Commentary on Alinghi – The Inside Story.

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By winning the America’s cup Alinghi really boosted the passion for sailing felt by the swiss population. Nicolas Wadimoff shot and edited a documentary on the swiss team when it arrived in New Zealand and a little bit before that. It was an interesting documentary to watch with some shots which are spectacular to wat watch on the big screen. There is a weak element within the documentary though and and that is the depth to which they could have gone.

Being interested in sailing myself I find that they should have explored the more technical side, for example attempting to get interviews with the design and manufacturing teams, maybe exploring the importance of the photography of sails and the discussions which go into understanding how to read those pictures and how to choose the best strategy. It would add a certain interest and complexity to the documentary.

The elements within the documentary which I feel should have been brushed over are firstly the conflict between the New Zealand media and the swiss team because we had heard about it in the international press.

With this form of documentary it’s quite a complicated event to cover because of the amount of time between the training, the motivation of team members and more. If you’re working on a documentary like this then you need to shoot many more hrs of material, have everything covered with hours of material left, especially if you can edit it at home first and do the clean version of the edit later on.

I’ll add more to this as time continues