Errol Morris First Person "Stairway to Heaven"

I've been meaning to blog on this series but somehow have put it off until now..my apologies.

I've really had a documentary focus this semester, being a part of this class and also working on a long doc editing project in intermediate editing. Errol Morris definitely has a very unique way to of telling the story. The First Person series is a great collection of many short docs of very interesting characters. I highly recemmend watching some of them.

"Stairway to Heaven" is a lovely piece about Temple Grandin, a very interesting autistic woman. I will just jump into why his editing really works for me. Rather than just exploring her story by cutting together a sequence of her interviews and using appropriate b-roll, Morris really tries to get us as the view INTO her world and her mind. One particular sequence that really got me was the part where Temple explains the process of how she uses a sqeezing machine to make her feel relaxed (that's another story). But she basically explains that farmers would use "sqeezing machines" on cows to make them relaxed. She tried the idea on herself and it worked well for her. Just as she ended her line explaining how it brought her into another world, the audio track fades to nothing and an interesting ambience comes in. A picture of her walking admist a crowd of cows fades in, slightly blurry, bringing us into a simulation of what she is experiencing. It really tells her story in a way that a straight up interview really couldn't have communicated.

Having said that, I do also think that he makes good use of different camera angles to make the talking head more interesting. He also tends to film at an angle and has an out of focus, undistinguishable background. His timing in his use of b-roll and illustrations also really helps him tell the story.