Documentary Mini Task

Documentary Mini Task

What is Documentary?

A documentary is a report, which consists usually of other people’s opinions around a certain subject, in which people would go to the place gather information and interview people for more primary data.  This will all help to answer the certain question surrounding the documentary in question.

Key features of expository documentaries

These documentaries consist of a narrator speaking directly towards you giving multiple rhetorical questions, which engage the audience to be interested in the question and the answers to the question. It is usually a strong male voice to sound more serious perhaps to get the point across to people watching. Some more of the persuasive techniques they use are hard-hitting facts and opinions to the subject.

Observational Documentaries

In this there is still a narrator but not always, sometimes there would not be a narrator at all and just there to observe and lets the viewer make their own opinion on the matter, but if there is a narrator they would not give their opinion and instead just say what is going on. They don’t use persuasive techniques as they don’t want to seem biased it’s like there is no question rather you make up your own question from this and give your own answers the data is just there. Some good examples of this are David Attenborough’s wild life documentaries.

Interactive Documentaries

With these, they are interested in really getting you involved by asking you questions, showing graphics of text and graphs. This is done for you to formulate your own answer along with regular camera with regular camera work to reflect regular lives and be as if you are there adding to the interactive aspect. They usually revolve around regular everyday life and use graphics for you to answer for yourself, as it is mean to reflect people’s everyday lives. Some examples of this is the 2009 interactive documentary Prison Valley, showing the everyday life of prisoners making you understand how they feel.

Reflective Documentaries

A reflective documentary is a more experimental type of documentary in which the producers do not mind showing camera crews or any behind the scenes footage and make the audience as interested in the documentary subject as they are with everything else. Some examples that use this technique are documentaries made by people such as Louis Theroux and nick broom field who are for making these type of documentary in which they would not hide the camera crew and act quite natural even when interviewing people.

Performative Documentaries

This type of documentary incorporate the filmmaker as the main character as he is placed in these places to set a scenario, in which is usually quite biased and somewhat exaggerated. An example of this would be the Michael Moore documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002) in which there is a scene where Michael Moore is in a bank and shows how easy it is to just get a gun at a bank.

Conclusion

When it comes to creating film you should always have to have some sort of moral to forward the narrative, and documentary is no different as it is based on the question or idea of the documentary. You should provide real evidence, and not exaggerate like you would a Hollywood movie, as documentaries are not that its more having an idea and trying to inform and get your own point across and showing reality, as otherwise you get the wrong idea of a documentary and is more like propaganda.