Documentary detailed analysis

I chose a documentary I really liked the look and sound of and decided how the documentary construction would relate with mine. I decided on a Louis Theroux documentary as one of my final analysis for the research module in my coursework, because it contains interviews, voiceovers, statistics and typography, similar to the way in which mine and Sophie's documentary will be made. This documentary, however, is around an hour long and ours will be around five minutes, but analysing documentaries such as these will give us a good insight into how good documentaries are constructed. We will need to input a lot more detail into ours if we wish to have a similar effect to much longer documentaries.
The conventions of this documentary are similar to a lot of popular documentaries- they contain a lot of information both in the form of statistics and voiceovers. Louis Theroux the presenter states a lot of thee statistics within this documentary both in the form of diegetic and nondiegetic sound, as a voiceover and as him talking within the documentary. The main difference between our documentary and those that are very popular and long is both the length and the presenters. For our length, we plan to make a documentary for around five minutes because that fits the kind of budget we have and the spare time we have in order to make it. Also, most long documentaries have someone presenting them and talking through everything, and although we will be presenting it in the way that our names will be in the credits, our faces won't appear in the documentary because we want to keep the focus on the people and places we are planning to film. We believe not presenting it in the way of standing in front of the camera and talking will be most convenient for our documentary because it will keep attention where it should be.
More conventions this documentary contains are the interviews. In order to obtain information from the people they interview, Louis (the presenter) asks various types of questions and this is his way of provoking answers from the people he is interviewing. He also keeps a very open mind when interviewing, which is something we need to remember to keep. It is very easy when filming to be discriminatory against someone you are obtaining information from, especially if it is someone Louis is interviewing which is someone who has gone to prison for fairly violent crimes. We will try and keep the conventions of being calm and composed and reserving judgement for anyone we are going to interview. This will hopefully show through to the audience when the interviews are shown within the documentary. If we decide to be judgemental to anyone we are interviewing, this might change the honesty and genuine nature of the person we plan to interview, so we are going to try and stay as open minded as possible when interviewing.
This documentary also has various conventions when it comes to the camera shots and angles and the way in which things are filmed. Firstly, a lot of these are filmed on hand-held cameras, which is what happens with Louis Theroux documentaries apart from the interview shots. This helps the footage to come across much more raw and genuine, and doesn't make it seem over edited. It also turns out more convenient because it is cheaper and easier to film with a hand held camera. Despite this, however, we are still going to use a tripod for some of our shots in order to keep it still. This will help with levels of continuity.
This documentary uses a fair amount of what are called 'talking heads', which means using random members of the public in order to obtain information. We are not going to use this within our documentary because we believe asking random members of public may put some people out of their comfort zones, and it would be much easier to ask people we know are confident and happily volunteer to be interviewed, because it is more convenient for both the public and us as we are not intruding upon their time and privacy, and then we are also in the knowledge that the people we are interviewing have signed consent forms. Also, the use of text to show who people are in plain font at a small part in the screen, shown used in Louis Theroux documentaries, are going to help show who is who within our documentary. We will also use titles for our credits, which is what this documentary does, in order to give the audience information and keep them satisfied.
Both this and the documentary we are going to make could be classed as expository. This means the presenters don't have a huge part within the documentary and they allow most of the film to be of what we are trying to learn about. This will be done in an objective manner, again with keeping an open mind and keeping the audience learning about something they wouldn't have previously thought of capturing. We want this documentary to be capturing information about certain people and the habits of their shopping, and to involve ourselves in large quantities kind of gets rid of the idea of keeping the documentary about other people and their lives. We want this documentary to be educational and fill people in on parts of life that they might be unaware of or don't usually think that would be captured.
We also want to keep some parts of the documentary in that would be deleted in a usual film, because this will keep the raw and natural part of our documentary apparent. If we deleted every part where someone is slightly awkward or stutters and everything runs perfectly it might seem like we have cut too much out and we want to keep it as close to the truth as possible, so in order to obtain this we are going to keep some 'imperfect' moments within our documentary.