Documentary

This documentary is the first part of 3 in an insight into Colditz. This episode focuses on interviewing the surving veterans (former prisoners of war) and sharing their memories. It uses a distinctive voice of god narrative to lead the audience through context and explanations, this voice is mysterious and always has special effects visuals playing to explain/present what is being said so that it is more entertaining and engaging to the audience.

Almost immediately after the voice of god narrative has finished the first interview starts without the footage, only the audio is heard over the visual animation of archived footage from the war. The war veteran being interviewed then revealed and uses the rule of thirds (as shown in the image to the left) yet the questions are never heard. As he speaks about how the idea of escape was inspired by strong snowy winds seen outside a window the shot cuts to the very same animation to create the imagery for the audience to view with a narrative.

Michael Moore is no stranger to making political statements by any means, with 9 films and 7 books which are all politically motivated the latest installment wasn't anything different. 

We see him on screen taking part in the documentary and investigating/interviewing which would be classed as participatory but he also deploys the voice of god techique whilst explaining the history of capitalism with the use of old achived footage from the same era. The archived footage is also used to juxtapose what he is saying, for instance, when he speaks of the good things capitalism promised the people within the footage are smiling and happy whereas Moore's sarcastic tone mocks this.

 He uses the roll on, roll off technique for narrating his actions, the main use of this is when Moore wraps yellow police tape around banks in the middle of the busy city center. This gives the viewer an entertaining and comedic value to the satirical style in which Moore is known for.

 Near the start of the documentary a preview of what is to come is shown using the some of the most important quotes but without the context of the backstory of the conversation/interview. Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren is shown in a snippet being clueless as to where american's tax money which bailed out the (by banks such as Goldman Sachs who supposedly twisted the governments arm into rewritting the bail out in order to suit the them) has gone, this snippet of a authorative figure in a moment of disbelief and confusion is enticing and he used as a teaser to keep the audience excited for what is yet to come in the documentary.

In order to let the viewers handle all of the information that is given and also react to certain aspects of the documentary breathing space is used so that the audience can reflect on what is being said. This is used alot after Moore is documenting civillians who are hard hit by the side effects of capitalism as it gives the viewer time to fully engage with the emotions of the civillians and feel empathy and/or sympathy as the problems brought up are unfortunately universally common globally in some way, therefore adding a personal moment which evokes emotion into the viewer leaving him/her susceptable to beleive the facts/opinions/arguments being given.

An interactive  documentary? New era perhaps? The thought of having a documentary which you participate in almost indirectly involves you with the journey of the documentary itself, if you have the choice of path, that is. I thought I'd review a new format rather than a singular documentary in order to research a new method of production and narrative.

Here we see a form of narrative technique that is in it's early stages of development, especially for documentaries. One of the main issues with making a documentary interactive is the fact that you can't really have a choice of non-fiction/facts within a documentary as such, only opinions can lead to choices.

The the two documentaries on this '3D Interactive Documentary Explorer'  don't really give a fluid experience in my opinion, each chapter has different tabs to the side of the player but in order to view them the video is paused, which means I could just as easily paused the video and searched for a specific answer myself rather than having to search through tabs of general information about the topic of that minute.

The 3D aspect acts like more of a picture viewer than 3D as nothing about the documentary is 3D, only the 'Explore' function show pages in 2D's interpretation of 3D.