Initial Research

My initial research has informed me in a number of ways- how to make a documentary and what most of them contain as general conventions, and I have also learned what different types of documentaries are out there and what type of genre would best suit the type of documentary I would like to make.
Firstly, I have learned the general codes and conventions of a documentary. Usually watching these, I took it for granted how much work goes into the making of documentaries and how many different factors play into the construction of making one. For example, there are many different conventions such as interviews, which can either be participatory or non-participatory, and this means the interviewer can either be in the shot or out of it. Whether or not they sit in the interview creates a different type of atmosphere for the viewer. There are also other conventions, such as whether or not the maker includes statistics in their documentary, which is something we are going to involving within ours. These can be highly informative, and different documentaries can be different levels of informative. Louis Theroux documentaries, for example, are much more informative in the form of statistics compared with David Attenborough documentaries, where most of the information stated within the documentary are recorded in a voice-over.
We have learned about the different types of documentary as well, such as social documentaries vs informative documentaries. Ours is going to be a social documentary because it will involve a lot of people within it, whereas something recorded by the BBC with a voice-over by David Attenborough would be involving something such as nature or animals. This tends to have a large impact on the way in which things are constructed and filmed.