We started by looking at what goes into Documentaries, the various styles and content that we see in the majority of them. The purpose of documentaries is to Entertain, Educate or Inform us, they go about this using a large variety of types.
These include:
Wildlife - A nature style program, usually with a celebrity voice over (particularly our national treasure David Attenborough) is which they will discuss a animal species. These are wildly popular and are shot in quite exotic locations, the shows are primarily dominated by cut away, this is maybe because it is hard to control animals in the wild for such a large period of times, they will edit a lot of footage together to form some sort of narrative, this personifies the animals to entice viewers.
I would personal say that this type of style is what kicked of the "Celebrity Led" style of documentary, in which they would send of a well known celeb to exotic locations to teach us about perhaps an animal, a country that a charity is helping (Comic Relief and similar televised charities.)
or a road trip across the country (anything with Billy Connolly and Stephen Fry in America series.)
Historical - All documentaries are cheap, that is why so many are commissioned and made, but Historical documentaries seem to be the cheapest, they are dominated by cut away of past footage and facts, this style of documentary contain interviews with "experts" to add clarity to the facts that the narrator is giving the audience.
Countdown - A countdown documentary contains a list of events, characters, subjects, etc about a particular topic, celebrities and experts will then talk to camera about each thing on the list. For example, BBC3 do a yearly documentary called "Most Annoying People Of..." in which it counts down 100 famous faces and figures who have annoyed the british public that year, and why. Although this style is used quite a lot, especially in the early 2000's in which Jimmy Carr used to host a "100 most..." seemingly every week, there not what I would consider a traditional documentary, even when writing this I am still pondering whether I have made a mistake, we do still see a lot of what we come to expect in documentaries, such as interviews, narration, name tags, titles, heavy editing, vox pops, a library of footage/pictures, music that relates to the tone of the programme.
Docu-Drama
Docu-Soaps - These are documentaries that heavily concentrate on the drama to entice an audience, this can be anything from series like "The Secret Millionaire". Anything life changing really, it also ties into a style called the "Personal Documentaries". Programmes that concentrate on one person or several people going through a similar problem or coping with a particular issue, examples of these include "Deaf Teens - Hearing The World For The First Time" on BBC3. These are incredibly popular as they are hard hitting and emotional, I feel like this is the style of documentary the majority of our class will use due to the nature of our brief.
These are just but a few examples of the styles of documentaries, I could produce pages upon pages of various styles, and even saying that those above are the "popular" styles would be an exaggeration, it is the topics, people and places that makes a successful documentary.
So before we could begin to think about making our own documentaries, we had to find and watch them to see these styles that we had just noted down in work, and to write down what it is that we generally see in each of them, and maybe if there was any similarities between documentaries, despite the fact that they wouldn't be about the same subject.
The first documentary that we was advised to catch was a recent episode of BBC's Panorama, as it was on the subject of Alcohol abuse. It threw a lot at me within the first 30 seconds, they showed snippits of people sharing intimiate stories about how desperate they were for there next fix of alcohol, these included the "celebrity" narrator, who was also giving pieces to camera as he had similar problems with alcohol in the past, I felt like they put these snippits at the beginning to entice people who would perhaps be flicking through channels and catch it, they also dangle the few snippits of celebrities being interviewed about the alcohol abuse they had in the past because we as a nation are infatuated with the celebrity world, of course there was only one interview with a past alcoholic celebrity (not including Cambell, the narrator).
Speaking of Cambell, it was strange the several parts he had to play in this episode, for starters he was the narrator, to provide us with statistics and facts, he was an interviewer/host to get the stories out of others, but he was also the victim, so there was serveral points in which he was sat down and having a one on one with the camera, these were moments in which he shared his own experiences and opinions about the topic, maybe strange was a bad choice of words but it was certainly something I hadn;t seen in other documentaries.
The choice of cutaways was interesting, it showed Cambell jogging around his local area, perhaps getting across the message of a more healthier lifestyle now he has quit the drink, or maybe just putting out a message of "exercise more" to us the audience.
The next documentary I watched was an american Docu-Drama called The King Of Kongs - A Fistful Of Quarters.
This was a fantastic documentary about the world of competative gaming, the biggest problem I had with it was that it felt scripted, almost like this was faked, or that the people was told to only say or share certain points of the story, for example at one point the "antagonist" of the Docu-Drama is saying that with all the luck that he has, he feels sorry for the poor bastard who is down on his luck, it then cuts to the 2nd main character, the "protaganist" discussing how he had just recently lost his job, and the tough time his family is going through. Maybe this is down to editing more than a faked/scripted documentary, but it did take me out of the film for a short while.
I also should say that I choose the words antagonist and protaganist as King Of Kongs really does paint the picture of Good Vs Evil, hero trying to beat the villain, again, this could be due to the editing, or the scripted dialogue, the "antagonist" of the piece could actually be the nicest guy you could ever meet, but they show him to be the biggest D-Bag.
This documentary didn't teach me anything about the world we are shown, I know about as much about the world of competative gaming coming out of that hour an half then I did entering it, it concentrates more heavily on the struggle between the two main characters, as that is far more interesting then the gaming itself, of course I feel like I watched a drama/soap rather than a documentary but it still entertained me, and we forget that some documentaries set out to achieve that.
I walked away from King Of Kongs with a theory that Americans tell a narrative through pieces to camera, vox pops and text, the american documentaries that I had previously watched didn't have any narration, whereas British documentaries always seemed to have a narrator (again, I was thinking back to previous ones I had watched, especially a lot of wildlife documentaires.)
The next documentary I watched helped my theory as well, despite it's wide generallisation.
The only difference I found between this documentary and others I had previously watched is that it didn't concentrate on interviews with these people to drive the narrative, instead, it took the two people the documentary concentrated on and brought them together, one to help out, and to share experiences. Of course they didn't do this all the time, sometimes it would be members of family visiting (with a narrator informing us of the narration and back story)
This seems to be another technique used in Docu-Dramas, to bring a camera into someones life but make them go about there normal business or talk to other people of interest to drive the documentary, there doesn't need to be a cameraman asking questions, and they don't need to sit the hoarder down and let them speak to the camera (there are still parts in which that happens.)
But my theory was broken when I came across a documentary on my Xbox 360 of all things.It was called Nightmares In Red White And Blue, a newly released documentary about the history of horror movies in america that was promoted on the Xbox, this had a strong narrative that took us through nearly 80 years of cinema pieced together with a narrator.
It was when I was watching this that I noticed the titles, they related to the subject, it was coloured red, white and blue with a "horror" style font, this may seem obvious but it would really take me out of the film if they were anything different, it is something so subtle and something you wouldn't give a second thought too, but it is an important part of a successful piece.
To further prove how wrong my theory was, I came across a recent Channel 4 program called "My Social Network Stalker" A intence British documentary with no narrator, the narrative is told through thevictim of quite a scary case of harassment recounting her story. The spaces of time are filled in using graphics...
...again, the text and graphics relate to documentary, in this case it is in the style of a text message, which, due to the fact that this is about harrassment and cyber bullying belong there...
...even little things like nametags looking like a mouse clicking on something will be something I have to think about when creating my very own documentary, now of course I can't have a needle instead of a mouse or something equally innapropriate due to the nature of the topic we are doing.
I then came across a few documentaries that are both quite similar, but very different in the same way, they are a series on BBC3 called "Bizzare Crime" a lighthearted series that recounts the weird and wonderful crimes that have been comminted by dumb criminals, much to the same style of "Americans Dumbest..." etc. The other was another Channel 4 documentary called "The Most Offensive Joke In The World" a countdown style documentary which goes through what we as a nation consider the most offensive joke in the world, it was an interesting watch, I mostly bring it up due to fact that it's narrative is told through a countdown, which must mean that that style's research is completed with polls taken from the public, or the "celebrities" in which are shown on the show discussing the jokes, and there own philosyphy/stories/opinions on those jokes.
I bring up Bizzare Crime as well due to the lighthearted nature of the programme, I saw a strange parrallel between the lighthearted nature of Jokes being presented and talked about in a serious was and the hard hitting world of crime being taken about as seriously as a game of cops and robbers. Bizzare Crime uses a lot of silly graphics and funny noises to poke fun of stupid people acting out stupid crimes, such as a man who has already been convicted trying to rob a CCTV store, and being completly oblivious to his face being on every camera around the shop and surrounding area. 
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