Artistic Pursuit Of The Documentary Old House & Big Yard

It is often said that a good topic lays a foundation for a successful work. Selecting a topic is important for a documentary and is a good beginning of creating a documentary. The documentary Old House & Big Yard mainly tells the story between the selfless village secretary An Xiangshu and the empty nester Cao Yue’e. By describing the life state and emotional changes of the empty-nester, this documentary reflects the tough social problems in the real life.This paper probes into the dialectical relationship between implication and explicitness of the documentary Old House & Big Yard from the perspectives of creation techniques, shooting objects, recording modes, subtitles, sound, sound effect, etc. In the early planning stage, this documentary makes innovations in terms of topic selection, positioning and viewpoints. Through interviewing and shooting the empty nester Cao Yue’e, this documentary alludes to the serious social problem of population aging in China, so as to arouse the resonance of the audience. During the mid-term shooting stage, this documentary takes real life as material, and real characters and incidents as the documentary object. This documentary interviews and shoots Cao Yue’e living in the old house and An Xiangshu living in the big yard, and has a profound reflection and discussion on how to improve the problem of empty nesters. In the late editing stage, the cross-editing technique is used to make the plots more authentic and accord with natural development.Combining the documentary Old House & Big Yard with the theories related to documentary, this paper focuses on the study of the "implication" and "explicitness" in this documentary, and has a reflection and analysis on this documentary in terms of director consciousness, creation techniques and audio-visual language, thus demonstrating the creative conception and shooting process of this documentary as well as its implication.