Documentary: Critical Review of "Michael Moore - Bowling for Columbine"

I was initially shown this documentary as an example of "good practice" in making a documentary but I personally did not like certain aspects of it. The coverage of the story and interviews were all very compelling and interesting as well as thought provocing, especially the interview with one of the creators of South Park, which made it seem more real to me as I connected with him as I like his work. The way the story was told was very effective and I came away both interested and well informed but the part that ruined the documentary for me was when he started looking for people to blame. Michael Moore decided to quiz people about why they own and gun in america and why Wall Mart thinks it is okay to sell weapons. This is something I agree with him about but the way that people in the film were having to take the blame, such as the person that simply worked at Wall Mart was very harsh and not very sympathetic of the film maker, it felt biased. When he went into a Politicians house and quizzed him about why he thinks guns should be legalised I did honestly disagree with what the Politician was saying but the whole time I felt like Michael Moore was trying to lay blame on the man and this was unjust. Saying that I did like the part with Marilyn Manson as Michael Moore highlighted the fact that legalised weapons are much more likely the cause of children doing such things than listening to a song and using this celebrity was a very good choice as he is very striking to look at but spoke a lot of sense in the interview, it was almost off putting how strange he looked but how much sense he spoke. Overall I thought the documentary highlighted some important issues and on the whole I agreed with everything that was said but I found it hard to really engage because I could not help but feel that Micheal Moore was trying to sway my opinion, even thought it did not need to be swayed.

Documentary: Critical Review of "Pride and Prejudiced"

This in depth documentary was showing the lifes of two opposing leaders of 1. A Political movement called the EDL (English Defence League) and 2. A Muslim activist group, which was considered to have extremist views (The name had to be changed quite often as it was being made illegal to be part of the organisation under the names they were using) The documentary showed their views and how they went about preaching their message to the people. I thought that the way the documentary gave each person equal opportunities to share their views and did not hide away anything that either person had done was very important and without doing this the documentary would have been very biased. That being said I do believe that the leader of the EDL had more of a chance to say what he wanted but I cannot be sure if it is simply because he had more time to be on camera as it followed him on his rallies around the country. Although this could just be because he is more active and less repetetive in what he does. The fact that the documentary was not afraid to show things happening that where illegal stood out to me as I did not think that they would be allowed to show such things so I thought that was a brave decision and I approved of this. The use of cutting away to seemingly level headed people was quite good because it was nice to get a level headed and thoughtful view on the situation rather than just being bombarded by everything that the two main focuses of the documentary had to say as it became tiresome seeing them repeat the same problems and policies over and over again.

Documentary: Camera (my role)

As the cameraman I am working mostly with Aaron, the director. He has a sort of visual style that he wants from this documentary and that includes finding the best spots in Liverpool to do time-lapse footage showing the busy modern side of Liverpool and then close up and interesting shots of the old derelict places that have been forgotten. We will be using the Canon 550D and an XM2 as well as a Canon 500D for stills and combining all of the footage/stills so that we can get a wide variety as possible. Also with all of the cameras being Canon it means that the lenses are interchangable as I only have one lens for my Canon 550D and being able to use other lenses means that a wider variety of shots are made possible. The visuals in this film will be very important because being able to use the shots to show what the interviewee is talking about will be very important to how well the audience can connect with it.

Documentary

I will be operating the camera on this Documentary and by the time I joined the group Rob and Aaron already had decided on something they were set on doing. The idea is to film quite run down and derelict parts of Liverpool and show that even though they are forgotten by most certain places can still mean something to you. The places will be carefully selected and will show a different side to Liverpool which has become a quite modern and renovated city recently. The main focus will be some strange tunnels underneath Liverpool, which are now forgotten and overgrown. The Strawberry Fields gate/shrine to the Beatles, which is an interesting place to see and obviously has a lot of history. We will also look at a school adjacent to the gate which was closed down and has now become derelics as it epitomises what the documentary is showing. The final thing we will show is the Gormley sculpture art on the Beach with 100 Iron men all looking out to sea made from casts of the artist himself. Over the footage will be sound from interviews with people that care about the places and have spoken to Rob already and suggested these places for him to look at. We will also get interviews with people on the locations if it is possible. I think this will mean that the interviews will not take away from the importance of the places they are about by not directing the audiences attention from looking at the place in question.