Side By Side Documentary

Title - Side by Side

Director - Christopher Kenneally 

Year - 2012

Running Time - 98 minutes

Side by Side is an American documentary produced by Justin Szlasa and Keanu Reeves. It was premiered at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival and is was also shown at the Tribeca Film Festival. 

The documentary looks into the history, process and workflow of both digital and photochemical film creation. It look into what artists and filmmakers have been able to create with film and digital and how theirs need and innovations have helped to push filmmaking in new directions. There are lots of interviews throughout the film with directors, cinematographers, colourists, scientists, engineers and artists as they talk about their experiences and feelings of working with film and working with digital. It also looks in to where we are now in the present day, how we got to where we are now and also what the future may hold. 

I thought that the introduction to the film was very powerful. The voice over was speaking about the growth of film since it had been intended and showing various iconic films on the screen such as Rocky and The Wizard of Oz, starting with the oldest films and progressing to the newer films of today, moving from film to digital. I thought that the use of the iconic films with the voice over was very powerful and it caught my attention straight away, making me want to carry on watching the rest of the film. 

A part of the film that I thought was very interesting was close to the beginning when we are taught about how film works. I learnt that film is covered with an emulsion that contains silver halide crystals, and when lights hits them, they react chemically and then the crystals change into silver when they are developed, leaving a photographic image. The film reels are then taken to a film lab to be developed over night and ready to preview the next day. I enjoyed learning and seeing this process on screen as it gave me in depth knowledge of how the developing of the footage works. 

I thought that just by watching the film, I had learnt a lot about how a documentary is edited because around the same time that I watched the film, I was editing my documentary film for the Moving Image Production Narrative module. One of the main things that I transferred from this film to the editing in my film was the use of overlaying the audio of the interview underneath the previous shot to bring the interview in smoothly.