Jone Aboitiz

Conventions Of A Documentary

Voice Over- authorative, opinions that people should pay attention to, knowledge, used to tell as story or explain, audience believe what they say and claim as the truth.

This is a convention that we were able to follow due to the fact that our documentary has a ‘Voice of God’. We used this to give generalizations and explain happiness which is the topic of our documentary. We used the aspect of ‘Voice of God’ to easily leave the audience with opinions to think about and aspire to.

Actuality footage- actual event with real people not actors, real footageThis is a convention

that we were able to follow due to the fact that all footage was shot in real time and not acted out. The interviews were not acted out as they were the actual people and not actors.

Narration- communicate events in narrative form in order to better understand them We broke this

convention as the voice over heard is not really telling a story but expressing an opinion that the audience may choose to believe or not. Our voice over is the ‘Voice of God’ rather than a narrator.

Interview- give viewers a sense of realism, interviewees look at interviewer to gain emotion

We were successfully able to follow this convention as interviews make up the majority of our documentary. We were able to interview three experts of different subject areas to talk about happiness.

Text- information of dates, times etc. give new information/ reiterate information, titles This is another

convention that we followed as text was used to introduce the topic and to introduce the interviewees.

Sound- non-diegetic to give off certain effect

This is a convention that we followed when it comes to the presence of the score heard at the beginning of our documentary and the end of our documentary

Dramatization- reconstruction of an event played by actors to give further insight to the real event This is a convention

that we broke as it was not necessary for our documentary. This is because it was not about a specific event that occurred but more on providing the audience with knowledge on the subject of happiness.

Realism- archive footage, interviews, location shooting and following action

Our documentary is full of realism. All the location footage was done in real time and the interviews were not done by actors. All the different montage footage were actually from the areas that the interviewees work and of the happiness speaker actually giving a talk to the boarders.

Talking Heads- like interviews but with members of the publicWe followed this

convention in a way where we asked for people to send us videos of them stating what makes them happy. We originally stated that we would include vox pops but due to time we were not able to do it.

Visual Coding- links to mise-en-scene, clothing to associate who the interviewee is

This was evident in our documentary through the different montage shots seen of the universities of where Yannick and Sundari work and the different books seen in Sundari’s office. Furthermore, this was evident in the different montage shots of Fredericka giving her speech to the boarders of Ratcliffe college.

Exposition- intro to the doc that introduces the main theme, first impression for viewers, catch viewers’ attentionThis is a convention that

we were able to follow as the beginning of our documentary introduces the topic of happiness. The definition of happiness followed by the different montage shots of places and then of people stating what makes them happy where a voice of god is also heard catches the attention of the audience.

Ambient diegetic sound This is a convention that we

were able to follow as during the interviews all ambient noise was present where even the diegetic sound of the different montage shots could be heard. The fact that the score was not present in the interviews draws the focus to what they were saying and provided the audience to get a feel of the environment that the interviewees are a part of.

Originally we stated that our documentary would be both expository and observational but looking at it now I believe that it is more of an expository documentary. This is because even if there was quite a bit of location shooting, long takes did not dominate and only the interviews included synchronous sound recording which were conventions of an observational mode that we said we would follow but ended up breaking.

Mode of Documentary