A Seat At The Table from Public Record on Vimeo.
“A Seat At The Table” is a short documentary piece which produced by New York Times Brand Studio. The film crew use split-screen style and draw a sweet family dinner picture （00：00-00：38）. The topic of the story is close to each other’s life. We all have family and we all have family dinner before, but we never really think about the reason（what bring us together).
One family is old school style because they have multi-generation in one family. They are also not that old school, because they combined by three families. You can tell how they get along with each other from each of shot. Let camera speak!
My favorite shot is the sound match cut(02:53-02:54), like the graphic match cut we saw before. In each family, mother is the superwoman in the kitchen. You can’t find any chef(even a three-star Michelin chef) in the world better than your mom. I like to use slow motion, but I don’t know how to cut my slow motion into the shots. This is a good example. In 02:10, filmmaker use slow motion to present how mother did their magic in the kitchen.
Body language, house setting, action and reaction are the key skills to narrative all these characters. All the family members have a unique personality, and I can even find myself. Sometimes we only care the big topics in our life and ignore the simplest one.
It is so interesting to see how both of the families are so similar yet so different. How both of the grandmothers are sitting in the front and the daughters are by the side. How both the families are big and have big personalities in their own way. It made me wonder how many other families would resemble my own or could relate to my family.
Shooting wise, I definitely agree, the slow motion were amazing, I enjoyed the slow steam footage at 1:58 and definitely enjoyed watching the slo-mo of the cheese being spread on the pasta. Not to mention the way the interviews were set-up, for instances at 2:45 – with the wind blowing on the curtain in the background and the child in the forefront. Also, the way the background music changed along with the storyline. When the lady spoke about her deceased father and the music changed to a slower tone, compared to when they were sitting up the table.
I found this video really creative and easy to watch, especially with the nice cuts and side-by-side videos.
Great pick, Phonix!
Excellent use of shooting the “doughnut holes” in this video. Such as, the barbecue grill, the smoke coming from the grill, and that the women prepare the food for their family using gloves (family on the right). This stood out to me, because we never do that in my family. We just wash our hands and go. I love the use of music, because it makes the piece feel light and fun. The filmmaker really aced what family dinner looks like, and I really liked the focus on the conversations within the piece.
There was a point in the video where I began to suspect that they were all one family, craftily kept separate by creative camera work in preparation for a reveal. That could just be my midnight brain playing tricks on me (not unlikely), but perhaps it was intentional. This piece heavily played on universal truth, which was one of two directions highlighted by one of the authors in our Telling True Stories book (the other being to focus on an outlier). The home-cooked meal/family gathering is something that is widely relatable for those who have what could be considered a traditional home life. Although these families ended up being different, having “a seat at the table” is transcendent.