Comparisons of Good and Bad documentary styles!

In order to make my own short documentary successful, it was necessary to look into other attempts at documentary, good and bad. Searching youtube for interview style rockumenaries, i found a vast difference between the interesting and captivating, and the boring and down right depressing.

Firstly when searching for the bad, i came across this, a very blunt and rather scary view of Kurt Cobain and his band Nirvana:

When deconstucting this clip, you can break down exactly where this documentary goes wrong…

Genre: The clip attempts to come across as a serious Rock Documentary. However, it is a very poor example of this. As can be seen, this film is simply a fanatical rant against Kurt Cobain and his supposedly satanic lifestyle. There is no balance to the film; just a biased, one sided viewpoint. There has been no attempt to celebrate any part of his life and musical influence making it just a hate video, rather than an informative and interesting documentary.

Locations: The entire documentary is filmed at the one live performance ; there is no variety to keep the viewer interested. This seems a very lazy and an easy way to make a documentary.

 Cinematography: The cinematography used to capture the concert is very good. There is good use of close-ups, two shots and long –shots to capture the feel of the live performance.

 Sound: One song is played throughout the whole of the documentary supplying no variation for the viewer. This teamed with the over exaggerating and negative voice-over makes an overall unpleasant  mix of sound and explanation.

Narrative:  The clip itself doesn’t tell any story at all, it is just a clip of a concert. The narration however, is simply a negative speech against Cobain and his lifestyle.

Editing:  The  footage of the concert is fine editorially. The sound continuity of the concert is also good. However, as the film does not explore away from the concert, there are no advanced editorial techniques.

…In  contrast to the last documentary clip, when in search for a good example of what i wanted to portray, i stumbled across this beauty summarising Marc Bolan’s life and his time in T.Rex:

When desconstructing this, its easy to pin-point where it goes right…

Genre:  An excellent example of work for this genre. The documentary combines both positive and negative recollections of the subject, Marc Bolan. There  are plenty of clips of the subject’s work together with interviews. Together  these combine to give a fuller picture of Marc Bolan.

Locations:   The film has a variety of locations in it which prevent boredom in the viewer. The interviews are a mixture of studio and home based and the film is interspersed with footage of Marc from different times in his life and career.

Cinematography:   Both the footage of Marc  in concert  and the interviews include a wide range of cinematographic  techniques. The concert footage  contains the kind of shots one would expect; extreme close ups, long shots and two shots. The interviews specialise in close ups and big close ups as would be expected  when filming one subject.

 Narrative:  There is no narrator  to the documentary . Instead the film maker relies on the use of interviews, clips and old photographs to tell Marc’s story. This gives the narrative authenticity as only the people who new Marc personally  are relating the events.

Sound:   It is mostly spoken dialogue and live music footage, with non-diagetic sound at some points where the interviewees cannot hear the music. •Editing:  The clip is edited very well, with a series of different transitions of images, from clips, to photographs, to images. Nothing is left on screen for too long, so the audience never gets bored.

Viewing the contrast between how right and how wrong my own documentary could go when adapting this style, i now feel more confident that i will make the right choices when making my own film.