Documentary Review: Man on Wire

A few nights ago,I watched the documentary "Man on Wire" directed by James Marsh. It was a fascinating movie about high walker, Philippe Petit's journey which led him to walk across the twin towers. The movie captures the long years of preparation for only about 45 minutes of routine on the wire.
It really showed how determined Phillipe Petit was to complete his dream, he knew it was illegal and extremely dangerous, but he wouldn't give up.  From the time he saw an article in a magazine about two huge towers in NYC being built, he was determined to walk between them. He encountered many obstacles. For example, he and a few other people had to rig the wire in complete darkness with high winds and in only a few hours. His friends told him to give up, it's impossible to rig this in such a short time,but Phillip didn't give up. And finally it was a majestic moment when he walked across the wire between the towers.

I really liked that is it had a lot of different footage and it kept cutting back and forth between all of them. It had archival footage of the building of the World trade Center,present day Interview of Petit and all the other people involved, reenactments by a different actor who played young Petit which portrayed the preparation and ideo and still images of the performance between the Twin Towers. All these different shots made the documentary seem so much more real.

I enjoyed how they would cut back and forth between shots of the preparation of the performance ( practicing, discussing how they'll do it) and sneaking up to the top of twin towers.

The filming was great because it made it seem like an older film. In particular the reanactment scenes, were either in black and white or had a color tone that is used in many old movies.

I barely noticed the music in the movie. I found it odd because it used calming, soft music even in the more exciting parts like the walking between the towers.However,it somehow worked.

I really enjoyed the movie, it was was well told, creating a lot of suspense. I defiantly recommend this movie.


Here is the trailer for "Man on Wire":

BARCODE

A few weeks ago, we finished our dystopian trailers. Ours was called Barcode and portrayed a society with citizens who lacked a identity. Everyone dressed the same, they had earpieces to stop them from hearing, to communicate they had only a few cards with words on them and to identify themselves they had a necklace with a barcode necklace. Our main character fell and broke her earpiece and was then able to hear. She then realizes how much the government is hiding from them and wants to end this dystopian society.

What really set our trailers different from the others was the fact that the first half of our trailer did not have music, only a low drowning noise in the background. When the main character falls and her earpiece breaks, intense music starts playing to signify the upcoming battle she will go through. Another thing that made our trailer unique was our costumes. All citizens wore the same thing: A white shirt, jeans, the bar code necklace and a paper bag over their heads. On one side of the bags were two eye holes and a drawn happy face and on the other side was the two eye holes and a drawn sad face because the citizens only had 2 emotions. 

I enjoyed the project a lot, but it was very time consuming. To film we had to work on weekends and for editing, my group and I went in many days after school and during lunch. However during the project, I became more familiar with the editing software that we used, Final cut. 



I am really proud how our trailer and I hope to use some of the tools I learned about while making the trailer, in the upcoming documentary project.