I decided to look at Michael Moore films for inspiration. His topics don’t particularly relate to my topic but I was interested in his style of film. I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 which examines the Bush administration’s actions during the tragic events of 9/11. I also viewed Bowling For Columbine that discusses the state of the Union and about the violence that seems to natural for Americans to participate in. Both of these films were very similar in style and showed a wide range of multimedia.
I like these films not nessecarly for the content, but more for the different forms of multimedia that was used to support Moores views. He used newspapers, videos, pictures, and text which formed his style. I really tried to pay attention of how he used all of these items together so that he would have a successful solid piece. He interviewed a lot of people but he interviewed the right people that would make the story even more interesting and relevant to his topics.
There were many techniques used in his films that are very similar to the kind of archive that I would like to put together. He used voice overs and Moores as the artist was the narrator to tell this story. He used lots of footage such as recent and black and white footage. He found material from decades ago to explain something to make people understand his ideas more. He also took the approach of using just sound to tell a story when the viewer could only see a black screen. I found that approach to be very successful because it allowed me to create a visual in my mind with the sound he was providing. I also liked how he used a newspaper format to point out his main points. He would use this text and highlight it in some form to make it stand out from the rest of the text on the screen.
Another approach that he took was using movies to prove a point or highlight and idea. I found this to be very interesting considering I started to make a list of movies that showed an actor eating based on emotions before I saw the Moore films. When I was watching his film and he highlighted other movies it made me understand the points in more clearly. Other techniques that he used were focusing in on facial expressions, using news clips, adding quotes with text and recapping the overall story in the end.
I was very pleased with watching these films because they gave me some ideas of how to showcase some of my information in an appropriate way. I am excited to take some of my videos and experiment with some of these effective techniques.
Here are some images of his style:
