On Academic Filmmaking as a “Messy” Methodology

How would you make a documentary, stranded in your house, in the middle of a global pandemic? What happens to your project, and what happens to the filmmaker-researcher? On the eve of the global Covid-19 pandemic, I returned from Melbourne to Istanbul to begin filming the documentary which is the practical side of my Ph.D. project on the filmmaking methodologies of contemporary female filmmakers from Turkey. When the outbreak of the pandemic locked the world inside their houses, I turned my house into a studio and started using things I found in the house as my equipment, such as the projector, phones, and books as tripods. My friend turned into a cinematographer, and we learned how to use a 4K video recorder from YouTube tutorials. We filmed the live interviews with the female filmmakers that took place over Skype. The film ended up reflecting the experience of making a film under the pandemic conditions. In this article, I will attempt to think through my filmmaking process and understand “mess” as an experimental approach that works even in an academic context.