Types of Documentries

Brief Notes on documentaries

Documentaries is a way of showing truthful accurate information in a factual format - normally following a chronological story. The risk of documentaries is they can be quite opinionated so you need to keep them as unbiased as possible telling both sides of a story. A few elements of documentaries are 

Interviews: Interviews normally involve the rule of thirds, which is a simple composition to follow to create a successful interview. The main camera angle involved is eye level to make sure you feel like you are connecting with the documentary, so you can understand it better. 

Cutaways: Is a main editing technique in documentaries because it helps us visually show the audience what the documentary is discussing, the narrative is always relevant to the cutaway's, making them have a clearer understanding. It is also a popular feature because it varies the documentary not making it as boring, and more interesting for the viewers. 

Archive footage: Archive footage is real life footage involved put into documentaries it is other known as 'found material' and these are normally used to make the documentary more reliable and be evidence for what they are discussing. 
Subtitles: Subtitles is a graphic element that usually introduces who is being interviewed and what they do. They can also be used to show statistical information to make the documentary more reliable to our audience.

Documentaries can be split into six different types or subsets

Poetic Documentaries

Before poetic documentaries, films had logic and a meaning to what they were about and why however when poetic documentaries came in the 1920's  it disrupted the coherence of a film. Poetic documentaries are abstract, and contain spontaneous moments for example, random images that do not connect would appear one after another. These were to make the audience feel uncomfortable and not really understand the concept of the film and why it was being shown.

Expository documentaries
In expository documentaries the narrator speaks directly to the viewer in an authoritive commentary, proposing a strong argument and opinion/point of view. It includes rhetorical questions that do not require an answer, however are used to try and persuade the viewer what you are trying to suggest. The commentary s mostly objective with a male voice over, the type that is instantly reconisged can be known as the' voice of god' I expository the images are often important but they are mostly used to expand and advance the argument that is being suggest, giving backup evidence for it being accurate. The authoritative narration persuade and speak directly to the audience, with objective opinions which analyses both sides.

Observational documentaries
Observational documentaries observe reality, and human behaviour in different environments with no interference or interaction with the human behaviourur. Filmmakers who use observation documentary thought that the poetic documentaries where too abstract and random so attempted to make it have more co hearance and natural by attempting to observe human behaviour in different circumstances.

Participatory documentaries

They believe it is impossible for the filmmaker no to influence or alter the events being film. These documentaries are similar to a technique of participant observation. This is where the filmmaker is part of the film, and is used to see how situations in the film are being affected or altered by their presence.

Reflexive documentaries

Reflexive documentaries is an abstract concept to documentaries. They used to use Brechtian theatre techniques which was to make the audience think and reflect off the experience (in this case documentaries) and think more into the deeper meaning. They would question everything and question reality. Brectian theatre also had the shock factor to it, and the audience would be surprised and not expect the situations that would happen on stage. They impacted on how the audience felt and made them feel comfortable.

Performative Documentaries

These are subjective and personal emotional responses to experiences to events in the world. These documentaries reflects off own personal experiences. These are biased, opinionated and are used to help us see things in the way we wouldn't experience them of perceive them.