Documentary Conventions

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 In this blog, I will be talking about the conventions of documentaries and how I will be adapting them or turning away from them in my own documentary. I will also be explaining how I began to dive into the genre of documentaries including the introduction from earlier this year. Lastly, I will touch on the target audience for this genre and how that relates to my supposed target audience for my own film.

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Documentary Intro:

        Documentaries are special storytelling formats that are non-fiction. They typically are made to attempt to inform, educate, and entertain the viewers through real-life events, situations, and topics that range from largely varying issues. In order to fully capture the non-fiction and realistic feeling of this genre, documentaries use interviews, B-roll, and narrations to present and offer realism to topics. Documentaries can also have distinct pacing and filming styles such as hand-held shots and movement in the footage. Overall though, documentaries are very free with the content as they can range from historic events to scientific discoveries to the life of a celebrity.

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Although I have watched 3 documentaries, 2 of which were full-length documentaries, I will only be mentioning the last one. This is because the last documentary I watched for my class was an episodic documentary that relates closer to my own topic and conventions. If you want to learn more about my true first introduction to documentaries and see how the other 2 documentaries helped me understand this genre more click here.

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At the time when I watched this episodic documentary, my group and I were preparing for our own documentary project. This project was going to build up our idea and knowledge of documentaries to provide the option of a documentary for our portfolio project. This project basically gave us enough background and experience with documentaries to make the option available.

        Before my group and I dived into our own documentary project, our class explored this new type of documentary: episodic documentaries. Abstract, the only episodic documentary we watched, really stuck with me. Not only did it let me see more of the varying topics that could be shown in documentaries, but it also helped me get a larger perspective on documentaries in general.

        The episode we watched together in class focused on costume design and showed the creative and distinct aspects of this type of art. This project not only widened my perspective and view, but it also showed me the grand importance and role of B-roll and staged B-roll in documentaries. While we had briefly covered the topic of B-roll in our prior documentaries, Abstract's specific vision relating to the staged B-roll provided a whole new view into the application of this technical element. 

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My Conventions:

After briefly explaining my intro to documentaries once again, I'm going to be going over how this all relates to my film, specifically how it the conventions see similarities and differences.

A big typical convention of documentaries that I plan to stray away from a little more are hand-held shots. Hand-held shots are normally used in documentaries to force and apply a larger sense of reality and truth to the matter. Similarly to how almost all of my shots in my documentary project were still, I plan to do the same thing. I have thought of the idea that I could use hand-held shots to make playing, jumping, or having fun with the pets looks more like reality and exciting; however, I have decided to approach this topic with a more calm incentive instead of the more hyper and fun side.

On the other hand, an element that I will be greatly embracing is the interviews and B-roll. Although I do plan on including a voice-over/narration, I want my story mainly to be following the interviewee stories. This a big thing I wish I could go back and change in my documentary project: the relying of the narration to help the story flow and move along. For this project I hope the personal stories of their pets and helpers will allow the interviewees to guide the rest of the story. This will also make me able to match the B-roll with their stories instead of the narration.

        Something else that is extremely hard to not do in my opinion is selective editing. I have always not liked the idea of selective editing since you can completely alter what a person is saying; however, using it in your own projects to cut out any unnecessary topics or elements that may make the clips not flow with each other is always a help. Another thing I learned from my documentary project is to not make the selective editing obvious, meaning cut the sound when B-roll or something else is being shown so you can't see the person glitch or cut from one clip to the next.

Since I don't have many more main conventions, I'll jumble the rest that are necessary in 1 paragraph.

        Throughout my piece I hope to have a constant feeling of joy and happiness by using only bright clips in the daylight or while the sun is setting so it creates a warmer and more wholesome feeling and tone. I will also be embracing the idea of matching music with your B-roll, to develop your point of view on the topic, and to further set the warm mood of the piece. I also will probably be using some parallel-editing to establish connections between the interviewees and the pets.

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Target Audience:

Unlike specific genres of films that typically have a main target audience, documentaries have a very grand range. This is due to their create nature and widespan of topics they could cover. My specific topic is also kind of straying from the typical pet or animal documentary target audience.

        Normally, pet and animal documentaries are thought to have a younger target audience as the cute and funny aspects of the topic are attractive and interesting to younger audiences interests. Since my topic takes the more calm and collected side of the topic, the target audience would be a little older. This leads me to my own target audience (or at least what I believe it to be at this moment):

- All genders but mainly focused to women

- Ages 15-25 (teenager - young adult)

- Middle-class

- People who have or want pets

- Interested in pets and/or animals in general

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Anyways, thank you for reading my blog and keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming vlog on my storyline and progress for my project so far!

-Dana