1. A 2 M E D I A - C O D E S & C O N V E N T I O N S
Documentary

2. Conventional Expectations of a
Documentary
● Non-fiction
● About the ‘real’ (historical, political cultural
events etc.)
● ‘Unstaged’
● Based on observation rather than intervention
● Informative, educational

3. Film language used to shape
realism
Placing the audience in the
action
● Location Shooting
● Uneven, hand-held
camerawork
● Natural Light
● Following the action
● Film-maker’s visible
presence
● Synchronous sound
recording
● Interviews with witnesses
● Amateur effect
Techniques that allow the
audience to be ‘objective’
● Voiceover
● Archive footage
● Expert testimonial
● Material shaped into a
narrative
● Material structured into
an argument

4. Voiceover
● The voiceover will usually be authoritative
in some way, encouraging the audience to
think that they either have some kind of
specialist knowledge or, as in the case of
people like Michael Moore and Nick
Broomfield: ‘the right’ opinions that
people should pay attention to.

5. ‘Real’ footage of events
● Documentary is essentially seen as ‘non-fiction’
although there are debates around this.
● However, a convention of documentary is that
all events presented to us are to be seen as ‘real’
by the audience.
● Documentarians often go to great lengths to
convince us that the footage is real and
unaltered in anyway, although editing and
voiceover can affect the ‘reality’ we, as viewers,
see.

6. Technicality of realism
● Including ‘natural’ sound and lighting (note
Nick Broomfield’s use of this in ‘Biggie and
Tupac’ when they ‘run out’ of sound!)
● Suburbia city sounds, non diagetic sounds
● The way the shots are taken to create realism
● Not everything is filmed so it’s unreal although
the it has elements of real life examples

7. Archive footage/stills
● To aid authenticity and to add further
information which the filmmaker may be
unable to obtain themselves.

8. Interviews with ‘experts’
● Used to authenticate the views expressed
in the documentary.
● Sometimes, they will disagree with the
message of the documentary, although the
filmmaker will usually disprove them in
some way.

9. Use of text/titles
● Watch out for the use of words on screen
to anchor images in time and space.
● Labels, dates etc tend to be believed
unquestioningly and are a quick and
cheap way of conveying information.

10. Sound
● Listen out for the use of non-diegetic sound.
Has music been added? Why what effects does
it have? Is sound used as a bridge between
scenes and if so what meanings are made?
● For example look at “Supersize me” – how does
the use of childish music undermine
McDonalds?

11. Set-ups
Not just reconstructions of events that happened in
the past but also setting up 'typical' scenes.
So if you want to quickly convey 'classroom' you
might ask a class to put their hands up like
there's a lesson going on and the teacher's just
asked a question.
Strictly speaking what you're showing is not 'true'
the teacher didn't ask a question, but it is a way
of cheaply getting footage a crew might have had
to wait fifteen minutes for if they had just waited
for it to happen 'naturally'.

12. Set-ups cont...
There is an issue here however because if crews
make a habit of using set ups they will only be
using images of 'reality' that audiences already
recognise (confirming stereotypes perhaps) and
producing fresh images/ ideas about 'reality' will
be impossible.
There's a sort of vicious cycle here. If I show you
radically different images from inside a school
you may reject them as atypical or 'unreal' but if I
can only offer you a 'reality' you already know
about how can I change your opinions?

13. Visual Coding
Things like mise en scene and props. Is
that doctor any less a doctor if she's not in
a white coat and wearing a stethoscope?
Has someone been ambushed in the street
to make them look shifty?
*Mis en scene - is an expression used to describe
the design aspects of a film production, which essentially
means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in
visually artful ways through storyboarding,
cinematography and in poetically artful ways through
direction. Mise-en-scène has been called film criticism's
"grand undefined term"