Camera’s sensory extension:
 
How filmmakers sense London through the camera?

​INTRODUCTION

This research aims to investigate how filmmakers integrate themselves to new ways of looking at, listening to, and experiencing London by conducting multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with five students from UCL's Documentary Filmmaking department.

I plan to shed light on the following questions:

         - How do senses play a part in the shooting process through the cameras/lens?

         - Is what you see with your eyes and what you hear with your ears necessarily true?

         - Can a camera sense what a human eye/ear cannot?

       - In the embodied practical process of sensory extension resulting from filmmaking, how do senses such as sight, hearing and touch connect with abstract senses, including senses of place and senses of belonging?

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BACKGROUND

Since the senses of the human body are coordinated and linked, in filming a documentary, the filmmakers not only rely on vision and auditory senses but also use all their sensory experiences to perceive and understand the world. The camera has become an extension of the filmmaker's senses to some extent. Different filmmakers will obtain completely different perspectives through different lenses and build a completely different subjective perception of the same object in their minds. At the same time, the camera will unintentionally record many sounds and images that people ignore daily. When filmmakers watch the video again, they might get a sensory experience that is different from when they were filmed.

 My participants are all living and filming in London; thus, the heightened auditory and visual concentration required for shooting encourages them to extend and enhance their embodied experience of London, at the same time, helps them to construct or reconstruct their sensing and understanding of this city. In addition, because of the sensory connection and communication between humans and objects, I also try to explore how the camera senses filmmakers and how it senses London.

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Method

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This ethnography aims to be completed through participant observation and staged semi-structured interviews with five participants over a period of up to three months. At the beginning of the project (January 2022), I was ambitious and had a very detailed and structured time plan, envisioning a different kind of ethnographic research each week with my five participants. However, things went athwart. Two of the five participants left without saying goodbye at the midpoint of the project, as if my research had had a negative impact on their connection with their cameras. Here I would like to thank my three other participants for their understanding, support and assistance, as well as my own status as a documentary learner and filmmaker. I made the “bold” decision in the middle of the project to include myself in the informants being studied. Thus, during this three-month long fieldwork, I used the camera not only to observe London, but also to examine myself, while at the same time trying to translate what I shooted into material that could be studied comparatively to advance the interaction with other participants. The idea has been successful to some extent. For instance, I used an accidently recorded movie on the'separation of sight and sound' as the foundation for a fifth interview with my participants (see later) and to further my understanding of multisensory ethnography. In addition, participant observation and comparative research are also the main research methods used in this project (see later). Through some comparative studies of the three remaining participants, the project explored some questions like the "memory of the senses", "the aural in relation to the visual", and "the suspected authenticity".

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