'Getting Up' Analysis

The title screen, showing the urban environment it's about

 This documentary seems to share a lot of the aspects that Noah wanted as director from our project when we first started discussing how it's going to look and be put together. The main aspect that we wanted to copy was the kinetic and energetic 'urban' style. Right from the outset of the doc there is street music playing, quick cuts, handheld shots and everything else to immediately establish its self as an urban film.

The use of night time footage used in the film to highlight the secret
rebellious side to it

As you can see from the photos below I timed the amount of time that the interviewees were actually on screen to get an idea of how long to hold our until we use cutaways to break it up. The average screen time was actually much lower than I expected, the talking heads of the people interviewed were only on for on average about 5 secs before it cut to montage. The interview clips themselves averaged out at about 16 secs until they cut to the next one.

People with faces covered to cover identity shows respect
for the interviewees

The way they used the cut up interviews to create a narrative and a full story of the graffiti scene in their location, which interestingly was never actually said specifically, I think it is meant to represent the graffiti culture in general. But nonetheless expressing the story through all the different interviews chopped and changed is something we will definitely be using in our film, and you can see how it is used well in this doc, we get a rounded view of everything from a select group of people and it never sticks on one person too long to get boring.

Colourful use of the interviewed artists actual work to help
advertise them as well as have them help the doc.

This kind of style of story telling is I think the one I'll use for our film, fairly quick cuts from one person to another so that you get people talking about the same point and supporting each other. I think this will give a much more rounded view to the doc and not seem like it's just one person being positive about the subject.

The name bar follows the same theme as the title page to
give the doc visual symmetry throughout.

It is also helped by the fact it has a lot of very interesting characters that are extremely charismatic and passionate about graffiti. This is something essential I think with both this documentary and documentaries in general, and is something we have for our film. The use of them all here and how they keep the doc engaging has emphasised to me that I'll have to exploit the characters we have in our film to get the most response and engagement from the audience.

Features footage of actual graffiti being done
on the streets

The balance of still photos to actual moving shots is good and the editing of the stills is still very energetic so they feel like they have movement to them. This is very much something I'll need to teach myself to do in our documentary, because using photos to good effect is something key to documentaries in my eyes and something I want to utilise in our film.

This shot with the harsh shadow feels almost like
a portrait of the graffiti artist in his natural area.

I don't personally like how it cuts to a quote on the over contrast before they begin to talk about the quote that has just been put up. I feel slightly like it was the best way they could come up with showing people what they're going to be talking about without using a voice-over. It works in the way that it would be a lot worse with v/o and it does help explain what they'll be talking about next, but I still find it breaks up the flow of the film a bit too much.

An example of the visual symmetry being used to effect and the
use of quotes to guide the viewer.

The rough length of clips if interviews, for
a section of the film

The notes I took watching the film

Amount of time talking heads are on screen on average,
again for a section of the film

*Despite looking I could not find the name of the director to give credit to him/her but it was uploaded by Ink & Instinct to Vimeo at the address:  http://vimeo.com/11392175