To understand how a documentary is constructed, it is important for us as a group to attempt several mini documentaries which cover different documentary themes. As we have a lot of ideas collected together, our first solid task we set ourselves was to produce mini documentaries which will we have their own forms and types. So far our plan is to produce a Mockumentary which would be Observational and Poetic. A reality documentary which would go along the lines of a more serious approach, filmed in a Expository/Poetic way. These mini productions would hopefully help us give an insight in what we may think works well and what doesn't, ultimately helping us choose what we may produce for our final piece.
Our first Mini Documentary we created was on an observational styled documentary. The documentary is on Rachael Coburn, a school girl, who has to live with the fact that she is pregnant in a very demanding period of her life, a late student. Aswell as observational, it was also a poetic genre, one which we have been interested in. Here was our final piece, which took us around a week to film and edit:
After filming this documentary, we swiftly moved onto our next idea, following the themes of a more expository form of documentary. We stressed the different types of interviews as this was a keen part of the documentary we had planned to use for our final piece.
The creation of these two pieces has allowed us to gain further understanding on these types of documentaries. I thought observational showed a topic which the general public can relate to, and become more interested in, whereas the expository may only target a specific audience of interest, depending on your topic. We enjoyed making the observational as it all happens on a journey and enables the producers to become more creative. As a group we have now become more interested in the expository type of documentary, by shedding light on a certain topic in the current news. With this in mind we had started to think twice about our original idea of global warming, as we thought it was a little too generic and not as dark as we had now wanted.
By producing these supporting pieces of documentary, it has allowed us to look at our weaknesses also, thinking more about the use of music and possibly the addition of voice overs, especially in an expository genre where they are seen more frequently.
