Types of Documentaries

Fully Narrated

• A fully narrated documentary is a documentary with a voice over. This is done to help the audience gain a better understanding of what is going on. Fully narrated documentaries use the voice over of ‘God’, so that people take what they hear as the truth. They also use direct address to engage the audience. And the voice over then goes along with the visuals that the audience is seeing; meaning that everything is based around the visuals. An example would be Frozen Planet. The narrator is authorities about the topic.

Fly on the Wall• Fly on the wall documentaries use cinema verities which captures and

brings the audience in. This makes the audience think it is the real setting. However camera angles and editing effects the way the audience sees things and what they are shown. A fly on the wall documentary is mainly observational and there is little commentary or narration. This means that this type of documentary is filmed as it is and not staged. This helps to give chilling experiences for certain topics, as it is showing you what has actually happened. However, it is the editing that can give a final meaning to a situation as you are actually only seeing what the creator of the documentary wants you to see and so it cannot be taken as complete truth as certain aspects will be missed out, which may be important to you but not to what the creator wants you to see. Light weight cameras where used to film right where the action was taking place. This is also un-staged so the directors can not predict the outcomes.

Mixed

• Mixed documentaries are a mixture of interviews, observation and narration to help to advance the argument the creator is trying to put forward. In a mixed documentary as the generalist speaks there are visual images that appear over the spoken words. An advantage of this is that it is representing an objective reality and not just a selective construction.

Self-Reflexive

• When using a self-reflexive documentary, the documenter speaks over to the camera to really draw attention in to the audience. However, when this is done some documentaries can be criticised that this is not about the subject it is about the documenter. Also self-reflexive documentaries have been criticised as being confusing to an audience as they can be said to be drawing attention to themselves for publicity.

Docu-Drama

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