2. What is the purpose
of a documentary?
For entertainment .
For example, benefit street.
This is also known as a
documentary soap.
To raise awareness
For example, Black Fish.
To inform.
For example, Queer
Britain.
Factual
A documentary may be
objective but the
perception of the
documentary may be
subjective to enable to
documentary to
encode a message. This
is a form of mediation.
Documentaries will
investigate an issue/
subject which may
not be in a social
forum. Therefore,
these are issues
people may not
have knowledge
about.
To persuade
To educate
To make an
argument
3.
4. Entertainment
• A documentary with the purpose of
entertainment will usually not be about a really
serious issue that is dramatic, it may have some
humour to it.
• Documentary’s are meant to be entertaining to
get an audience to watch it, if the documentary is
not entertaining then people will get bored and
watch something else.
• Some entertainment documentary's that I have
saw usually show the way that a different group
of people live.
5. Raising awareness
• A documentary that wants to raise awareness
will use facts, statistics and a variety of
techniques to connect with the audience
trying to make them feel a type of way. A
documentary with this purpose will have 1
side of a story and encode their message to
make the audience agree with them.
Therefore, this will then help raise awareness
as people will start to talk about the issue and
maybe even want to do something about it.
6. Factual
• A factual documentary will give the audience statistics
and research about the subject the documentary is
about. A factual documentary’s aim is to inform its
audience about a subject that people may not know
anything about. Therefore, if the documentary is
factual then it gives people further knowledge about
the subject, which extend peoples knowledge so they
are more aware of the facts they need to know.
Furthermore, by using statists and facts it makes the
subject more real and the audience are more likely to
believe what is being told if there is evidence.
7. Persuade
• A persuasive documentary will use techniques
that will persuade the audience to agree with
what they are saying and maybe even create a
change in the subject/topic the documentary is
about.
• Persuasion is a good purpose for a documentary
if the issue they are talking about needs a
change, therefore they may need help as the
issue is a major problem. Therefore is the
documentary is successful at being persuasive
then people will want to help.
8. Investigate
• Documentary’s with a purpose of investigating
are usually documentary's such as crime shows
and murder mysteries. These will be subjects that
people may know a bit about but don’t know the
full story as it has been kept out of the social
forum. Therefore, an investigation documentary
will tell people the truth and show exactly what
happened to the people it is about. These type of
documentary’s will show all the facts about a
case as they want to audience to see how they
solved the case.
9. Inform
• Some documentaries are created to inform an
audience about a specific topic. These type of
documentaries will contain lots of facts and statistic
about a topic to make an audience aware.
• These type of documentaries may be about health, so
it may be trying to inform people about health
concerns or it could be informing people about issues
to do with our environment/world.
• Informative documentaries are a good way of raising
awareness about an issue and also a good way of giving
an audience more knowledge about a topic that they
may of not been that aware about.
10. Educate
• Documentaries can be created to educate their
audience. The creators may want to teach the audience
about a subject which is not very common or about
something they are interested in. Educational
documentaries are useful as we learn something from
them that we may not have known about before.
Therefore, people will be likely to watch the
documentary when it isn’t something they are aware
off because they want to be taught about something
new. When the documentary is trying to educate us we
may be given facts by professionals/experts which
people will find even more interesting.
11. To make an argument
• A documentary may have been produced to make
an argument about an issue. For example, a
documentary may have been created to argue
whether having a mobile phone is a good or bad
thing or a documentary about the use of social
media, whether this is effecting the younger
generation. Documentaries which argue are quite
interesting as they explore different people’s
views about an issue and they will include facts
and statistics ,therefore they can also be quite
informative.
12. What documentary style/purpose have
we decided to adapt to our documentary?
• The documentary purpose we have decided to choose is to raise
awareness. We have decided this purpose for our documentary as
we want to raise awareness about the damage social media has had
on thee young generation. We think that this is the best issue to
raise awareness on as people have became addicted to their
phones and social media and we feel as though this is damaging
and lots of different ways. Therefore, we want to raise awareness
about this issue and inform people what social media is doing to
our brains and our way of life. We think this will be interesting
when doing research and we can collect a wide range of
information as when we are in college we are surrounded by the
younger generation, who are the one addicted to social media.
Furthermore, while doing research we have watched lots of
documentaries that have been created to raise awareness.
Therefore, we can take tips and ideas from these so that our
documentary will look professional.
13. What have we learnt and why?
• From looking into the variety of documentaries that there are I have learnt that
although they have different purposes and styles when addressing an audience
they still use facts to do this. They do this so that when they are talking about an
issue by using facts the audience will be more likely to listen as it sounds like they
know what they are talking about. Also, when they are giving lots of facts and
statistics the audience know that they care about this issue as they’ve researched
and collected information to share with us.
• Also, exploring the different purposes and styles has helped to gain an
understanding of how the purpose matches the issue. Once we’ve chosen my issue
we will need to know what my purpose is because we may want to educate our
audience about the issue but we could also raise awareness about it. A clear
purpose should be created in the documentary.
• Furthermore, from watching different documentaries we have learnt the different
code and conventions they use to create there purpose. This is useful as we can
see what works well for different purposes and we can then use this when creating
our documentary.
