The purpose of a documentary ver for blog
- 2. Purpose of A Documentary Raising Awareness: Raising public awareness of a topic or issue in society. Persuasive: Manipulating the audience’s perception (subjective). Informative Factual Investigative: Investigating issues that are not available in normal social groups. Entertaining
- 3. Informative The documentary can provide insight on subjects such as people, political issues or wildlife that the audience want to know. For example the documentary may contain information on plants or animals that the audience want to learn about and cannot go and see themselves or because it easier and cheaper to watch the documentary, simply stay at home and watch it instead. In this capacity the documentary will likely deliver statistics related to the topic which can be displayed to the audience as graphs, percentages, fractions etc. to allow the information to be more easily assimilated.
- 4. Persuasive The persuasiveness of a documentary depends on many things including the information provided. It also hinges on being able to make the information provided seem genuine and believable. Objective information will likely be shot and provide a fair representation of the subject to the audience, however mediating the footage the provide their suggested readings. For example, some documentaries may take seconds of objective information out of context and make it sound more negative than it was originally intended to be. On the other hand, subjective information will be used to provide a biased representation of the subject and influence the audience. For example if the documentary provides subjective information towards a political party then they can persuade the audience whether they are right or wrong by showing flaws in their agendas rather than positives.
- 5. Raising Awareness Documentaries can be used to raise awareness of issues that are unclear in the media or are not heard of in certain social forums. For example a documentary about the Amazon rainforest is likely to make the audience aware of deforestation and use subjective information to persuade them that it is wrong and that the companies cutting down the trees are bad people. By talking to experts or people associated with the topic, the information is made more morally real, authentic and sometimes concerning for the audience. With the delivery of this type of information along with facts and figures, the audience is informed about something that needs to be brought in to the limelight.
- 6. Investigative Documentaries can be based around investigations in to criminal cases or just societal issues. The documentary would throughout focus on getting to the bottom of or explaining certain facts about a topic. The majority of the time investigative areas of documentaries contain a lot of interviews/ personal experiences to provide the audience with evidence. They may also contain recreations of scenes that are believed to have taken place; for example a murder. A conclusion is almost always provided, casing together all the information provided to the audience to give them a sense of interest after viewing the documentary.
- 7. Entertaining Usually documentaries are meant to be entertaining, as that is how they get viewers. Documentaries such as ‘Benefits Street’ are considered docu-soaps as they are made to appeal as dramatized documentaries to entertain the audience. Usually entertainment overrules the other purposes of a documentary and can cause it to become more subjective than objective and cause an altered to reality representation of the subjects such as the lower class members of Benefit Street. To provide greater entertainment value, some documentaries have a stronger narrative than others, showing a chronological series of events perhaps in a ‘day in the life’ style and cutting less and having more of the same story, rather than cutting to completely different people or locations. Music can also be used as a way of increasing interest in a section of the documentary or to make the space between sections less boring.
- 8. Factual Documentaries are, in the audience’s eyes, supposed to carry legitimate facts and figures for them to learn. Unlike a drama a documentary is supposed to be objective and provide real life accounts, facts and figures. However, the expectation of the audience can be used to make them susceptible to persuasion as they are likely to believe they are being told accurate and un- biased facts.
- 9. Preferred Purposes As one of the group’s initial ideas was to do a social media addiction focused documentary an investigative style is likely to be employed to help us find out the root of the problem . In my opinion the investigative style is more entertaining than other styles as it is likely to contain a reconstruction and includes quite a lot of evidence and facts to support certain conclusions. In turn this would possibly aid the audience in finding the cause of their social media addiction. As a result the documentary would cover quite a few different purposes in the process including being a source of entertainment, being factual and most importantly for the specific topic, being informative.