When my group and I started to seriously think about the title and style of our documentary, we decided to look at current documentaries in order to develop an understanding of their conventions and editing style. After researching into several music documentaries, such as Katy Perry's 'Part of Me' and Justin Bieber's 'Never Say Never', we concluded that Taylor Swift's, 'Journey to Fearless' would be an appropriate source of inspiration. This was not only because our actress for Drew is a huge fan of Taylor Swift's music, but because we thought the country singer style would suit Drew's character. This then led us on to designing our project's title, 'my short rise to fame', which we came up with as we wanted our video to tell the story of how Drew Taylor rose to fame.
After watching Taylor Swift's 'Journey To Fearless', my group and I highlighted key documentary conventions that we wanted to adhere to in our own production. Similarly to the opening of Taylor Swift's documentary, we wanted to create an exposition at the start of Drew Taylor's 'Short Rise to Fame' in order to create a first impression and to introduce the audience to the documentary's subject manner. As our documentary is based on a ficticious pop singer, we have only managed to accumulate one piece of achival footage of Drew Taylor as a young girl, as well as forging a shot of Drew Taylor playing at a concert (we filmed Gemma playing her guitar on the stage in the school hall).
In-depth Analysis of Taylor Swift's 'Journey To Fearless' Documentary
Taylor Swift's, 'Journey To Fearless' is a fast paced documentary that explains how she managed to secure a record deal and become so famous. It starts with a silhouette of Taylor holding her guitar, before fading to a shot of people cheering her name at a concert. Instantly, we, as the audience develop the impression that she is globally successful and immensely popular with fans of all ages. In true American style, the cheesy voice-over kicks in with, 'welcome to Taylor Swift's Journey to Fearless', and from there, the footage of adult Taylor singing at her concerts is contrasted with old home videos of young Taylor playing on her keyboard and singing nursery rhymes. The audience is immediately informed of how much music meant to her, with the concert footage portraying how determined she was to achieve her dreams.
Throughout the documentary, the editing is quick, engaging and effective in developing a sense of musical progression. Often the use of input from interviews acts as a voice-over whilst relevant images and footage play over the top, such as the shots in the High School when Taylor is speaking about her musical inspiration from her own experience of High School. The audience is constantly engaged using interviews, concert clips, and music video clips. There is a real sense of audience inclusion with Taylor, as she frequently references how she wanted her tour to be something that her fans could truly enjoy and get the most out of.
We wanted to create a similar character to Taylor Swift, who had been on a similar musical journey to fame. Our fictional character, Drew Taylor, has come from humble beginnings, where she was bullied at school, to winning a Talent Show, and now she is becoming one of the most influential singers in the world. We wanted to portray this journey to our audience using the same narrative structure as the Taylor Swift's 'Journey to Fearless', using the typical documentary conventions, such as interviews, old pictures/videos, music video clips and voice-over. Similarly to other documentaries, we wanted to have a mixture of media content in our video, which meant that we interchanged between music videos, interviews and pictures with overlaying voice-over in order to keep our audience engaged and interested in the subject matter.
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