Resarch - Eric Bana's 'Love the Beast'

This is a link to the full car documentary film by Eric Bana which I used for my research

Eric Bana's - Love the Beast full movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSq0RfI7ZJU

This is a link to the full and uncut interview between Jeremy Clarkson and Eric Bana

I used this because it shows us how to conduct an interview revolved around the passion of cars as it is the uncut version of the interview segment, not the chopped up version which was used in the documentary film. It gives us an idea of the type of questions we can ask, what answers we can expect, and also how serious the duration of an interview about cars has to be, and this clip helped us understand that it can be more of a fun conversation rather than a formal interview, as long as you both acquire the same passion for cars.

Car Documentary Eric Bana's - Love the Beast analysis

This documentary film stars Eric Bana and shows his connection with the first ever car he owned which he still has today. He said he opened his garage door, and there, right in front of him, was the film he had been searching for. The subject of this film by Eric Bana is his very own 1974 Ford XB Falcon Coupe, nicknamed “The Beast”. The film is about him loving his car from when he first had it but knew it wasn’t the best driving car, so he decided to keep rebuilding it over the years and then enter the rebuilt version into motor races and eventually make his car an actual “Beast”. Eric started the film wanting to document him, his first car, and his lifetime of friendship with his car. He wanted to do a documentary on his 25 year long love story. It’s a story of his ongoing relationship with his very first car.

Eric and three of his friends, decided to enter the car into one of the most dangerous motor races “The Targa Tasmania Rally”. It was during this race that Eric, who is making the documentary to prove how much he and his friends love "The Beast", ended up wrecking it. Eric unwillingly happened to turn his documentary into a drama. We follow him from inside the race car during this event with a camera looking out at the road and another looking up at his face from inside the car. These shots are common conventions of car documentaries as we see them in other car programmes, like ‘Top Gear’.

In the documentary Eric Bana also holds interviews with a lot of famous people about their experiences and opinions on cars. Most of them however didn’t really seem much like interviews at all. One of the interviews was with Jeremy Clarkson which didn’t really seem like a normal documentary interview, it seemed a lot more like a friendly conversation about two people’s experiences and love for cars. Eric Bana is an actor so probably isn’t that experienced in interviewing which is why this interview seemed to sway away from asking him questions and getting answers, he was speaking a lot as well, even answering some questions himself. So this interview didn’t exactly convey typical documentaries conventions, but since there wasn’t a professional film maker making the film, minor things like this are to be expected to an extent. Even so, it was still a very enjoyable and interesting conversation to listen to if you are a car lover.

 

This is another documentary that I researched which was unrelated to our topic

Enfield Poltergeist Documentary
 

This documentary film is about a poltergeist in a family home and how it haunted the family living there in 1977. The documentary is set out having the family explaining the story many years later, whilst having actors play out what they said had happened.

The editing in this film is very much just cutting between them telling us the story and the actors playing the traumatic experience out, which is a common convention in these types of past story telling documentaries. The acting scenes were showed whilst overlapping with the different family members telling us about the events. The sound was all very dark and mysterious which was used to be very unnerving to the audience to give them a feel of what the family are saying they felt like, because watching how the events unfolded with this music playing, almost inserts the fear that they felt into the audience.

There are also a lot of other witnesses to they events being interviewed in the documentary like the neighbour, a police officer and people that started investigating the incidents, and they all gave the same sort of confirmation that there was something very wrong there and it appeared there was clear evidence to suggest it wasn’t any kind of a hoax. This is important to include as the audience needs to believe what they are hearing to feel for the family and to fear for themselves as well. The film did this well as it shows actual footage of the police officer being interviewed at the time of the events, and they clearly said that they did see a chair move along the floor with no explanation. And because it’s a police officer backing up the story, it helps the audience feel amazed that a situation like that actually can happen as they now are more convinced, and then become intrigued to find out what happened with the poltergeist now they believe the story being told. As the film goes on however, there are experts that received evidence like photos and video footage, that do admit the evidence isn’t concrete, and is in fact a little dodgy, but there is still other evidence and witnesses which can’t be ignored. This leaves the audience now questioning whether they believe it is real or whether they now believe otherwise, which makes them want to watch the rest of the film to find out the truth or to be further convinced.