Research & Planning: Research Task

In this task I made myself research targets to research categories within documentaries, which ill enable me to know what an audience want and like, which if I use this information to my advantage could make my documentary successful. The targets were-

• Most Popular Documentaries
• Documentary that was most successful at the Box Office
• Research techniques used in Documentaries

Most popular documentaries (2010)

v  Inside Job rated 8/10- a closer look at what brought about the financial meltdown.

v  Senna rated 8.7/10- a documentary on Brazilian Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna, who won the F1 world championship three times before his death at age 34.

v  Catfish rated 7.1/10- in late 2007, filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost sensed a story unfolding as they began to film the life of Ariel's brother...

v  Jackass 3D rated 7.1/10- Johnny Knoxville and company return for the third installment of their TV show spin-off, where dangerous stunts and explicit public displays rule.

              Ratings by users on IMDB official website.

Most Successful at box office

Fahrenheit 9/11- Made $119M at box office, released of 2004; the documentary was about Michael Moore's view on what happened to the United States after September 11; and how the Bush Administration allegedly used the tragic event to push forward its agenda for unjust wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Techniques Used in Documentaries

There are various techniques used in documentary, one of which is the voice-over. This is when there is a commentary by the filmmaker, spoken while the camera is filming or added to the soundtrack during the production, this is also known as a narrative.

Depending on the type of documentary there is a lot of archived footage, where materials obtained a film library that is previously recorded to shows historical events and is then added to the documentary, also reconstructions are added to documentaries to shows previous events that happened that shows an extremely close representation of the events that are reconstructed.

An exposition is often used at the beginning of a documentary and introduces the important themes of the film. It is important because it creates the viewers first impression and introduces the viewer to the content. This can be an important technique in documentaries as it may decide whether the viewer will continue to watch it, this is usually done by specially chosen dramatic segments of the documentary to catch the viewers attention. Also the way that they are montages makes the viewer to believe a certain theme presented by the documentary and this presents its view much more persuasively to the viewer.