The Story of Tap Mun directed by Matt Pidden, revolves around the history of the island. Through two different perspectives, Pidden orchestrates the story of Tap Mun exceptionally.
From the beginning of the documentary, Pidden sets the scene with an establishing shot of the island through an aerial view putting the island in the audience's perspective. Rather than focusing on one slant, Pidden goes for two with two different interviews on people's experience on the island.
The first interview is from a man, Adu, who grew up on the island but moved away at a young age until he returned to run his own restaurant in retirement. This interview is staged in a still setting with some voiceover from the interview played through b-roll allowing the audience to better understand what is being talked about. Adu’s story on how people have come to the island over the years goes hand in hand with the b-roll added by Pidden.
The second interview is an in motion one as the woman, Quien, takes Pidden on a trip through the island. This interview uses several unique transitions that blend each location while Quien speaks.
The documentary as a whole incorporates different camera angles like close ups, aerial views and master shots that provide the audience with different points of views of the island. I found the voiceover complemented the b-roll wonderfully as Pidden used someone with a deeper and more focused voice to narrate the story.
Pidden incorporated all his previous background knowledge on editing and recording to capture a story that is well developed and kept the audience engaged in its entirety. The part I enjoyed most of the documentary was how well Pidden blended the natural sounds of Tap Mun’s environment, the non-diegetic sounds, the voiceover and the interviews.
The purpose of documentaries is to capture a story that is important to a group of people and explain it in real time. In this case, Pidden was able to highlight an island that might not be known to many and tell its history in the correct way. This documentary recognizes how special one small island can be, and how significant peoples contributions can make to create a functioning environment.
After watching the documentary several times I was left wondering how Pidden fully put this all together. I want to know how he organized every piece of footage and audio into what platform to carry it out. Another process that is often difficult is figuring out the order of the way the story was told, in Pidden’s case this flowed exceptionally and it would be beneficial to have insight on this process.
As with every project whether film or photography based requires time. I would want to know how Pidden planned his documentary out and how much time was dedicated to each aspect of the project.
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