Inspiration for Opening sequence - Life Itself (Dir. Steve James, 2014.) and Living Like Kings (Dir.Zoe McIntosh, 2014.)

Whilst at this years Sheffield Doc/Fest, I watched Life Itself (Dir. Steve James, 2014.), a documentary on the life of Roger Ebert, and found the beginning of it to be a really interesting way of opening the story. From just showing the city scenes of a key location, the story is established by the location rather than the subject at first. I also really liked this film for the style of it's content as well as it's approach - turning a sad story into a more positive memoir and celebrating a life rather than purely focusing on the negative side to grief.
Although our film is incredibly different to this in terms of it's approach as well as type of film, I like the idea that although the story we are focusing on has the potential to be quite negative, we could experiment with instead celebrating the positive sides to the area as it stands today.

Another short documentary film I have watched recently which also follows a similar opening sequence structure is Living Like Kings (Dir. Zoe McIntosh, 2014.) which I discovered when looking through the Short of the Week website.

 

I showed this to the rest of the production group, as I thought it would make an interesting and bit of a different opening to our own film, if we included a still or long take of the Devonshire Quarter area in a similar style to the ones shown above, and would be an interesting way to establish the location of our film's story without delving straight into interviews. I also feel like this would be fitting with theme of 'community' of our film - right from opening shot.