Nic Hill's Piece By Piece is an eighty-minute examination of the San Francisco graffiti scene and what makes it interesting. While it briefly addresses the legal ramifications of going out and spray painting your name or your alias or your gang on the side of a building, the focus here is on how graffiti is more an art form and less and crime – thought the merits of that are obviously very debatable.

First things first, this documentary only covers graffiti in San Francisco, and it doesn't really venture anywhere outside of that city. It doesn't cover Los Angeles or New York or Detroit or Chicago so in that respect it's rather limited but at the same time, it looks like graffiti has been around San Francisco long enough that in the context of this documentary, one city is enough. To cover any more than that would extend the scope of the project and extend the running time of the movie to an inconceivable length.

The documentary does go all the way back to the seventies in an attempt to try to explain how and why graffiti culture has evolved into what it is now compared to what it was in the early days and how that change has taken place. Many different 'artists' are interviewed on camera, each one with a different story to tell and a different take on why they do what they do. Many of them appear with masks on to hide their faces – an acknowledgement of sorts that what they're doing could very well land them in jail – very few of them really acknowledging that what they do destroys property and is against the law for a very good reason.

Not surprisingly there are a lot of gang ties in the San Francisco graffiti scene and a lot of the footage we see in the documentary shows us taggers and painters throwing up their names and/or their gang names. Sadly, there isn't a lot of focus here on some of the actual pictures that get done, graffiti style, around the city which is a shame as those are usually (though not always) more impressive than the tags that are so common not only in San Francisco but across the country.

Piece By Piece calls itself "a journey into the most intriguing and misunderstood artistic movement of modern youth culture" and to an extent this is true but at the same time, the 'misunderstood' aspect isn't all that well explained. There are some veiled attempts to discuss the consequences of what these guys are out there doing, they're very obviously overshadowed by the 'look how cool this is' aspect of the documentary. There's little discussion as to why the movement is misunderstood from an anti-graffiti standpoint, it's all pro, so this ends up being a very biased piece and more of an opinion piece than anything else.

There are plenty of good qualities to the film, however. The interviews with the graffiti artists are interesting and it's fascinating to hear their stories about different attempts and leaving their mark. Some have had run-ins with the law, others always seem to get away with it. One unlucky tagger was shot and killed by a man after getting caught spraying his window and we hear a few sentimental tales about him. As a human-interest piece or character study, Piece By Piece works well. It's just a shame that it wasn't a little more objective and that it didn't show us more variation in the actual graffiti in general.

Video:

The film was obviously a labor of love and done on a fairly low budget on a DV camera but even with that in mind, it still looks quite good. The disc is well authored in that the shimmering sometimes associated with DV productions is kept to a minimum and there are no problems with mpeg compression artifacts. Color reproduction is pretty strong which is important given how big a part color plays in the graffiti we see in the documentary.