A tat doc from YouTube...

So here is a documentary I found on YouTube about tattooing, titled Body Art: A Tattoo documentary directed and produced by Eddie Stevens. I was initially excited that I found an actual short doc on YouTube but the longer I watched the it, I will say, the more disappointed I was. I like the general idea of it, but I was expecting to see a documentary on Lou Schiberras, the guy who mentored the people from Miami Ink, and what I got was some old video of different tattoos with hard rock music attached. I liked how the video started, with the sound of the tattoo guns and some guys looking at flash on the wall, but after that there was hardly any focus on the actual tattoo artist. While the video was uploaded in 2007, it is pretty clear that it was made way before that, making the quality very mediocre. However, the content in the doc was very interesting in that it goes along with what I am trying to portray in my documentary: How much tattooing has changed (the style of tattoos, the type etc. etc.). Looking at the tattoos themselves in the doc was itneresting because you can see how much of a better quality they have now and how the entire world of tattooing has recently become more artistic, rather than as before.

Tattoo Documentary

In preparing for the documentary project coming up I decided to look around for some films that involved tattooing in some form or another and I found one called Tattoo Ink produced by Bob Shami. For my documentary I plan on looking at tattoo culture and I was hoping to take some inspiration from this particular film, among others. After watching it I found some things that I really liked (such as in their style: certain effects, lighting in specific situations, the plethora of people that were interviewed/talked to etc.) and I also found some things that I really did not like (for example, there was about, at least, 15 minutes of footage that had what seemed like a background effect or even a fade effect of wierd numbers running across the screen. I thought it was a mistake on my computer, or with the download, untill I later realized that it was an intentional decision made for the film). I also really liked how much of the documentary was filmed at an actual tattoo convention, giving the audience a feel for the subculture and what it is all about.