Pre-Production: Sex Robots and Us Review

This documentary seems to go from interview to interview without any real break between. Like my documentary, it is this journey which is presenter lead by someone who has relevance to the topic (someone who has robotic arms and legs as an amputee). The synopsis is:

"Cyborg presenter James Young journeys across the world to meet the makers and users of sex robots who have plans for a Westworld future where sex bots live amongst us.

In Barcelona, James visits Dr Sergi Santos and his wife Maritsa, creators of one of the world’s most advanced sex robots and the answer, they suggest, to many couples' miss-matched libido. Sergi tests out his latest robot and James finds out how Maritsa copes with Sergi using the dolls himself.

Elsewhere in Barcelona James also finds simple versions of the robots - not yet fitted with AI - being used in a brothel, and visits a professional sex toy tester who tries out one of the latest male sex dolls to hit the market.

Back in the UK, James visits Sergi’s business partner Arran who has been demo’ing a Samantha robot in a sex shop near Liverpool. Arran tells James about his latest plan - to offer his sex robots to elderly people’s homes.

In Japan, James meets two of the most human-like robots to have been created before discovering a darker side to the sex robot industry when he visits a factory mass-producing ultra-realistic dolls.

So do we really want sex robots in our lives?"
Most of the documentary is shot handheld even including the interviews and none of them seem to be incredibly well thought out or even well lit. Whilst this style is effective to appeaser more casual and less formal to a younger audience,  it isn't something I would consider for our documentary. I really want to make the most odd my role as DoP/Editor and include cinematic shots I am going to enjoy prodding. Having cinematic mixed with factual entertainment, its a line that is rarely crossed into each other apart from in more experimental documentaries on platforms such as Vimeo and Netflix. Because cinematically shot documentaries are so well liked in America (Netflix is an American franchise), it makes sense for ours to be shot like this in order to fit in with the platform.



Not well lit
Deep Depth of Field
No Rule of Thirds







I believe this is a reallly poorly shot interview and there is no real skill that has gone into iit. Even for the format and style it is targeted (BBC Three) I feel it could have at least mastered some of the basics.

This documentary was also shot over a long period of over a year as there are constant developments on technology and its quite a new thing. This has made it really insightful from a point of progression. It concludes fairly openly with the question 'what is the fuutre for technology and how will it decensitise or disrup humans'.



The way this is filmed isn't something that inspired me personally. I felt it wasn't fitting with the style I was going for given I want to experiment with the cinematic look. I like the concept of the journey but I found it was too linier. It was going from one interview to the next with no real development besides the more superior robots in Japan. It is filmed very basiclally and I image has with him one self-shooter to follow the presenter around. Whilst this was useful to watch as an example docuemntary, I feel this is the opposite of what I want to get out of the documentary.

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