This short film is part of the New Zealand documentary shorts series called Loading Docs, and thus far it is a series I have found both interesting but yet also fascinating because one of the themes of the series is that all of the documentaries are only 3 minutes long. This must have put a lot of pressure on the makers when it comes to the edit and I guess it is even harder where you have character-driven films (as most of them seem to be). In this case we join Wayne, who is a man with some form of learning difficulty. We join him for a very precise series of interactions, with his carer called Nigel and a woman called Rachel.
Maybe I missed who she was in the brisk pace, but the key thing here is his affection for Rachel. Of course it is filtered through his own understanding and abilities, but ultimately he is a person unwittingly hurt by the object of his affection and also keen to work out ways to appeal to her. We are shown this very quickly and really all I got was a sense of this where I felt like I would have liked to sit in it for a while and appreciate how it looks and feels. Again, 3 minutes seems to have been the rule of the series but one has to wonder if it was the right limit to set. Just like Stop/Go, I felt there was a lot more to Wayne that I would liked to have seen and was a bit disappointed that I didn't get to see it.
As it is, there is the sense of the slightly tragic but also slightly beautiful here and both of these appealed to me. Visually the film has moments which are beautifully filmed; in particular the hanging wooden objects towards the end. The only downside of this is that it is almost too beautiful a shot and it stood out as odd in such a much more down- to-earth film, but I appreciated it for what it did. It is an intriguing short film even if the time available really seems to have limited it; I would like to see what Griffin and Kernick could have made if the final editing process hadn't been so clearly brutal.
Maybe I missed who she was in the brisk pace, but the key thing here is his affection for Rachel. Of course it is filtered through his own understanding and abilities, but ultimately he is a person unwittingly hurt by the object of his affection and also keen to work out ways to appeal to her. We are shown this very quickly and really all I got was a sense of this where I felt like I would have liked to sit in it for a while and appreciate how it looks and feels. Again, 3 minutes seems to have been the rule of the series but one has to wonder if it was the right limit to set. Just like Stop/Go, I felt there was a lot more to Wayne that I would liked to have seen and was a bit disappointed that I didn't get to see it.
As it is, there is the sense of the slightly tragic but also slightly beautiful here and both of these appealed to me. Visually the film has moments which are beautifully filmed; in particular the hanging wooden objects towards the end. The only downside of this is that it is almost too beautiful a shot and it stood out as odd in such a much more down- to-earth film, but I appreciated it for what it did. It is an intriguing short film even if the time available really seems to have limited it; I would like to see what Griffin and Kernick could have made if the final editing process hadn't been so clearly brutal.