Research into existing products - Rooney: The Man Behind The Goals

Analysis of Rooney: The Man Behind The Goals
Rooney: The Man Behind The Goals is a 2015 BBC documentary about England's all-time top goalscorer. Wayne Rooney has given cameraman unique access to his home and personal life for the first time. The title suggests that the documentary is going to explore Rooney's personal life and how it affects him as a footballer. This documentary is in the mode of Bill Nichols' participatory as the filmmaker (Gary Lineker) and the subject (Wayne Rooney) interact and allow Lineker to address people in the documentary rather than comment on Rooney's life.

The documentary begins with a horizontal tracking shot from a car of football pitches. This suggests that these were the pitches that Rooney used to play on when he was child, since this documentary is about the story of how Rooney got to where he is today. The filmmaker then uses a cutaway to archived footage of Rooney playing for England then back to the tracking shot. The editors may have incorporated this to show how far Rooney has come from playing on a Sunday League pitch when he was a child. Furthermore, archived footage can give a historical knowledge to viewers who unknowledgeable on the subject. The editor then uses a 'J cut' where the sound of cameras taking pictures scene is heard before the actual scene. This gives viewers a better understanding of the environment that Rooney lives in. J cuts and L cuts are used often in documentary film making.

The director uses the hook technique to make the viewers watch the whole documentary. The hook in this documentary is snippets of interviews with former teammates, managers and opponents such as Cristiano Ronaldo. By using these superstars and former managers, viewers will want to know what they say about Rooney.

This documentary has been made to honour a great footballer and has some sub-messages within the documentary such as hard work gets rewards. Furthermore, the documentary is trying to communicate with audience to inspire them; whether the audience is child wanting to become a footballer to an adult wanting to do better for themselves.

By watching this documentary, we decided that this type of documentary would be hard to create therefore we chose explore other avenues of documentaries. This is because a participatory documentary normally requires a focus point, someone/people/something to base the documentary and explore it. Therefore this mode of documentary would be hard for us to create as we would need to think of an idea in this mode which is hard enough, then plan how we would be able engage with subject and then create an extract.