I was really keen to see the film as I am a huge Coldplay fan, having seen them live 15 times in the last four years (two of the concerts, Glastonbury 2011 and the Emirates Stadium London, being included in this film).
Given our current project, I was also keen to see how the film was put together and if there were any ideas that could inspire me with our film. And there were.
I said in a previous post that Alex and I are keen to make the footage more exciting and contemporary rather than the plodding arrangement that we inherited.
I have seen many concert and music documentaries (must of them by Julian Temple who seems to have cornered the market!) including the Glastonbury movie, the Sex Pistols Filth and the Fury and his documentaries on Ray Davies and Paul Weller.
Without seeming biased, the Coldplay film is by far and away the most organised, intricately planned music documentary I have ever seen. I'm not sure if it's because of this course that I am seeing films a different way, but whilst I was watching the film I was mentally breaking it down and I can almost visualise the storyboard that the editing will have worked from. Without sounding pretentious, the first thing I noticed was that the film had obviously been made by someone who has a great fondness for the band and the music, as well as having a brilliant eye for interesting, but uncomplicated visuals. The off stage footage included shots that must have been planned months in advance, such as the pyramid stage of Glastonbury being shown out of season as just a frame in an overgrown field, and the texture shots of cities and airports were not just one take, rushed shots but very considered shots with focus pulls, and interesting content.
Another thing that I noticed, which I had said that I wanted to include in our film, was not having the person being interviewed shown on screen answering the questions. Instead the responses played over footage that focused on that person talking.
Another effective devise was to use black and white for the off stage footage and colour for the performances. This is something I want to experiment with for our film. The climbs ie: the action, could be in colour, whilst all the discussion about preparation and equipment used could accompany cropped clips of the bedroom hand holes and close ups of ropes and kit. This would alleviate the problem I have of not liking the bedroom scenes but recognising that those scenes do include useful footage of the climber practising.
Here are some of the notes that I made about Coldplay Live by Paul Dugdale:
This was really useful to watch and has given a new shape to our film. I have got a definite structure for our film now.
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