Resources- Documentaries

Throughout this experience within class we were shown a number of documentaries all with there own style, mood and story. So by watching all of these documentaries it actually helped me decided what type of style I wanted my own piece to be done in. Some helped more than others but I guessed that was good because it was it still educated me in all the different forms a documentary can take and how shooting a documentary has developed over time.

So to begin I will introduced a 2010 piece called Nostalgia for the light by Patricio Guzman

This documentary is a piece that Guzman linked his country's hidden history to the secrets of the stars. This documentary involves the story of those who disappeared during Chile's 17 year dictatorship under Pinochet and the work of the global astronomy community in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile.

This was something that appealed to my passion for history's hidden stories as I always love to know how people where treated and the living conditions people use to live in so my first thought when I heard what this was about was good positive thoughts. Then whenever I began to watch it I found it very hard to get in to partly because it was in subtitles which I sometimes find that the emotion or mood that is trying to be created is taken away simply because you have to concentrate on whats being said you don't have time you think more deeply about it. Another thing that put me of this was the science clips which to me at the time I found very odd even though he was talking about the secret of the stars I just thought the different in footage from the science to the people being interviewed and their search in the dessert was just too much as a simple shoot of the stars at night from the desserts view would have been enough.

So by the end of this documentary my search for the right style was still on the go.

The second documentary which I found a lot easier to watch and engage with was the 2012 Malik Bandellou documentary called Searching for Sugarman.

This story line is more or less given within the title and it was about the search for a very gifted singer- songwriter from Detroit who disappeared and was rumored to be dead. Only for Bandellou to found out that Sugarman was actually still alive and was kind enough to appear within the documentary for a interview to tell his story.

This piece was interesting as it was almost seen as a mystery, was he alive? was he not? what happen? etc. The style within this piece was very smooth the scenery and quality didn't change much and it was a good look into the past and an inside look into what the music industry was like. The fact that even within the interviews with the recording people and people from the music industry the question of was Sugarman still alive was kept throughout. Now whether the people knew at the time he was alive is a different story but the way it was done I liked that the suspense was kept until near the end when he was found.

Searching for Sugarman was at the time a starting point in whether the old footage mixed with the new footage was a rout I wanted to take.

The third documentary was a piece by the Oscar nominee Sarah Polley and this was called Stories We Tell.

Stories We Tell was a personal piece about the secrets within Sarah Polley's family. It  looks at the relationship between Polley's parents, Michael and Diane Polley, including the revelation that the filmmaker was the product of an extramarital affair. It incorporates interviews with Polley's siblings from her mother's two marriages, interviews with other relatives and family friends, Michael Polley's narration of his memoir, and Super-8 footage shot to look like home movies of historical events in her family's life.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to watch the whole thing but from the clips on the internet  I thought this look brilliant as it was something personal to Sarah Polley just like my documentary was personal to me, of course in different context. But from watching the set up of the interviews with her family it gave me a clear idea of the type of shots and set up I needed. During the pre-production stage I did plan to us her style of having two camera so it would show me recording them but when developing the plot and realising I would need to be interviewed I decided against because having someone else to film me while they were being filmed would defeat the purpose of it be a personal family piece.

So at the end I did take the style and structure from this documentary into consideration when filming and editing my piece.

The final documentary was a student piece called Stephens Journey. 
Link: http://vimeo.com/4436209


The plot within this was basically a middle aged who suffers from a disease known as Antitrypsin Deficiency. Stephen lives in Buncrana, Co. Donegal and receives treatment for this disease in the Mater Hospital, Dublin to which he travels every week and has been doing so for the last thirteen years of his life.

Now this documentary really inspired my documentary. I liked how it always cut from Stephen talking about the journey and his condition to actually seeing him carry out what he says. It made you feel like you went on the journey with him making you connect more and feel sorry for the character. A part I found inspiring was whenever the student got footage of Stephen actually having to stop in the street to catch his breathe and how he would pretend to be on his phone so people wouldn't stare or think anything. 

So at the end of them all Stephen Journey made the biggest influence on me as it was a disease you never really hear about on the tv and it involved normal people that you could relate or sympathies with which was what I wanted to betray in my own piece.