Monday, 20 February 2012

Monday, 6 February 2012

Concrete Circus

The concrete circus is a documentary about a group of athletes  all over the world like for example Paris, London, Wales who don't do normal sports but street sports such as free running, style bicycle and skateboarding. But the way it has been presented is different from most others as it uses wild footage for example footage of free running and skateboarding and style bicycle how the athletes run from different building jumping over buildings and climbing up buildings.
they do the most  amazing things we would dare to do like super human things from taking the extra mile and they have a narrator who explains everything in key detail about the background and life style as youths and how they started their hobbies and developed in them and made it their life. 

During the documentary, music was used a lot to create a mood and to fit with the activity of the scenes portrayed like fast music and edgy music. 
while watching this documentary i noticed there were many different camera shots and angles which is used throughout documentaries,  this  is so that you can  viewing things form a different point of view. 
These are some of the shots i found:
  • Wide shots
  • Panning
  • Tracking
  • Close ups
  • Mid close ups


Documentary Analysis

Please and Thanks


This documentary is participatory you see the the points of views of the the public and how they react to manners and politeness. This documentary is also expositor as it exposes a lot of the views from the older generation in that they say that the younger generation have less respect for everyone and do not have manners.This documentary can also be one sided as it only shows the point of view from the older generation not from the younger generation. it is also informative  as it tells us about how people feel towards the simple words as in please and thank you and having a basic common courtesy to be polite. the way the documentary is filmed is in different clips of the public talking to the camera and the interviewer ask them questions but you never see the interviewer only the people they ask questions to.


The King Of Laughter


This documentary shows a man who basics his whole life on laughing as he thinks that it helps him to survive. the man has had a lot of disasters in his life and by laughing he can forget about them. He narrates to the audience that he had a lot troublesome times but he just strides the hardship with a smile on his face. documentary is also is a expository documentary because the main person is being exposed of his life story. The documentary is also a observatory because we also have quick experience of his day in his life. 

My Documentary Idea

For my documentary i have thought through a lot of options on how i want to make my documentary and what i should talk about within my documentary and i have come up with the idea of making a documentary within school and the hidden truth on why in school you are peer pressured and bullied by your friends or your year group or year group above.  

within my documentary i will be discovering why students follow the so called cool crowed and how it effects their own life and how it can lead to being bullied.

i will be asking questions to students who are classed as the cool kids about what they think about peer pressure and if it happens to them and what they think of bullying. then i will ask the same questions to the kids who are outside the cool crowed and outcasted, then i will compare the results to see if there is any differences and the weak points and strong points from both sides. by doing this i will be  a strong knowledge of the opinions of the affected few from peer pressure and the views from the group who affect theses things on them.

my main goal for this documentary is to see what happens to students when being peer pressured and bullied and how it effects the person and how we can come against it and make life for students better and show children in schools how bulling affects a person and what can be the out comes of this. over all i would like to improve how children see peer pressure and show them that that its not all fun and games and then i would like by doing this decrease the levels of bullying and peer pressure within schools.

Thursday, 26 January 2012

The Different Types Of Documentaires

1.Poetic documentaries,The poetic mode moved away from continuity editing and instead organized images of the material world by means of associations and patterns, both in terms of time and space.Documentaries in the poetic mode forsake traditional  narrative content: individual characters and events remain undeveloped and appeared in these films as entities. The poetic mode of documentary film tends toward subjective interpretations of its subject. it also uses music to creat a mood. an example of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=692vC2YpRxg&feature=related

2. Expository documentaries, is speaking directly to the viewer, often in the form of an authoritative commentary employing voiceover or titles, proposing a strong argument and point of view. These films are rhetorical, and try to persuade the viewer.   
1.Arose from dissatisfaction with distracting entertainment qualities of the fiction film
2.Voice of god commentary, poetic perspectives sought to disclose information about historical world & see that world afresh, even if ideas seem romantic or didactic
3.Addresses viewer directly, w/titles or voices

4.Advances argument about historical world 
All together there is over 6 different types of documentaries, all different in there own way im going to be talking about 6 of them.


1. Poetic documentaries, a poetic documentarie has subjective interpretations of its subject within a poetic documentarie it conntaines a narritaive but it has individual characters and events but they remain undeveloped. The poetic mode usually creates a mood by using music. 

1. Does not use continuity editing, sacrifices sense of the very specific location and place that continuity creates
2. Explores associations and patterns that involve temporal rhythms and spatial juxtapositions 
3. Social Actors rarely become fully-fledged characters
4. Opens up possibility of alternative forms of knowledge to
5. It takes shape around commentary directed toward the viewer; images illustrate  the verbal commentary builds sense of dramatic involvement around need for solution to a problem.
6. Nonsynchronous sound prevails (historical circumstances)

7. Editing generally establishes/maintains rhetorical continuity more than spatial/temporal
an exampe of this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRlrGxUqluI

3. Observational documentaries, attempt to simply and spontaneously observe lived life with a minimum of intervention Often, this mode of film eschewed voice-over commentary, post-synchronized dialogue and music, or re-enactments. The films aimed for immediacy, intimacy, and revelation of individual human character in ordinary life situations.

1. Arose from available lightweight portable synchronous recordin equipment & dissatisfaction with moralizing quality of expository documentary.
2. It allowed filmmaker to record unobtrusively what folks did when not explicitly addressing the camera.
3. It stresses the nonintervention of filmmaker
4. Filmmaker cedes control of events more than any other mode.
5. Editing doesnít construct time frame or rhythm, but enhances impression of lived or real time.
6. This mode limited filmmaker to present moment and required disciplined detachment from events themselves.
7. It uses indirect address, speech overheard, synchronous sound, relatively long takes.
8. Its sense of observation comes from 

a. Ability of filmmaker to include representative & revealing moments b. Sounds and images recorded at moment of observational filming in contrast to voice-over of expository mode c. Illustrations do not serve generalizations but a specific slide of reality. d. Presence of camera on scene
  a negative of this is that it lacks historical context 
an example of this is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kckoh4VGc9w

4. Participatory documentaries, believe that it is impossible for the act of filmmaking to not influence or alter the events being filmed. What these films do is emulate the approach of the anthropologist: participant-observation. Not only is the filmmaker part of the film, we also get a sense of how situations in the film are affected or altered by her presence.  The encounter between filmmaker and subject becomes a critical element of the film.
an example of this is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcE3ZGreltQ

5. Reflexive documentaries, don’t see themselves as a transparent window on the world; instead they draw attention to their own constructedness, and the fact that they are representations. How does the world get represented by documentary films? It is the most self-conscious of all the modes.The reflexive mode considers the quality of documentary itself, de-mystifying its processes and considering its implications.
1.    Arose form desire to make the conventions of representation themselves more apparent & to challenge the impression of reality which other three modes normally conveyed unproblematically. 
2.     It is the most self-aware mode - its reflexivity makes audience aware of how other modes claim to cosntruct "truth" through documentary practice.
3.     It uses many of devices of other modes but sets them on edge so viewer attends to device as well as the effect. 
4. It tears away veil of filmmakers illusory absence 
5. Becomes technologically viable in 50s  with emergence of portable synchronous sound equipment makes interaction more feasible 
 NEGATIVE: TOO ABSTRACT, LOSES SIGHT OF ACTUAL ISSUES
an example of this is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBsL2nBuJCk

6. Performative documentaries,stress subjective experience and emotional response to the world. They are strongly personal, unconventional, perhaps poetic and/or experimental, and might include hypothetical enactments of events designed to make us experience what it might be like for us to possess a certain specific perspective on the world that is not our own, Often, a battery of techniques, many borrowed from fiction or avant-garde films, are used. Performative docs often link up personal accounts or experiences with larger political or historical realities
. Like Reflexive Documentary, it raises questions about knowledge
2. Endorses definition of knowledge that emphasizes personal experience (in tradition of poetry, literature)

3. Tries to demonstrate how understanding such personal knowledge can help us understand more general processes of society
4. May "mix" elements of various documentary modes to achieve link between subjective knowledge/understanding of the world, and more general understandings, i.e. historical ones.
an example of this is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATYJx3x0nyo

http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/2006/12/six-types-of-documentary.html