7/29/2019 Evaluation Q1 - Bill Nicholls Analysis

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Analysis of Bill Nicholls Documentary Modes

In 2001, Bill Nicholls of Indiana University, an American Documentary Theorist came up with a

theory of Documentary Modes which refers to the different types/styles ofdocumentaries that canbe identified through the use of particular codes and conventions. The different styles are known as:

Poetic Uses subjective interpretations of its subject(s). In the poetic style of documentary,individual characters and events remain undeveloped; this is in favour of creating a

particular mood or tone to be portrayed within the documentary

Participatory The film maker is included in the documentary. For example, in SupersizeMe Morgan Spurlock appears in the documentary throughout the whole documentary as

the documentary is personally about him and a challenge he sets himself. This style of

documentary is only suitable for certain topics of documentary. This couldve been suitable

for our topic of video game violence affecting teenagers behaviour as we could have

monitored people playing violent games to monitor how their aggression levels alter due to

exposure to video games.

Performative Similar to participatory, Performative also includes the film maker in thedocumentary, but the Performative mode is more autobiographical and pretty much follows

the film maker around.

Reflexive This considers the quality of the documentary itself. It helps the audiencedevelop a sense of understating of the process of construction in film so they can develop a

sophisticated, yet critical attitude.

Observational this mode follows the subject around and this is generally done in a fly-on-the-wall sort of way. We did not use this method as we did not concentrate on a single

person playing video games, but the overall affects instead. Observational tend to not have avoiceover or any music included, whereas we did so this is another reason for why this mode

did not match our own documentary.

Expositional This mode was the most similar to our student documentary. It has anarrative and voiceover throughout the majority of the documentary which is an important

aspect of introducing the viewer to the topic which is what we had to do in our opening 5

minutes to the documentary. Expositional documentaries are very factual, and inform the

reader on all sorts of statistics on things that are relevant to the topic (we stated these in the

voiceover and also onscreen, visually).

A narrative structure was used in our documentary, we used some rhetorical aspects for the viewer

where the voiceover asks the viewer a question before we then go on to have interviewees answer

the same question for us to use as individual voxpops. The purpose of our documentary was to

discover what the effects of violent video games actually are, and we did this in an argumentative

way by portraying and investigating into both sides of the argument. Assessing both sides of the

argument makes the documentary become more appealing, meaning the viewer is constantly kept

interested and entertained. We did not directly address the audience very much; this is something

we would definitely change if we were to have a second chance on the documentary.

We used authority in our documentary, by interviewing an expert to find out their view on the topic.

This allows our documentary to appear to be more professional as rather than it just being an

opinion, the expert is able to provide us with more factual information which becomes more

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persuasive to the audience. Authority is known as an argumentation scheme, another

argumentation scheme is known as numbers; our documentary fell into this category as we used a

range of different factual statistics to inform the viewer about.

Overall, the structure of our documentary continually used the enigmatic code; this is a problem

that only gets discussed, but does not actually get solved. This leaves the viewer with questionsmeaning they will want to carry on watching the documentary in order to be able to get some

answers to them. Unanswered questions make the viewer think to themselves, allowing them to

then realise how serious the issue may be, and then whilst thinking to themselves, they are able to

come up with some resolutions to the ongoing unresolved problems that are currently occurring.