The 9/11 faker
The documentary I will be analysing is called ‘The 9/11 faker’ which looks at a person who
‘faked’ being a survivor of 9/11 and exposes her to the audience. The mode of this
documentary is The Perfomative Mode which reviews the emotional and subjective aspects
of the documentary, presents the ideas of the context, different views and meaning to
different people, Usually autobiography nature, contemporary mode .
Mise en scene
This print screen is showing an
interview with a woman speaking about her views on the topic at hand. The mise en scene
aspects are those of a typical and good documentary. The lighting in the majority of the
room is rather dark but then the light focuses on the interviewee, this focuses the attention
on the interviewee for the audience.
The location and setting where the interviewee is situated seems to be in a library which
sets a formal view for the audience, meaning that this is a serious documentary.
The props used are just a lamp (which lights up the room) and the books within the library;
this again suggests a formal atmosphere for the audience and does suggest that this woman
may be quite intellectual.
The costume the woman is wearing suggests that she is a very smart and sophisticated
woman which ties in with the topic of the documentary. The shirt suggests that she may be
a business woman but the fact that she has rolled up her sleeves a little bit suggests that she
is a little bit ‘laid back’ at that point in time.
Billy Camden
Title of the documentary
The way they introduced the title of
the documentary was by using a
shot of whom the documentary was about and put the title over it. This shows the audience
who the documentary is about and what the documentary is about.
Titles of interviewee’s
This interview is good evidence of introducing the interviewee with a title, the persons
name appears in the same shot that she is speaking, this clearly indicates who she is to the
audience. Underneath her name is a title of who she is, in this case she is a 9/11 survivor,
again this is clearly indicated and is something we will put to use in our own documentary.
Billy Camden
Framing the image
This is a good and clear indication of how to frame an interview in terms of cinematography
and what shots to use and the positioning of the camera. Here, the cameraman has
positioned the camera to be a medium close up of the interviewee keeping the camera at an
eye-level angle. The medium close up shows the middle half of the man’s body upwards,
which shows his face and costume which are the parts the audience will see. The head room
is also very important; as you can see the camera is positioned to get the whole of the man’s
head in the shot but then allows very little room above his head. There is also a greater
amount of room to the man’s right, this is because of his body position and so allows the
camera to show all of his body position. There is also a lot of room left so that the audience
can see the setting/location where there the interviewee is situated, in this case it shows an
empty office block, which represents the man to be smart and intellectual. They also choose
to construct the interview here because it is a place with very little noise and distractions so
that the interview can run smoothly. All of these aspects of how to frame and interview will
be taken into account by us and put to good use in our documentary.
Billy Camden
Still shot cut away
Within the documentary there are a
number of cut away shots, these shots can be taken from video footage or still images. In
this cut away, this image is a still image taken at the scene of 9/11, the documentary
producers use these shots to show the audience of events that occurred during 9/11, they
showed this image because the narrator was talking about the survivors of the attack, this
allows the audience to see what the narrator is talking about through images. This is a good
idea for cut away shots and will be used by us through our own documentary.
Extreme long shot cut away
Another good cut away shot that I
noticed being used within the documentary was extreme long shots showing the area of
what the documentary was focusing on, in this documentary the focus was on New York, so
the producers included a long shot of the city. This gives a good and different view of the
city and allows the audience to look at it from a different perspective.
Billy Camden
Live footage cut away
These are other examples of cut away shots used by the producers. These cut away shots
show real life footage of the day 9/11 and shows what happened. This allows the audience
to understand in more depth what happened that day and allows emotion to run through
the documentary. Using this footage is a really good idea and we will try to implement these
types of cut away shots in our documentary.
Pedestrian cut away
Here is another example of cut
away shots, this one in particular is a very common shot used in many documentaries. It
shows pedestrians walking around the street, this may connote that people are involved in
the topic at hand but mainly it is good to break up the documentary and allow it to move
onto other areas surrounding the documentary.
Billy Camden
Angles of an interview
This shot of the interviewee gives
the audience the chance to just focus on him and look and identify who he is. It also enables
more shots to be used and just basically gives another angle for the audience to view the
interview from.
Editing
The editing techniques used in this documentary
seem pretty standard, with mainly shots cutting between on an other from simple cuts,
dissolves and fades.
Billy Camden
Editing
This piece of editing shows a room where the 9/11 survivors met to speak about their
experiences, the editor shows the room to be empty and very gloom. This represents the
room to be a sad and dark place and whoever used it was quite depressed. This piece of
editing just represents how important editing is to a documentary as it can connote so many
different meanings to the audience.
Sound – Narration (Voice over)
The narration of the documentary is very important as it is the main part of the
documentary that feeds information to the audience. The voice must be very clear and
coherent for the audience and must have a very monotone pitch so that the audience does
not get distracted. In this documentary the way in which the narrator speaks and uses
language is more informal than formal, this is so the audience can feel comfortable when
watching the documentary but allows them to be aware that the topic is a very serious
matter.
Billy Camden