Conventions of a Music Documentry

A music documentary is either used for one of two things to promote the band or artist, or to tell the story of that band or artist, whether they have died or are still alive. This is something we need to decide in, whether we are going to try and use our documentary to promote our band or tell a story.
Some documentaries such as Ray, actors are used to play the parts of the artists. These documentaries are usually telling a store of someone who has died or is very old. So in this example Jamie Foxx played Ray Charles.

This image is of the film poster for Ray. It is in monochrome because of the time ears everything was set in, things on the tv and in films were only viewed in monochrome, unless you went to see the artist live. This is the typical documentary which is telling a story, about an iconic artist of the past.

Another way of telling a story would be to have the artist or band telling their story, about something that happened to them in the past, or the thing that changed them. These are usually set like an interview, with clips from the past. A typical example of this is 'This is it' This is the documentary about Micheal Jackson. Even though Micheal Jackson has died, there are interviews about him, and his lifestyle, and there are also clips from when he was alive, and performing. This type of documentary can be used both with actors of the real people telling the story. In the case of Micheal Jacksons documentary, its the real people who are documenting his life. There are also shots of him in it before he died.

This is the film poster fir Micheal Jackson's 'This Is It'. Straight away the viewer can see that this is Micheal Jackson, because of his iconic stance, and his outfit. Even though we can only see his silhouette the audience know straight away that it is Micheal Jackson. Both Alex and I love the effect of just having a silhouette and leaving part of it a mystery. We would like to do something like this in our filming part of our work, or the still parts of our work.

For our film trailer we are looking ad doing a mix of both of these typical types of genre for a music documentary. We are wanting to have parts of our trailer acted but some parts real, using the real band. By doing this we both feel that it will give it a very unconventional feel, and something we are aiming for.

If our film were to be produced we would like companies such as 'Warp Films' or 'Film four Productions'. This is because they both produce productions such as 'This is England' and 'Four Lions'. They are both an 'indie' type of genre, something that we are going for. These films are also done on a low budget, evidently not as low as ours but still low for the film industry. The reason we would like one of this to produce our film and not a big publishing house such as 'Time Warner' because houses such as these don't take a risk on indie films. Our trailer and film will be a risk because it is unconventional, but that is what we most like about our films.