Adam Pelling-Deeves: Video Production, Oxford – Corporate & Creative

Posted on March 21st, 2019 by Adam Pelling-Deeves

I’m slowly working my way through Candice Breitz’s interviews on Vimeo.

They’re recorded for installations but they work really well as stand-alone stories. There are conventions and trends in documentary film that are often over-used to the point of patronising the audience. Such as the use of maps whenever a location is mentioned, archive footage whenever the past is mentioned, facts and stats on screen without any time or expanding to absorb their significance, and mood music. The audience should decide when something is funny or sad and really don’t need a style of music to tell them *how* those moments are funny or sad. However, the device that grates on me the most is additional sound effects such as a dog barking in a night scene or a car horn as someone crosses a road to make a moment more mysterious or exciting. The use of any of these conventions can suggests a mistrust in the content and the audience — that these tricks are needed to hold an audience’s attention. These interviews prove that a subject with a strong story can be enough.

It’s also nice to hear stories such as these directly, rather than through the voice of a journalist.

Here are a couple of the shorter ones as an introduction:

TRAILER: Sarah Mardini from the Love Story collection

Zoe from the ‘TLDR,’ collection

Also, if you enjoy documentary films, Field of Vision are making some great shorts at the moment from all kinds of interesting perspectives.

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