Director Devina Saberi talks about the inspiration for her new documentary series Growing Pains, the challenges and opportunities of documentary storytelling for online platforms, and her advice for early-career filmmakers.
Devina Saberi, still from Growing Pains
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For early-career filmmakers, social media offers a path from growth to audience, says Devina Saberi, director of the new online documentary series Growing Pains. TikTok’s episodic structure and immediacy of community reactions allowed the series to open up beyond the story and engage viewers in unexpected ways.
“We can answer people’s questions about the series right away, even during release,” she says. “And that platform (…) is public in real time, so it’s great to be able to have conversations with people on that platform.”
The 20-part series focuses on three young people from culturally diverse backgrounds, and the director’s close friends, as they navigate work, love, and family, and the challenges Saberi faces as she makes choices about her future. reflected the personal and professional choices he had made. This is her first feature-length screen project.
“I knew I wanted to tell these stories and I knew I wanted to do it in a certain way, but I didn’t know how yet, but I saw (TikTok) as an opportunity. ” she says. “Online fundraising was my introduction to the industry.”
However, it was not without its challenges. Each episode is a maximum of one minute long, and building algorithm-friendly narratives allows us to film just enough to capture the nuances of these very intimate stories while adhering to the platform’s format and audience expectations. It was a continuous process. As Saberi said, that balance is important. tricky. “Trying to capture that nuance can be difficult.[And]there are a lot of different formats that can do that, but it takes a lot of thought.”
Throughout the episode, Saberi talks about building stories for social media platforms, supporting community storytelling, and the challenges of observational documentary, especially when filming friends.
“When you’re filming real life, things never go the way you expect them to. And with some of these storylines, they didn’t go at all the way we expected.”
Growing Pains is available on TikTok.
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