Being Elmo

 

After watching the documentary Being Elmo I saw a lot of differences between storytelling in this documentary and storytelling in other forms such as other movies, short stories and art. In the documentary Being Elmo, Kevin Clash tells his story of being the voice of Elmo and a brief autobiography of his life steps to get to the place he is at.

In documentaries, they tell stories with interviews, dramatization of things that took place, old photographs and video clips, and often have a narrator. After watching Being Elmo, I realized that this documentary included all of these things. The person that the documentary is about, Kevin Clash, is one of the main sources of information and main part of this documentary. He comments on his personal experiences, how they affected him, his opinions and insight, his dreams, his talent, etc. There is nothing better than hearing the information straight from the source. In some documentaries, they are about people who have died so you cannot interview them personally about their life, which is a little more difficult. Being Elmo also included interviews from Kevin’s parents, family, co-workers, friends, employers, etc. These interviews also help the viewer get insight to the person’s life from a different view and you get to hear their opinion of them. Another thing this documentary had was pictures and video clips of from when Kevin was growing up, establishing his puppeteer career. This helped show the growth of his career and life, and the different things he went through to achieve his dream. Dramatizations of scenarios in his life were also put in, for example when he first met Jim Henson, they showed a staging of the scene to show the audience what the scenario probably looked like and how it felt for him to be there. The documentary was narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, which helped keep a nice flow to the film. All of these aspects put together put together a great documentary that I really enjoyed watching. Personally, it was really interesting to see the ins and outs of puppeteers and how the put on shows.

When comparing this documentary to other storytelling forms we have studied this semester, I saw a lot of differences. When comparing it to another feature film, other films do not use interviews and flashback pictures to tell the story; they have characters and plot lines. Short stories also tell stories through plot lines, characters, and theme. The strategies are a lot different in short stories, regular movies, and documentaries and it was interesting to see the difference when watching Being Elmo.