VISUAL NARRATIVES

What I enjoyed most about Fever Year was the simplicity of the filming. It was beautifully shot. The cuts were clean and not rushed. I also loved the songs in the film by Andrew Bird. When he performed it added a level of emotion and rawness to the film. I thought the technique of looping he used to create his music was great. There’s no doubt he is extremely talented. The camera work I liked the most was when they showed long shots of the farm he grew up in. They were great shots to show the viewers exactly where he grew up. Most of the lighting in the film was stage lights during his concerts. The darkness of the stage and the lights hitting down on Bird really set the mood for his slower songs. I noticed they did a few shots of streetlights a night that were beautifully captured. There was also a lot of natural light from windows in many scenes.

Xan Aranda, the director of Fever Year used very beautiful filming techniques incorporating interesting angles and lots of different types of shots to better share the space that exists around the subject of every scene. There was also good use of mixing in old footage of some of the shows that Andrew Bird used to play all the years before he started selling out stadiums. The story follows him on his tour through a busy year that he is struggling to get through, always being portrayed as being sick or injured in some way. Almost half of the film is devoted to showing his live performances intermixed into the documentary. The story of him making it through a grueling year is an interesting narrative but other than that I felt like the documentary as a whole didn't really have a point. Most documentaries tell stories of a moving topic that have some sort of dramatic conclusion. This one didn't really seem to get anywhere in the end. It was just about Andrew Bird being himself. I suppose this is how most music documentaries go, but I felt like it could have been more moving in some way.