The first thought I had while watching Extremis was that it is a very powerful documentary, not only because of the type of story that is portrayed but also on how they manage to capture emotions from an intimate perspective.
In terms of audio, I like the balance that exists between the dialogues, the soft piano music, as well as common ambiance sounds in the ICU. I think that by keeping the music only for certain short scenes, the human aspect of the documentary is better highlighted.
The structure in the editing style follows a slow flow and made clear and smooth transitions in most of the documentary. I found the editing very connected to the filmmaker style since his shots emphasized that the idea of letting everything flows naturally, without forcing subjects to action. Also, the filmmaker makes a great work by focusing on a lot of close-ups to the subjects. I consider it was helpful to highlight facial expressions, emotions, and outstand the painful situation. I like how they managed to capture a single scene from different angles. For example, when the doctor is talking to Selena’s brothers and we, as viewers, get a whole scenario even though the shots are kind of individual. On the other side, I felt that most of the B-roll are literal visual shots since it contributes to the theme of the documentary, helping to set the scene of every situation and its subjects. There were only a few shots that have that sense of being creative by capturing the attention by showing subjects’ hands or the medical equipment with its sound.
I consider this kind of documentary is not simple to get access to, since not only depends to get permission from the hospital but also, it’s hard to get the consent of the relatives of the patients during those difficult moments. I think that it takes a lot of time for the filmmaker to build a confident relationship with the subjects, probably hours of talking and at the same time keep a certain distance to make the story trustier at the moment of shooting the documentary. More than that, I guess that the audio setup should have been done quickly to get every single detail and not miss any strong dialogue or sound.
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