Posts

Showing posts from April, 2019

Interviewing Techniques: Searching For The Sugar Man, Malik Bendjelloul's style

Whilst planning my own documentary, I have trying to pay attention to the formatting and presentation styles featured throughout documentaries that I have seen, and though there have been a number of documentaries that I have had issues with for various reasons over the years, I had never actually encountered one which I felt was hurt by its presentation. However, I finally got around to watching 'Searching for the Sugar Man'. The documentary is centred on an artist known as Sixto Rodriguez: compared to Dylan, a man who supposedly shot himself on stage, covered himself in petrol and set himself on fire, said to have overdosed in prison, wrote songs which became the anthems to anti-apartheid protests, gold record sales without so much as a penny making its way to him. And yet the documentary on all of this bored me immensely, with all of these intriguing points, the documentary makers seemed to skip over it all and focus solely on their love for the artist. Malik Bendjelloul, th

Interview Techniques

-When writing questions for a documentary it is important to consider open and closed questioning. Closed questions require simple 'yes or no' answers, these are not very good for in depth interview, though closed questions may serve to open up new topics. For interviews and documentaries, it is far better to come up with open questions, these require more thought out answers and can often lead to further questioning. - -The way in which an interview is recorded also plays a part in how effective an interview can be. For each of Louis' documentaries, he is always out on location, filming on the interviewee's turf, never at a film studio or set, it is always up to those he is interviewing as to where they film. This approach not only gives off a more casual look to the documentary, but will also add to the interviewee feeling as though they are in a comfortable space to talk/that they are in control, and as such can feel free to say what they really feel. It is this th