Major Project: Research-Senna

Major Project: Research-Senna

As part of my ongoing research for this documentary, the next documentary I looked in to was the early 2000's film "Senna".

This was a film that Alex felt had particular relevance to our's and was keen for me to watch. Below are the personal notes I made after watching it through.

• It isn’t immediately clear what the subject matter of the documentary is. It seems to start off talking about one topic, before divulging into a different area within that topic.

• It isn’t immediately clear exactly who are contributors are (they aren’t given many contexts). We don't quite understand what purpose they serve in the narrative or even what they do.

• The documentary begins with the presenter talking about their memories of the subject matter (vaguely), something I'd be keen to replicate in our film.

• Good use of stock footage, especially early on to get us interested in the topic. This is a point I have raised before for its effectiveness in the narrative.

• Good use of soundtrack at the start of the documentary. Sound design should never be underestimated and music is a great way to maintain a pace.

• Poor camera angles. Clearly, not much attention was paid to the cinematography in parts of this film.

• Cutting between different contributors throughout the documentary helps get different perspectives (good use of storytelling).

• Moments of comedy and sadness that help us connect to the story. By having an audience feel a range of emotions they become more engaged with our story and contributors.

• Instantly cutting the music/sound from clips instead of gently fading them out completely ruins any atmosphere they had built up.

• We feel both attached and detached from the story at the same time. We want to care about the subject matter, but not enough is done to keep our attachments.

• Fairly decent narrative structure, it asks questions early on and does an ok job of answering them as we go.

• There’s only one camera angle that ever gets used, this combined with the lack of cutaways makes interviews feel very stale.

• The documentary was very stylistic and of its era.

Closing Thoughts

• The documentary tells a very straight forward story about the life of a racing driver.
• We feel emotionally connected to the documentary and its characters occasionally, but not often.
• It doesn’t do enough to hold our attention.
• It was good to look at for research, but there is very little we can take from this. Certainly not as much as Alex indicated.

Overall Relevance Score 4/10