan.
For a long time I was stumped on infiltrating the structure and due to my lack of experience everything felt a little bit over my head. I had to sit down several times and look at my footage over and over. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to combine information that could tell the story of hip hop’s emergence in Japan from its very beginnings to what is today. I wanted to put together a story that would appeal to hip hop fans outside of Japan, as if I were their inside man. From here I started putting together a timeline based off my interviewees sound bites. I chose DJ Cap to be placed first because his interview gave insight to the beginning of hip hop’s emergence starting in the late 80’ s. From there everything fell into place. Besides video I used other mediums such as pictures and music. I did a little narration and I added a map of New York and Tokyo to introduce my audience to the project. I also used subtitles to narrate the story. I added background music as a finishing touch to keep my audience interested and entertained.
I came across a few difficulties in finalizing my topical history piece. One came about in conducting my interview. I didn’t realize it, until till I was ready to edit in postproduction. In one of my interviews the levels were extremely low. I thought everything was fine, when I was recording it, but the truth of the matter was, that I had set up the wireless mics all wrong. I was worried because I wasn’t sure, if I was going to be able to get my subject to willing do another interview, but luckily they had no problem doing so. I also found it hard sometimes to communicate exactly what I was trying to ask. Although my subjects could speak English a little bit of language barrier existed. At times they really couldn’t understand my question and they would give me an answer that really had nothing to do with what I was asking in the first place. That was a little frustrating. The most frustration though came from editing. I found postproduction to be very overwhelming. Although I had made a log sheet, I just didn’t know where to begin. I just felt like I had way to much footage, compared to the actual length that my final work needed to be. Another thing that I had trouble with was organizing all my footage. I went through several clips looking for just the right ones that could paint the picture that I was trying to portray. The hardest part of the organization for me was the end/conclusion, because I didn’t want it to end abruptly nor did I want it to be out of sync with the rest of the documentary.
There are couple of things that I would change or go about differently now that I look back on it. For one, I would have definitely changed the location of my interview with DJ Flourish. The background music was distracting, especially since there wasn’t any background music in my other interview. I also could have played some Japanese Hip Hop music as the background instead of the instrumentals. I think that it would have made more authentic. There were times that in my conversations with my interviewees the cameras were not rolling. I know that in the future I should keep the cameras rolling until I run out of tape. There were a lot of things that I wish I could have put in there that were not recorded. Also organization, I wasn’t necessarily all over the place but I could have been a little bit more organized. For example, I was ignorant to the fact that when recording a-roll and b-roll they should be on separate tapes. If knew this at the time, logging and editing would have went a lot smoother. Also in the case of my interviews, I would have started way earlier, just for the simple fact that things wouldn’t seem so rushed. In that case that would have probably made my project come out the way that I intended in the first place. Other than these few things I wouldn’t change anything else I was pretty much pleased with the end result for it being my first topical history. I’ve learned a lot from this experience, and now I have more confidence that I am capable of producing more works such as Hip Hop in Japan.
