By - Anthony Bennett
Ecmo is an emotional documentary that focuses on the aftermath of a Greenford high school student who became critically ill after a 3 day school trip to Disneyland Paris. The documentary focuses on educating and informing its audience about the seriousness of the illnesses he had.
The use of non diegetic music at particular scenes makes the documentary more emotional at the right spot by using the song “died in you arms” – foreigner, creates emotion as scenes of Anthony laying in hospital come up on the screen. To juxtapose this at the end, the remix more upbeat version of this song is used to create a happy ending theme. Anthony visits a co-coordinator and a plastic surgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital to help find out what happened to him in his stay in hospital
Anthony keeps the audience engaged by having the documentary packed with facts that make the audience gasp, sit 3 mins without blinking, cry and even laugh. The use of humour is used at the end when the camera zooms into his get well cards and a funny picture appears of him and his girlfriend Sam, this was added so the documentary is not sad all the way through and it makes the outcome more pleasant and does not leave the viewers in a sad mood!
Ineresting facts
- Anthony is the most camera shy person known to exist, it took him a record breaking 23 takes to film the 15 second shot of him describing what pneumonia is.
- Teachers and PSW's had to get involved with Anthony's documentary telling him to give up and work with a group because the didnt beleive that he would be able to pull of a good documentary by himself.
- Anthony had to redo his documentary on 4 different laptops and computers becase the memory kept running out!
- On the final day of handing in work, ant brought the laptop in ready to have his footage transfered and when he opend the file....it was corrupted!, luckily he had saved elsewhere from the night before so he had to redo the ending but it turned out better than previously.