Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Reflective: Portrayal of Characters in Documentary

In both King of Kong and and Kahn's writing, we learned about the power of documentaries as far as their portrayal of people. In King of Kong, both Billy and Steve had negative things implied or stated about them. The referee guy came across as quirky or eccentric, but he was awesome so I did not feel that it was negative towards him. Steve was shown to be a man with a family that he ignored in favor of Donkey Kong, who had also never accomplished any of the things he worked towards in life. This is for the most part overshadowed by the way that they portrayed him in the rest of the movie, as it seemed he was supposed to be the protagonist. Billy basically got screwed by King of Kong. They decided to make him the antagonist to Steve and to make the viewer hate Billy. They even went as far as to make him look good in the beginning just so he would have that much further to fall through the rest of the documentary. He was at first shown to be the popular, talented guy who was very popular in the gaming community. Then, he was shown to be scared, passive-aggressive, and lazy. They even showed a random clip of Billy doing his hair in his bathroom in the morning, which was not very flattering. While all of these things did happen and the documentary makers had access to all of this, they also chose to put all of this information into the documentary as well as putting it in the video in the manner they did. They certainly had other information at their disposal and could have presented the film they did have in a different manner that did not portray Billy or Steve in such a negative light.

Kahn's writing is more unfortunate because he offended an old professor, which was clearly unintentional on his part. This, in addition to the portrayal in King of Kong shows us that we may use our video to purposefully show someone in a certain way, but also that we may unintentionally offend someone in a way that we had not considered.

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