Poetic Documentary inspiration and planning

For our short poetic documentary, our intention is portray the theme of contrast between both derelict buildings and dull demolition in the city and lively, independent and bright, quirky areas of the city - where the independent businesses lie. Through doing so, we also want to evoke a sense of contrast in moods in the viewer, between positive and negative, depending on the content they are viewing. The main themes we want our film to explore are a sense of community and realisation in terms of the way that we shop on the high street in comparison to the independent shopping experience.

Research

Whilst walking around Sheffield, mostly in the city centre area I have noticed recently the amount of demolition work going on and how unappealing it is making key parts of the city appear. I took the following photos to reflect upon in group meetings and get a sense of where these buildings are and also to further research their purpose for taking place in the city:

One of our main influences for our poetic film is Blight (Dir. John Smith, 1996.), as the themes explored in the film are similar to the ones we wish to express in our film - the sense of community in the film is put across in an interesting way; through the use of repetitive key words and phrases from the people who the story affects the most - the viewer is able to pick up on the tone of the story whilst watching the demolition visually unfold. Our film could follow a similar structure, although we would like to make it different by also including background sounds repeating, such as supermarket till beeps and other everyday, high street sounds and then a busker on the Devonshire Quarter independent area of the city contrasting this alongside shots of close up details within the independent stores, ones which make them unique and appear to capture a sense of their history and uniqueness.