LO2: Demonstrate the Creation of Meaning in Film

 The genre of my film is a documentary with the sub-genres of history/historical and motorsport. I decided to choose these sub-genres because the documentary revolves around the creation of a wheel used for motorbikes which relates to motorsport, and the invention was created in the past and therefore matches the historical genre of being set in the past. This is to engage the audiences of three separate genres history, motorsport and documentaries. It also helps my film bring in the already existing audience for the Astralite wheel based off its presence in two other programmes. This includes Silver Dream Racer and Tomorrow's World (which Tony featured on three times.) This targets the idea of global village proposed by Marshall McLuhan (1964) as the audience will span countries and generations as it is on YouTube this should hopefully promote word of mouth about my documentary and its focus the Astralite wheel and create Electric Agora online. As my film is a historical motorsport documentary the only pleasure it can target is really the intellectual puzzle (Rick Altman 1999) This is because the documentary is thought provoking by nature and should lead to people researching about the company, the wheel and Tony himself. The idea of 'intellectual puzzles' was expanded upon by adding b-roll footage and historical documentation into the film this was done to purposefully peak audience curiosity and to make them delve deeper. This is often done in other films in the genre to create further interest in the content. 

I took inspiration from two documentaries/short films one is The First Auto the other is Guy's First Triumph Ride. Both can be seen below. 

The First Auto:

In this now online YouTube documentary The First Auto the main themes are similar to those of my documentary Astralite: A History. This is because the documentary follows the course of a new invention being implemented, tested and found to be superior to other competition at the time. It is also similar as like my documentary it refers to the past throughout the majority leading up to the present day. The style of the documentary is different to mine as it uses actors and is only loosely based on the subject matter meaning it's information isn't fully factual. Meanwhile my documentary is Non-Fictional and all information and documents come from the inventor of the wheel and co-creator of the Astralite company.

Guy's First Triumph Jump:

Guy's First Triumph Ride is a factual but casual behind the scenes motorsport documentary. I want to mirror the casual atmosphere of the documentary by using natural key lighting and having the set in front of camera appear homely and warm. I also want to include footage of racing or biking in my documentary whether this is footage of the Sheffield Speedway or Isle of Man, or testing/racing with the Astralite Wheels. With the interviews with Guy Martin the camera angle is at a low angle which connotes Guy as being confident, knowledgeable and being in control; I want to use a low angle whilst filming Tony to create similar connotations. 

The genres of my film engages the audience via the subversion of expectations. Due to the genres I am following many audience members would likely speculate that like the majority of the other films in the genres they would follow the story of a racer or racing team. This is obviously not the case, instead my documentary focuses around the life of a part time racer part time business man and inventor who created a wheel for other bikers (and himself) to use. I  intend this subversion of expectations to fit into the idea of Long Tail Theory ( Chris Anderson 2006) as people will likely not view it straight away but when they do they will soon take to social media afterwards and talk about how this film isn't what you'd expect, which promotes a second later wave of viewership likely bigger than the first wave was. There is only one character presented in the film and he is Tony who is played and voiced by himself. This means that the character ideas of other genres such as those proposed by Vladimir Propp (1928) don't apply here because my story is non-fictional. 

My documentary follows a similar narrative structure to both The First Auto, and Guy's First Triumph Ride as the first thing the audience is presented with is the topic of the documentary, for The First Auto we see a picture of the motorcar, for Guy's First Triumph Ride we see the triumph bike and Guy Martin. In my documentary the audience sees the Astralite Wheels in the title card and then they see Tony appear soon after. This sets the narrative and genre for the rest of the documentary.. Tzvetan Todorov's theory of the five stages of a film are challenged in my documentary because there isn't the same simple five step structure followed. This is also the case in other slice of life or colloquial documentaries like Guy's First Triumph Ride. 

There is representation of age and of Alzheimer's in my documentary as Tony is an older man and unfortunately has Alzheimer's. Hopefully my documentary will help quash some of the negative stereotypes around people with Alzheimer's as well as raise awareness. I wanted to not address Tony's Alzheimer's on purpose to see if anyone could actually tell without being told, if not then this reinforces a effect of people only noticing a difference when told there is a difference. In terms of other varieties of diversity (such as race and gender) I made up for diversity in my stock footage by using footage of diverse crowds.