Gotye - Making Making Mirrors - Genre Analysis

Title: Gotye - Making Making Mirrors

Type of Documentary:

‘Gotye – Making Making Mirrors’ is a short expository documentary showing behind the scene footage of Gotye’s album, Making Mirrors. The documentary also has a poetic style to it with its use of music.

Themes:

The documentary shows how Gotye uses a variety of different sounds to incorporate his music. It focuses on what he likes to record and his love for music. 

Your/Audience Responses:

I found the short documentary in a way inspiring due to Gotye’s drive to make original sounding music.

Structure/Narrative:

The narrative structure of the documentary is very linear throughout the documentary no one actually speaks other that Gotye narrating. The beginning of the documentary introduces the topic and some of the albums background. This emphasizes how involved he is with his music.

Mise En Scene:

His clothes in the documentary help signify his personalities and his individualism. The majority of the documentary is filmed from within his studio where he creates his music. The lighting in this documentary is mainly back lighting to connote an instruments importance.

Camerawork:

There is a variety of camerawork used within this documentary to help with the exposition in the documentary. There is a large use of close up shots of instruments within this documentary to link with what he is talking about. An over shoulder shot is used here also to show Gotye and the objects of his interest in the same shot. Fore-shot is used to focus on one thing and blur out the background. This draws the attention of the audience to the subject of focus. Stop-motion is used at the start of the documentary to signify the amount of equipment he uses to create his music.  

Editing:

The majority of editing throughout this documentary is the use of cuts to make the documentary smoother. Fades are also used when the topic changes to something different. Jump-cuts are used in this documentary to signify the amount of different instruments he used to create his album.

Sound:

Sound is important in this documentary as it mixes non-diegetic music together with diegetic music from his album to connect the finished product and the starting product together.  

Graphics:

The graphics used in this documentary used to show people’s names, important places and titles. The text is white and artistic to reflect signify the nature of the album and Gotye himself.