Last Minutes With Oden
The “Last Minutes With Oden” is a short documentary that shows us the last dying moments of a dog that changed a mans life. We follow the story through the eyes of Jason Wood, the owner of the dog as he experiences these moments. Further research by the filmmaker (Eliot Rausch), Jason Woods suffered from ADHD. He was always heavily medicated and this led to him having a drug problem (O'Neill, 2010) before he met Oden. Oden was his turning point.
I won't spoil the documentary as I highly recommend you to watch it, but there are some really raw and emotional scenes that really bring out what he was truly feeling about losing his dog. I really gave such a real sense of emotion that even I began crying my eyes out whilst watching it. Most of the film is done with voiceover so it felt like I was being told a story through my ears and the visuals reflected the words he was saying. It was a perfect combination of the two hence why I was emotionally traumatized. I questioned whether they filmed this during the moments of Oden passing or it was archive footage but nonetheless I couldn’t tell which.
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The documentary as a whole really showed how important a relationship can be. Whether it is a dog, friend, etc. It’s a story filled with hope but mostly on how to regain that hope when it gets lost. My only thing about it is the audio… Watching the film again( Yes I still cried a lot) I noticed how the audio had a lot of background noise and at some points, the music felt overpowering. Yes, the music fits the overall perspective of the film and really gives a sense of heaviness and sadness but if the music had been turned down a notch and the audio been done differently.
In order to really test out how the visuals were, I watched the documentary on mute. Yes I know, it’s a documentary carried by a voice-over… But I wanted to test out if the visuals were as strong as I remembered. At a first glance, I noticed how shaky the camerawork is, luckily with the way the film was coloured and how the shots a done it feels like I see a lot of loneliness which makes the shakiness work. An issue I found is lack of focus during the close-ups. I felt like they could have been focused to really emphasize how he copes with this situation.
For example, he smokes, the close up of that is blurry just for a second then comes in focus with the shakiness. It didn’t appeal to me very much and I felt like if a tripod had been used it would have made the shot more clearer on how he is feeling during this scenario. I feel like there should be either or if you know what I mean. Some scenes are shaky, some aren’t… It just gets a tad convoluted. Trust me guys when watching something watch it fully as normal, then just audio, then just visuals and you will see a film in a new eye as I have. You really begin to appreciate all the work put into the art form.
I really enjoyed this documentary, it really opened my eye to a different side of film making that I never was introduced to before. I highly recommend you watch this film just make sure to have a lot of tissues!
Click the Picture below to go and watch it!
References-
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O'Neill, C. (2010, October 12). Remember That 'Dogumentary'? There's More To It. Retrieved April 23, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2010/10/12/130518741/phos
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Rausch, E. (2020, April 23). Last Minutes with ODEN. Retrieved April 23, 2020, from https://vimeo.com/8191217
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Rausch, E. (n.d.). Last Minutes with ODEN. Retrieved April 23, 2020, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1920998/