I’m really happy to see a lot of people posting creative ideas on how to feature aspects of the past while producing multimedia journalism pieces. To add another to the mix, this Vimeo Staff Pick is titled Treasure, and features an adorable old man named Tom Clark whose insatiable appetite for treasure hunting has kept him searching into his golden years.
What I notice about many of the pieces we’re posting is that filmmakers seem keen to recreate scenes or actions of their subjects doing the activity that they may have old photographs or footage of. I don’t really think it counts as staging as it seems to be just a more controlled version of what subjects are currently doing as their hobby anyway, as is the case with this piece, and I think it can really help us visually link the past to the present.
This piece has so much going for it in terms of creative flashbacks. There are quick shots of Clark doing his “detecting” in between other quick shots of a black and white photos of him in his youth. Since we’ll be looking into incorporating older artifacts as well as pictures for our Reporting Story assignments, another visual element that I think is valuable is the shot by shot montage of a multitude of the treasures he’s found over the years. Most are simple items and while they’re still interesting, it’s a very creative way to showcase his immense findings in a short amount of time. There are many close-up shots of his hands, the shovel, and the little trinkets, all of which let us in close to this interesting world of treasure hunting.
TREASURE (03.00) from Oliver Murray on Vimeo.
I love the term you used, “creative flashbacks” because I think that it really sums up what a lot of filmmakers, especially non-fiction filmmakers, do to recreate a story and bring the audience in to present tense storytelling. I also think that this piece used a lot of sound design to help carry the story along and add another element to the storytelling experience. When we see all of the different artifacts he has collected over the years, we hear a beeping noise for each one. I thought that that was a very clever move on the filmmakers part.
What is nice about this piece is that he is still doing this in the present. So, it’s not like they really needed to recreate anything because to this day he continues to go out and look for treasures, and whereas he collected them in the past, now he gives them to the people who on the land where he searches.