Post #2: 2/16/21

Last night I watched another documentary called "Minecraft: The Story of Minecraft." Aside from the first impression that the title is very uncreative, the first thing I noticed about this documentary is that unlike the previous one I watched, 90% of the footage was taken in the real world. A lot of the b-roll in the film is taken from people's videos, but none of it looks like it was original footage within the game. Overall, the documentary was about how the game has changed the online world and how YouTube is integrated into that notion.


The film as a whole seemed like it didn't have a super high budget. A lot of the b-roll they used from the real world seemed unprofessionally shot; some of the angles didn't look great and it was often shaky. There were also a lot of jump cuts and b-roll was often repeated. Some of the subject matter was interesting, but these technical errors were distracting an took away from some of the content.

I let this film serve as a lesson to me. I think it could have been a much more successful documentary if it had taken a different approach. A documentary about a game should by nature include a lot more footage of the game. Also, there is a lot of existing footage they could have pulled from instead of repeating clips. This served as a tutorial on what not to do in documentary!

One of the things I think this documentary did well was include shots of people plying the game. This is an additional thing I feel like Ross and I could incorporate into our documentary. Although we want to make 90% of our footage virtual, it is admittedly nice to put a human face into it. In addition to the idea I had in my last video, I think this is another approach that could work pretty easily. 

Overall, I wasn't super impressed by this documentary (which you can find here), but I did have some takeaways from it that I think are pretty valuable. 

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