Upon being given the documentary brief 'Liverpool Stories', I immediately set about trying to find a group whose mentality was similar to mine with the brief and creative inspiration. I ended up with a group that I had never worked with before, and the thing that we all had in common was that during the briefing session, we had all been massively inspired by one particular film. This film was called 'Pockets', by a filmmaker called James Lees.
Pockets from Pilgrim Films on Vimeo.
The thing that we all agreed on was that the poetic style of the documentary complimented the simple narrative and we felt that it worked better as a short film than a news-piece interview based documentary.
Pockets is a film that simply portraits miniature character studies based on the things that people in the street have in their pockets. We thought that this little slice of life was more poignant to us than most well-made documentary pieces and as a group we decided to follow this kind of a story with our own film. It was not only the narrative that had us gripped, the shallow focus and bright eye-catching soft cinematography as well as the slow editing pace made us look at common people in a whole different light - literally. For me, it had encouraged me to look upon all of these stories with a positive, calm and reflective state of mind, which made the film all the more charming.
As the next stage of my own personal inspiration research, I looked at other films by James Lees. One in particular jumped out at me from his collection on Vimeo. It was made as an introduction to a song for Shakira's live world tour, but again, the slice of life style and personality that shone through with the subjects in the video not only inspired me but changed my mood for several hours afterwards.
Shakira - Waka Waka (This Time for Africa) from James Lees on Vimeo.
In particular, I loved the use of paint powder and colour as well as the use of dialogue: to me it made for a visually dramatic piece despite the simple subject matter.
I set about trying to find other films with similar subject matter just to see the different ways that it could be done. This film was made by Rick Mereki as a tourist advertisement, but it demonstrated a different way of editing a documentary piece. The landscape cuts look beautiful, but if we were to use members of the public, this effect may be much more difficult to achieve; the reason that it works in this film is because it is one man featured.
MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.
Aside from short films, I recently watched a slightly darker character study on Channel 4. The Cutting Edge documentary was called 'Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder', about a Mr Walker in Surrey, who had hoarded about a million pounds worth of property that used to belong to his parents. I decided to include this in my research because of three key things: 1) It was a less positive story and there is still a possibility of finding a story that is sad or disturbing etc. 2) It is a single (rather than group) character study and 3) It was made in a more traditional documentary style. After watching this, I hope to find a more positive story that can encompass many members of the public, because I want to recreate the charm and beauty of 'Pockets' preferably.
Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder on 4OD
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