Documentaries

What is a documentary?
A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record.
Documentaries are primarily used to inform people on taboo topics and can often be controversial, but they can also be purely scientific or historical, including documentaries such as 'secrets of the terracotta warriors' however there is another version; mockumentaries.

What is a Mockumentary?
A television programme or film which takes the form of a serious documentary in order to satirize its subject.

Mockumentaries that you may have seen include;
- The Office
-Borat
-The Dictator
-Ali-G in da house

In class we have started to produce a mockumentary ourselves about a boy who struggles to pronounce vowels and this is currently in production. We are doing this short mockumentary as practise or our two minute opening to get used to the shooting process and the production process.

Stop-motion

Stop-motion

 

 

 

In class we used modelling clay to recreate a short stop-motion sequence. I worked with Aisha and we did a short sequence from a game of Pacman. Shooting the footage, while it may be entertaining and produces a very original interesting end product, is very time consuming and I think that it would be far too impractical to implement in my coursework because we spent about two hours modelling and shooting only to end up with around four seconds of footage and so shooting a two minute opening would be incredibly difficulty, fiddly and the camera angles would be limited and creating any kind of 'want' to see the rest of the film would be near impossible so I have elected not to personally implement it.

However I do appreciate the way that others have used this technique to great effect, for example Jan Svankmejer used it phenomenally in his short film 'lunch' in which he created mouths and faces from modelling clay to show characters eating things which are clearly not edible and while at first its a very freaky and almost chilling thing to watch, as you watch it, the whole film becomes more comical and you can really appreciate the editing and how well the film has been pieced together.