All of the documentaries have a very similar concept although the people they are interviewing are completely different. In each of the documentaries the starting is the same with it opening with the person taking about their object/subject.Their name then comes up on the screen. The music is next to kick in and it's quite loud and overpowering while they object is filmed and the surrounding area. The beat is intense and nobody speaks while it is playing. The music then fades so that the audience can hardly hear it when Hunter goes back to filming the interviewee. This is important in his documentaries as it is all about the person, which is why it is about unknown people.
Each of them have their own passion.
The Toy Maker is about an old man who has had a passion for toys for a very long time, his passion is just making the toys. This shows that the man still young at heart. It is important to him that he gets to keep making these toys because of him it is an adaptation of the real world. In this documentary he is staring at the camera for a couple of seconds too long and laughing at his own joke this makes the documentary funny and lighthearted.
This in comparison to Casper Brooker - South-Bank who is young and has a passion for this place because it feels like a home to him. In both of these the people had completely different taste, yet watching it we feel the exact same emotion each time. However this documentary seems a little bit more serious with him being serious about wanting to go to this place all the time even when his friends didn't like it.
The Toy Maker and Casper Brooker both explain their
passions in similar ways, despite how different they may be.
There are a lot of positive and negative of Richard Hunter's 'Micro Docs.' The positives of them are that they are short therefore impossible to get boring because of the length of them. This is important because not everybody is going to watch a 10 minute documentary of someone they know absolutely nothing about. The length of these documentaries is also clever because it gives them enough time to switch from the conversation to the object and have enough knowledge of the object after watching the documentary. The cons of this documentary is that by watching two minutes of it, it leaves the audience wanting more, they want to find out more about these people. It is important to the audience that they find out all they can about these people and by only knowing two minutes of these peoples lives it isn't enough.
Each of the documentaries feel incredibly personal. Each of them have their own twist, although they are all very similar this is because the people in them make for it to be more interesting. The audience as a whole wants to find out more about these people. An example of just normal these people are in the Bowie documentary - Bowie the Teddy Bear stuffer the guy is just a big Bowie fan, who actually just wears a wig instead of his bald head when wanting to be like him, he also works in Build a Bear.
In real life he looks nothing like Bowie.
Although we know absolutely nothing about these people apart from what we have been told. The reason is because the people in the documentary make us interested about them, in the two minutes that we have already watched we have already learnt so much about this person but however not enough. This is a very clever skill that is used by Richard Hunter who plays the audience into thinking we know more than we actually do about the person and the situation. The reason for doing this is because for the two minutes people aren't going to get bored. The audience can also relate to this person because they see someone talking about a love & passion that they have which makes the audience think about something that they have a passion for and therefore can relate to what they are saying and the similar circumstances.
The way that each of these are shot is very important. A lot of the time the back focus is blurred, this is so that our focus is on the individual. This was what Richard Hunter is very clever at, making sure the audience isn't distracted away from what the subject matter is. Each of them have rather blank backgrounds which compliments the main focus really well. This shows the importance of the people. If this were a documentary about someone famous then the same setup would be used where the only focus is on the person. However in normal circumstances of a longer documentary of an everyday person then there wouldn't be as much focus for so long on the person as it would come across as boring.
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