Natural history is an interesting topic to study although whatching the documentaries can be quite challenging. Today I decided to buy a piece of documentary result and as a result I have struggled to stay awake for over two hours. It is not that I do not like these documentaries and it is not that I have not slept enough but simply that by their very nature early documentaries make staying awake a challenge.
richard - Apr 5, 2007
I’m not exploring the notion of art so much as that of the documenting of ordinary live by ordinary people. I didn’t mention Engel because I don’t know much about his work and theories yet.
Is it Art if it’s banal? If everyone but the filmmaker falls asleep when watching the film, isn’t it just glorified vacation pictures? You forgot Engel in the US.
How many of you have a digital photo camera and how many of you have uploaded pictures you’ve taken to the web? How many of you have browsed through thousand of stranger’s photographs? I was in a lecture a few days ago and we were discussing jennycam and how it was something new, something that would lead to BigBrother. Apparently she was creating something new, something that had never thought of before.
The Planet Earth and Blue Planet documentaries have some amazing footage and some great sights. One of those greats sights is that which starts with birds sitting in the middle of the ocean because the wind is too weak for them to glide. You see the superpod of dolphins and a cluster of those dolphins leave to hunt. The wind picks up and the birds begin to fly. As they fly we see the dolphins get closer to their quarry.
Whilst doing my work last week in Geneva I was told that I had to include footage from the Film “Henry Dunant - Du Rouge sur la croix”. I didn’t get to watch the film until today but I enjoyed it. it’s an interesting film for anyone who has been brought up in Geneva to watch. There are two cities in the World that have the United Nations, New York in the US and Geneva in Switzerland.
I am greartly pained and sadened to see that Al Gore won the oscar for best documentary for “An Inconvenient truth”. I find that this is absolute lunacy and there is reasoning behind this statement. In the United Kingdom you’ve got the British Broadcasting Corporation working on some beautiful documentary. Just look at Deep Blue, The Blue Planet and more recently the Planet Earth Series. Those are beautiful documentaries showing the world in such a good light.
I went for a meeting today and the documentary idea is far clearer now than before. Thanks to the help of the tutor I’ve got a far more focused way of looking at the question I wanted to ask. I still need to write a third draft of the proposal and get it approved. In the meantime I can already start writing the introduction to the dissertation explaining the context and setting the scene for the remainder of the document.
It’s fun to watch documentaries when you know that they spent at least two to three years in the making. I like the documentary because it’s an opera rather than a documentary. There is a minimum of comment and a maximum of shots. There are some sequences where you see things happening in front of the camera and it switches to a second camera. That’s because for sequences like the penguins jumping out of the water they filmed it with one film camera and one pole.
Student unions are one of the best places to meet people and make new contacts. It’s a place where drinks are cheap and normal rules no longer apply. At least that’s what they’d have you believe. The undercroft is one of the worst student bars in the United Kingdom for a number of reasons, firstly the prices, highest in the UK, secondly the location, a basement with rats scurrying about. thirdly poor management, the reason for which many of the staff quit the job.
Yesterday sound was added to the multicamera in order to add more depth and it’s almost ready. there’s a little fine-tuning left before it’s ready for release. I’m not sure about the documentary because I took a break from it last night. Two days till the deadline.