Man on Wire directed by James Marsh is a thrilling documentary based on Phillippe Petit's wire walk between the World Trade Center's twin towers in 1974. The film follows Philippe's dream and journey towards achieving his ultimate goal of wire walking between the two tallest buildings in the world at the time.
The documentary is edited in a similar style to your typical heist film, such as a film like 'The Italian Job (1969)'. This is because the film uses a lot of screen time for the build up, using suspense and creating a sense of excitement for the viewer to keep them hooked to the documentary. Keeping the audience hooked to a documentary is always important to a documentaries success as if a documentary is not interesting, then audience will loose attention and probably not even get the message the documentary is trying to give to the viewer.
The documentary starts off using a reenactment of Phillipe's team setting off from their apartment to begin their execution of the plan, along with cutaway interviews of the team describing the moment as the reenactment happens on screen. This is typical of a heist movie as the narrative dives straight into the action, and by leaving the action on a cliffhanger before the documentary moves onto Phillipe's early life as a tight rope walker. It creates enough suspense to keep the viewer interested right through till the 'heist' is carried out at the end of the documentary.
The only difference between 'Man on Wire' and your typical heist moving like 'The Italian Job' is that 'Man on Wire' is based on a real life event so the audience are likely to know the outcome whereas fictional heist films are at an advantage as the outcome is not known. Therefor James Marsh as a director had to make sure 'Man on Wire' was still full of suspense even though it's non-fiction. This suspense was created by interviewing a very passionate Phillippe Petit explain his constraints during the 'heist' as well as showing them through reenactments, such as when two members of the team were hiding from the guards under a blanket. Even though the audience knows they succeed, it creates suspense as you do genuinely get a feel in the way its edited if they are truly going to get to the top and complete the wire walk.
Although our proposed documentary idea is a very different style and genre to Man on Wire, being based around the Cahill family with an interview on John and Becky's daily life dealing with their children Jack and Dara, Man on Wire is a great example of how long documentaries keep audience on edge and engaged with the documentary throughout. Our proposed idea is 10 minutes, which will be the longest documentary any of us have created so learning about how feature documentaries keep the audience engaged will be useful to us when going about filming and editing our own. So for this reason, we will be editing to a style to make sure the documentary is as gripping for the viewer as possible.
The Runners (2013)
The Runners filmed by Matan Rochlitz & Ivo Gormley is a short documentary which simply interviews people while they are out for a run. Unlike 'Man on Wire' which is a feature documentary with huge funding, 'The Runners' takes a very simple approach to documentary making, even to the point where absolutely anyone with a camera could have gone out and made a documentary like this. It doesn't require interviewed off specific people of importance, doesn't need to technical reenactments or access to archive footage, just needs someone with a camera to go out and question runners while filming them.
This short documentary has likely gained popularity due to how unique it is. An important factor for short documentaries is because the budget is a lot less than those of feature documentaries, short documentaries have the harder task of needing to stand out from the rest. 'The Runners' achieves this as interviewing people out for a run has never really ever been done before. It is an experimental documentary as it takes the concept of interview documentaries and applies it to runners as putting someone on the spot while they are running will provide different answers to someone sitting down in a room.
One factor I think we can take away from 'The Runners' documentary is the concept of experimenting with style. We don't have the budget of feature documentaries like 'Man on Wire' and considering our documentary is a short 'The Runners' as an example documentary applies to us a lot more. A documentary that we find to be most similar to what we want to create is Louis Theroux's 'Extreme Love Autism'. In this documentary Theroux goes around interviewing American families that have autistic children to find out what their lives are like. This is very similiar to ours as it is along the same lines of our documentary, the only difference being that we have inside knowledge considering the documentary is about Sam's family. Sam as a team member will be very helpful when filming and editing our documentary as he knows what feeling we want to give to the audience. Overall I think 'The Runners' has a very interesting style showing that budget should never be an issue, and all you need at the end of the day is a bit of creativity.
No comments:
Post a Comment