CODES AND CONVENTIONS OF DOCUMENTARIES

JAMES OWEN

In this presentation I will state and describe the main features of documentaries. To find out this information I watched 3 different documentaries from 3 different channels, this allowed me to get a broad spectrum of information about documentaries and how they differ, and analyse the information to present the main codes and conventions. The 3 documentaries I watched were:

Trevor McDonald: The Mafia

Anorexia: A boy in a girl's

world

Royal Marines Commando School

VOICEOVERVoiceovers are where a person speaks over the top of filmed footage to describe what is happening to the audience or to expand the audiences knowledge based on the footage.Voiceovers are usually authoritative, encouraging the audience to think that they have either some specialist knowledge or, in the case of well known people we hear in voiceovers like Sir David Attenborough, the ‘right’ opinions that people should pay attention to.

REAL FOOTAGE OF EVENTSThis is recorded footage of an event that is real. No actors are used, they are all real life events.Documentary is generally seen as non-fiction. A convention of a documentary is that all events presented to us are real and actually happened. Documentaries often go to great lengths to convince us that footage is real and unaltered in any way, although editing and voiceovers that are used can often affect the reality the audience see.

MUSICNon digetic music is edited over the top of footage.Music is used to affect the way the audience sees certain events. This depends on the type of music used to determine how the audience views this. For example, tense music was used when a mob member encountered two ex acquaintances on the street in Trevor McDonald: The Mafia to display the danger that they are in. Each type of music makes the audience view the clip in a different manner.

INTERVIEWSInterviews are where the presenter of the documentary asks a person questions about certain events.This person could have been part of the event or involved in some way. This allows the audience to gain more knowledge about the event and see it from several different perspectives. The interviewer can also construct the questions they ask in order to gain information that they did not know before, in order to expand their knowledge on the event.

SUBTITLESSubtitles are captions displayed at the bottom of the documentary. These are edited on after the documentary has been filmed.These are used in documentaries if footage is recorded and some of it is hard for the audience to understand so captions are used. They also may be used when interviewing someone who does not speak English, as there may not have been any witnesses of the event that speak fluent English. This allows the audience to expand their knowledge as without the foreigners viewpoint they may miss key points.

RECONSTRUCTIONSReconstructions are a real event recreated by actors and filmed in a studio.These are used in documentaries because not everything is caught on camera, a reconstruction can be used for events that were not caught on camera to display the audience what happened and to broaden their knowledge on what happened. These reconstructions are usually created based on the story of a witness or witnesses of the event in order to make the reconstruction as close as possible to the real thing.