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‘Allen Iverson’ is a documentary that tracks the career of an NBA superstar, Iverson. The documentary narrates about the ultimate legacy of the legend rising from a childhood of poverty in Hampton Virginia. Iverson rose from poverty to become an all-time superstar as an athlete in basketball, becoming an 11-time NBA all-star and as well being recognized in the basketball sports. Despite his success, Iverson was faced with rejection by people of his hometown, and this left his coach wondering whether he should stay and play. The main reason for his rejection was due to his unapologetic embrace of hip hop music that sent shockwaves to the entire league and as well influencing the entire generation. The documentary features interviews with various people including Iverson’s coach while the rest of the documentary is left for Iverson to tell his story.
The main intent of the filmmaker is to alert and make aware the audience of the life history of the NBA all-star icon, Allen Iverson. To fulfill this, the documentary highlights the course of his career in high school throughout the NBA, being a hip hop star as well as he progressed to become a superstar in basketball until his retirement. The main focus of the documentary, therefore, is to the life of a single person being narrated by various people, who provides their accounts on Allen’s life and career as well as the superstar himself telling his story and therefore the intention of the filmmaker of making the audience aware is fulfilled with facts.
The documentary is of a higher quality as there are no visually irrelevant materials. The visual materials are designed to suit the documentary in the sense that at the background, there are players playing basketball which is in line with the clip, all the interviews are of the same topic and the media outlets as well as newspapers in the documentary relate to Allen’s career. There are no visual distractions in the video, and it is easy for the audience to follow the concept as at some occasions there are visual aids such as words in the papers making the audience reconnect if they were lost. Besides, the quality of the pictures is of good quality and are taken from different angles. With the main character being on the screen all the time, the audience cannot get bored as he is introduced at different occasions, providing his part of the story keeping the audience ready to hear what next. Therefore, the overall quality of the video if high.
The mise-en-scene has been designed in such a manner that will provoke a response from the viewer. Since the documentary talks about the life course of a superstar, the images of Allen Iverson dominate the documentary as the main character. The setting of the documentary dictates that Allen is an NBA player as the costumes being worn are those of the basketball players. Most of the actions are in the field and therefore the audience even without listening to the audio, still can infer that the topic of the documentary is about sport and not any other sport but basketball. Allen Iverson was a shooting guard, and therefore we expect him to be shown scoring, this has been the case as he constantly scores, dribbling the ball past his opponents and celebrating the victory. The scoring is on different occasions, and this is an indication that Allen was indeed a superstar in the NBA. The reactions of the players as they win as well as that of the other characters in the documentary, illicit emotions to the audience. The overall mis-en-scene of the documentary is of high quality as the audience response is triggered as per the filmmaker’s intention.
Reference
ALLEN IVERSON: The Answer [FULL Documentary]: Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/2TCjK4jRDfw?t=409
