Documentary: A documentary film is a type of film that documents reality. It presents true facts about a person or event, in simple terms it present the factual world and life as it is. Despite the fact that they are not scripted the scenes are carefully chosen and arranged and the people within the documentary are not actors. They usually rely on voice over narration to describe what is happening in the scene, and often include interviews with the people in the film.
There are many sub genres under the documentary genre like:
Mockumentary - A mockumentary is a "mock documentary", a parody of the often earnest nature of the documentary film genre.
Nature Documentary - A nature documentary is a documentary film about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on film taken in their natural habitat.
Docudrama - is a documentary-style genre that features dramatized re-enactments of actual historical events.
Docufiction - refers to the cinematographic combination of fiction and documentary.
Outstanding examples of documentaries
The inconvenient truth
It’s a documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim aiming to educate citizens about the devastating effects of global warming. The film provides us with a range of facts and information in a thoughtful and compelling way. Like all documentaries it promotes awareness and through the compelling presentation of slide shows we sympathies with al gore and understand his message about how we should act quickly on this issue. The film clearly stays in touch with the codes and conventions of a documentary film, as it documents the reality of global warming and its effects on the planet and civilization.
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Short films, Codes and Conventions
A short film documentary explores a certain issue in a set time. They follow many of the conventions in a long feature documentary such as voice over’s, interviews and Archival footage.
From my research into short film documentaries I found that there are many downfalls in creating short film documentaries. They firstly fail to explore an area, topic or issue in enough depth; secondly the fact that it does this makes it pointless and unsatisfying as the audiences are unable to gain enough insight into the area being studied in the short film.
Analyses of short film docs
In today’s lesson we analyzed 4 documentaries, which had different contents - 'The city affected to crystal meth', 'Street Art', 'Bright new wonder', and 'The future unwritten', they were about different things, and had different styles, for example the future unwritten is an autobiographical/biographical documentary about a man called Strunner who isn’t really present in the documentary, the makers (he's friends) use voice over’s of his radio show and old clips of his life, in contrast the city addicted to crystal meth is about the effects of crystal meth, its narrated by Louis Theroux who's actually present in the documentary, the doc uses a wide range of camera shots for the purpose of creating sympathy, for example it zooms in when the mother is in tears because of the fact that she's a helpless mother whose addicted to drugs. In contrast Bright new wonder uses a techniques where which the protagonist character the father is looking directly at the camera, which is standing on a tripod, its in a mid shot. This technique creates various effects it firstly draws us (the audience) into the documentary, it secondly creates a more conversational atmosphere as he's directly addressing us, as a result were a more sympathetic towards him. Street art is a documentary about the issue of graffiti; it explores the different views about graffiti, such as how some people view it as a form of vandalism and others as a creative way of depicting youth art.
