In-Depth Analysis of 'Steve Jobs: The Billion Dollar Hippy'

Steve Jobs: The Billion Dollar Hippy

 

The Billion Dollar Hippy is a highly intellectual documentary that explains how Steve Jobs rose to the top of the technology market, including both the ups and down of his life long career. It starts by showing various different shrines in Job's name, and the voice over explains what the documentary is about and starts by stating that Steve Jobs died in 2011. Immediately we as the audience develop the impression, from the mourner's reactions to his shrines, that he was a very important and influential person to many people. After these initial shrine shots, we see close ups of the inside of an old Ford Mustang as it is driven along an old country road in America. this reinforces the 'hippy' theme to the documentary. As the documentary progresses, we see more and more about how motivated and determined he becomes as a person and we also learn that he is not in the business purely for the money. He wants to change the world.

 

The editing is purely quick cuts, swapping from compilation footage of Jobs to talking head interviews with many of Steve Jobs' colleagues. The compilation footage depicts Jobs in various different interviews and photoshoots and also shows footage of his previous Apple presentations, where he would present the brand new products that his company are about to release.There is background music throughout almost the whole documentary and all of the songs featured fit the 'hippy' genre, for example Bob Dylan. Not only does this fit the theme of the documentary but also it makes it more entertaining and easier for the audience to watch.

 

We wanted to create a documentary in the same layout as this, however ours would be more sarcastic - more like a mocumentary. The main points that we wanted to take from this documentary was the talking head interviews (of which we have 4), the voice of God (in the strong British accent, similar to the one in Steve Jobs' documentary) and the idea that Steve Jobs was almost like the 'mesiah' is what we wanted Alex's character to be like to the people of Ware.

 

Our documentary is only the first 5 minutes, however the narrative structure is similar to that of the Steve Jobs documentary. Our documentary follows Todorov's narrative theory, which includes 5 steps. Although we only see the equilibrium stage in our documentary, if we were to make the rest of the documentary, it would include the other 4 stages of the theory.

 

There is also evidence of Propp's character types in our documentary:

 

Alex = The Princess

Alex's Dad = The Princesses Father

'Greg' = The Protector

Carlisle (manager) = The Doner

 

And so on.

 

There are many techniques used in the Steve Jobs documentary that we hope to incorporate in our own documentary, although we will have to change them slightly in order to fit our more sarcastic theme.