DEMAGOGUES, DOUBTERS AND DOUCHEBAGS [2020]

In what ways can we experiment with documentary convention and use the voice-over as something more than a purely functional tool?

Assignment 2: Humpty Dumpty

The Task

Take a 1-2 minute section from any film that one of you analysed in Assignment 1. It must be a section that includes significant amounts of voice-over. Remove the images, but keep the soundtrack.

Your task is to produce a new sequence of images for the pre-existing soundtrack/voice-over.

Have fun with this, and try not to treat the words too literally.

We are trying to find new meanings, not to recreate the previous film.


For Covid-19

An experimental exercise, by Anhar Al-Shameri, Jana Politis and Emma Welsh.

By joining two completely unrelated entities, we explored the relationship between sound and image. Our goal being to create a new shared meaning.

To achieve this, we combined archival footage, with the voice-over from the feature documentary For Sama, which offers a glimpse into war-torn Syria; The result, a film about the current global pandemic, COVID_19, and its impact on people’s lives.

 


MARTEN NEEDS A MOUSE

By Jarvis Ho and Martin Ho

Here our group re contextualised narration by David Attenborough to fit a Mockumentary style. We used popular tropes from the nature documentary genre to create the illusion of a “serious” film while still being playful in context.

 


Colobus

By Natalie Campbell

This film is a hybrid born from combining the voice-over from a documentary and visuals from a children’s picture-story book. By adding a lively soundscape and a page turning mechanism, the editing phase of this project has brought a new lively audio book to life. The voice-over comes from Terra (2015) and explains the first time mankind encountered wild animals. However the narrator embodies all of humanity and so her words actually describe the first time she personally saw a monkey, Colobus. I adapted this scenario to be about a girl in a toy shop, re-contextualising the original story by embedding the words in a new visual world.

 


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By Leah Oliveria

For this piece, I’ve re-contextualised an interview with Nina Simone, experimenting with animals in captivity if they were interviewed. I’m going to say that this piece is unethical & I regret choosing the audio I did, especially considering who Nina Simone and her story is and  this work is not intended to diminish that.

 


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By Jade Coyle, Ria Pflaum and Hayley Hu
A film that uses Morgan Freeman’s narration about the sacrifice and beliefs of the Aztecs applied to news footage of the virus of 2020.


The Creative Brain

by Henry Roach

This film was an experiment to take the audio from a Documentary about creativity, The creative Brain by David Eagleman. I used the audio and created a sequence using stop animation. This was an experiment to transform the original sequence into a film that focused more heavily on the creative process itself.


Prison Animals

by Morgan Reinwald

Prison Animals is a short film that borrows an excerpt from the narration in The Game Changersdocumentary. This film explores vegan athletes, and uses a sequence where conservationist David Mander talks about Rhino poaching. This voice-over was employed in conjunction with found footage from Dwayne Johnson movies to create something completely dissimilar.

 


 

Liam Ward • 26/05/2020


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