FAT U A L

POSTMODERNISM

OVERVIEW

• Documentaries are a medium in which to record, and reconstruct ‘reality’.• However, as Baudrillard suggests, as soon as

you ‘try to capture reality, you destroy it’.• This suggests that all documentary footage is in

fact a construction, and is subjective, rather than objective as the audience might think, in accordance with the directions of the director.

CONCEPT

• The idea which we had for our documentary came from a report issued by the National Obesity Forum which suggested that previous dietary advice relayed by the government was not evidenced.

• Following on from this, we thought of the idea of exploring both sides of the argument.

• This idea of challenging previously accepted advice confirms a postmodernism reading, as it represents the postmodern convention of challenging what was thought to be the truth.

• In our view, this worked well, and the controversial topic acts as a key selling point to our sophisticated, curious audience.

INTERVIEWEES• We didn’t show take a cinema-vérité approach of showing the

interviewer in any of our shots, nor include the questions being asked on screen, which gave the suggestion that our interviewees were talking freely.

• This appears to the audience to be real, as they are drawn into an everyday reality which they don’t feel the need to question.

• However, we have used our documentary as a way to encourage the two points of view about government health advice, and therefore our questions pushed our interviewee’s answers in specific directions.

• This injects a sense of inherent subjectivity as a result of our directions, making it impossible for the documentary to portray and accurate representation of the everyday.

• While this was important in order to make our documentary cinematic to suit our institutional conventions, it reduces the legitimacy of our information being conveyed.

INTERVIEWS

• Our interviews were further constructed through our use of technology.

• We used lapel mics for all of our interviews, and a shotgun mic with a dead cat on for our Vox Pops. This heightened the quality of the audio, and cancelled out background noise, which made the Vox Pops in particular quite detached from the reality.

• However, this was necessary in order to keep focus on our topic, rather than having the audience be distracted by what was going on around the interviewees.

INTERVIEWS• In addition, we used lighting equipment for all of our interviews

except the Vox Pops.• For our interviews with Renata and Dympna, we used

Patterson lights with a Soft Box. This is quite obvious in our shots, and perhaps looks a little unnatural.

• For our interview with Aseem, as we had travelled to London by train we could not take the Patterson lights and only used a reflector, which merely reflected the natural light.

• As we used the gold side of the reflector, Aseem’s face showed up with a yellow hue, which in parallel, also looked quite unnatural.

• These all contribute to the lack of realism within our production, confirming the Postmodern reading that our documentary is a construction.

EDITING• Everything in our documentary has been edited – we have edited the

clips together, edited the lighting, interviews and the audio. This would suggest that everything within the documentary is a construct, confirming a Postmodernism reading.

• In particular, we manipulated the cinematography in our editing by reversing certain clips, for instance one within Nandos in which a man can be seen to be walking backwards in the reversed clip. This again presents an unnatural image, cluing the audience into the idea of the documentary being a construct, encouraging the audience to realise that the documentary does not capture reality and is in fact a construction.

• Although this was effective in making our documentary filmic, it took away from the continuity of the editing, and the realism, perhaps distracting the audience from our topic. An active audience might make presumptions about this kind of editing – that the facts spoken within the documentary are not real either like the clip.

POSTER

• The photograph in the film poster is a representational medium, and we have carefully constructed it to convey the theme of our documentary.• The poster is probably the most cinematic/pictorial

out of our three products. We would have liked to make the radio ad and documentary follow this idea of being stylish and cinematic, however we feel that we failed to some extent in this aspect.• The poster is clearly constructed, and doesn’t

represent reality due to the depth of field and edited colours which we added saturation to.

POSTER

• However, the poster has a very concrete concept, and postmodernist posters are often much more abstract and feature interesting typography.

• The use of text on the newspaper is quite creative, and subverts the convention of newspaper headlines affirming government points of view, which confirms a postmodernism reading.

• The fact that we used a man in a suit further suggests a postmodernism reading, as it suggests a sense of construction, in having a superior convey a message to those lower down in the hegemonic institution.

RADIO AD• Again, in our radio advert, all of the people who we used for

our voiceover have a clear middle-class accent, which reiterates the idea of a construct in order to have those higher up injecting ideas to those lower down (which also confirms a Marxist reading).

• The fact that we have edited all of the clips together, and removed the background hum on the interview clips further presents the fact that the radio ad has been constructed in order to persuade our audience to watch it.

• We also recorded the main female voiceover for our radio advert on top quality microphones within a sound-proof recording booth, which presents something far detached from reality, as in reality there would have been background noise.

RADIO AD• However, to more closely adhere to a postmodernism

reading, postmodernism advertising demands that the ‘signifying no longer corresponds to the signified’, i.e. the radio ad should have been more abstract, which would have been more entertaining for our active audience.

• Our radio advert was too simplistic and to the point – to have a greater effect and to create a more interesting advert we should used more creativity and perhaps included the sound of a beating heart to reflect the effects of obesity, which would have had to be clearly constructed.

• The opening of our radio advert confirms a postmodernism reading, as the newspaper headlines being read over the top of each other created a confusing opening and immediately clue the audience in to the fact that we were questioning circulating ideologies which they have been exposed to through the Culmination theory.