During our first seminar for this project, we watched 5 documentary films: Making of Dark Days, Skateistan, Eric's Secrets, King of Laughter, and Pockets. I'm going to analyse in detail here the ones which particularly "spoke" to me.
Pockets was my undisputed favourite. The basic concept is to interview strangers in the street about what they have in their pockets, however the visuals are often abstract and don't always match up to the dialogue (for example one woman mentions using a crack pipe every day and the filmmakers have carefully edited this section to avoid disclosing her identity). The film also uses unconventional close-ups - i.e. unusual framing, or focused on the background.
Skateistan was a nicely filmed documentary, however I felt it to be too constructed - as if the filmmakers were glossing over the problems in the war-stricken area by saying a skate school solved every problem the children had. It was almost too optimistic, however the filmic style was very nice; it was very clear (possibly HD) and the colour correction was very recognizable to this particular film.
Making of Dark Days follows a young man making a film about the homeless people who live in New York's disused subway tunnels. It's a good few years old so it's interesting to see how films were made before digital camcorders and editing software. However it's around 45 minutes long so the pacing is much slower than my documentary would have to be, making it less useful than the shorter documentaries we watched.
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