Documentaries' Success on Television
After choosing to make a documentary for my A2 project, the first
thing I set about doing was to research other documentaries that had
been made and had been successful on television. I researched relevant
mediums to gain knowledge and understanding of the project I was
taking on and to make sure that on completion my product followed all
the codes and conventions of other documentaries shown in the
allocated time slot, on the same channel I was basing my documentaries
style around, therefore meaning that mine did not look out of place
and unprofessional As my projects brief was to make only the opening 5
minutes of a documentary and not a complete one, I only analysed the
opening 5 minutes of other documentaries. I analysed the opening 5
minutes several times so that I could specifically check the different
aspects of each opening sequence such as the theme, style, narrative,
genre, documentary focus, editing, etc. I recorded many documentaries
from the television and then analysed closely the similarities and
differences that each documentary contained to give myself an idea of
what my documentary should look like. I analysed, amongst others, the
documentaries ’Love in Oldham’, which was about inter-racial
relationships and ‘When We Were Kings’, which was a highly successful
documentary about the boxer Mohammed Ali- This documentary won an
Oscar. However the style of the Ali documentary would not be ideal for
my documentary as it has different stylistic devices, it is celebrity
inspired therefore the audience attention can be kept easily by the
main focus being on the celebrity, Ali. I analysed ...
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...uch as the BBC
documentary ‘Skint‘ which involved other characters to inform the
viewing audience about other aspects about the subjects life and
personality. I would include the drug abusers mother to gain her
aspect on her sons life adding depth and understanding to the
documentary as other similar products would include. Many ideas were
changed and developed during the project all in hope of improving the
overall product.
The technology I used in the making of my opening five minutes to a
documentary were the cameras for filming the footage used in the
product, the I-movie program on the Apple computers for editing the
footage and including music and voice-overs for the narrator and also
the tape recorder to make it possible to record and analyse other
products on the same medium as the one I was producing on.