Bad example https://www.youtube.
This is a long documentary that actually does a decent job of keeping the viewer into the story through effective visuals, supporting sound effects and tons of B-roll. Where it fails for me, is the lack of face to face imagery of the main characters, and the clearly staged dramatic representations. I am also not a fan of the transitions between segments nor the length of the film. So what do I mean by face to face imagery? For the first two minutes of the film, the viewer hears a narration by the main character accompanied by b-roll of him brushing his teeth, walking to meet his friend, etc. but there is an awkward tension created by the fact that you hear the speakers voice, and you see images of him, but there is a delayed revealing of both the speaker's voice and face in the same clip. An interview setup would have done well in that situation, but there is none. By the time you finally see his face and hear his voice in the same clip, its a staged representation of the beginning of his story instead of an actual interview where he could have explained the beginning to the camera. The staged representations are lazy, and the viewer cringes to watch them, If you miss shooting an important event, give some other thoughtful b-roll, but not that. As for the transitions, they are also lazy. no good film needs a chapter by chapter set up for the stages of a story. A good editor can make one thing flow to the next through sound bites and visuals. Then as a last point, there is no reason for the film to be 19 minutes long. a lot of the material could have been condensed to make this 10 minutes or less. Shortening would also drastically increase the chance that a viewer will stay to watch the whole thing.
Good example https://www.nytimes.com/video/
Conversely, this is an excellent example of a project similar to the style I want to do. It takes a broad topic, a migrant caravan, and it humanizes it through the story of one mother and her child. It hooks the viewer in 20 seconds through a montage of scene setting shots into a sound bite of "She's pregnant, you are going to kill her!" As the footage rolls, a voiceover introduces the woman with a short and to the point statement. The footage continues, as does the voice, and music slips into the background ever so smoothly with the natural sound bites. As the narrator begins to talk about the woman's family, a short clip of each sister and aunt transition through. As the migrant caravan starts moving, the narrator explains that, and the camera follows. In the following clips, the cameraman breaks Prof. Jacobson's rule of keeping the camera still, but he keeps the footage ever so smooth that the movement helps put the viewer in the frame of a moving caravan. The rest of the story is told through the narrator and sound bites of an interview with the main woman as lots of b-roll plays through to support everything. The film comes to an end with slowing down of shot pacing with less and less camera and subject movement until the sound bites bring about a comfortable conclusion going along with the music.
No comments:
Post a Comment