Guilty Pleasure

Watching documentaries has always been fun for me, How It’s Made marathons were a guilty pleasure of mine for a long time. It was engineering documentaries such as Extreme Engineering, How Do They Do that? and a variety of ‘one offs’ such as 'How was the Eurostar made?' inspired me to take Engineering as my first career path. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that it was learning about new things that enticed me rather than actually building things. It took me a car, a radio, many iron casts, a few desk lamps, a couple of welding jobs and a theatre lighting rig actually.

Recently Performing Arts documentaries have been my go to, reality shows such as Dance Moms

whilst prompted it does take me back to the days where I was the little dancer getting shouted at for my pointe not being on point. An interesting film I saw today was called ‘Ballet, Sweat and Tears’ an interactive style documentary focusing on the young girls a the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, the ballet school of the Mariinsky Theatre. It had a great interview technique (although overdubbed in English) where they would sit down with the artists either backstage or in their ‘comfortable’ place. It would then have a B-Roll switching between rehearsals, down-time and their main performance.

Whilst writing this I’m watching another documentary similar in style called ‘Getting into Cirque Du Soleil’ in which you see the audition process behind the world’s most strenuous circus. Which seems to be the worlds longest and most gruelling audition and workshop process (Which in the end only means they will put into a database of talent, not actually get a job!). I love the circus and have been involved in the circus community for a long time so this is But again I like the style, like the other it’s interactive with a mixture of interviews, interesting b-roll footage and a standard voice over giving extra facts and giving context where needed.

I personally believe that this is one of the most effective ways of documenting a business or work endeavour as you get the visuals backing up the context and opinions given by the people involved.

When given the idea of the Brewery I was reminded of one of my favourite Youtubers SortedFood, who did a tour of a Brewery in Ireland on their ‘Let’s Talk Chocolate’ tour.


I think the interactive style works really well here, you have a clear outline of who know what they are talking about and who are there to entertain the audience, whether you have watched the channel before or not. You get a clear inside to how the Stout is made but not really the history of the business which is something I would love to get involved with if we are to produce our documentary at the Hogs Back Brewery.