Documentary Research

The documentary we are going to make is a group project, and once we had decided our theme was going to be the Changing of Christmas I began to do some research on a large variety of Christmas short films and documentaries.

One I looked at took a very comedic approach to Christmas, and is made in a single room with just two characters. It's about two coworkers forced to stay behind and wrap all the presents on a list before they're allowed to leave. Everyone else has gone to a work party.

This could have been quite a boring scene due to the lack of other interaction, however the director and writer Vick Krishna ensured that the plot was interesting enough to keep people watching.

The film uses a wide shot of the two men sitting at the table to set the scene, and the director has cleverly divided the two halves of the shot.

I really like how the set design has foreshadowed the the split between the two men, with the right had side character wearing a red jumper, and all of the props on that side of the screen being red such as the wrapped presents leaning against the wall and the Christmas tree decorations, and then on the left, the man is wearing a green jumpers and the presents on that side are green and so are the decorations on the tree. I think this is a really nice contrast.

Another short film I looked at was 'The Night Before Christmas,' about a homeless man breaking into a families house the night before Christmas to steal presents. 

The film has an interesting plot twist that I really liked, where instead of showing a load of aftermath with the family after the homeless man stole from them, it follows the homeless man as he runs away, and meets his wife/girlfriend and their child in a make-shift home in the snow, and gives her a cookie that he stole from the house. I thought this was a really nice change to the usual way of demonising homeless thieves etc, and showed a more human side and how they're not so different than our own families. 

I also loved the cinematography in the film. There were some really beautiful shot of the Christmas lights in the house at the start, and the snow outside, drifting down onto the tent/shack that the homeless family are sleeping in.

The lighting is warm and cozy in the house, contrasting with the cold greys and whites of the outside, representing the collision of the two families very different worlds.

A documentary we all looked at was 'Folded' about a woman looking for a man she once loved. This is not a Christmas film but we took a lot of inspiration from the filming techniques used in the piece. 

We found the transitions really interesting and engaging and really liked how the filmmakers showed the progression of the story with their footage.

Another documentary that we looked at was a short film called 'City Lights' by a filmmaker called Colin Rich. We took inspiration from this for our timelapse and also for our music. We also found the lights in his film really beautiful and wanted to try to capture that when we were filming the Christmas lights around where we were filming.