2. Purpose of A
Documentary
Raising
Awareness:
Raising public
awareness of a
topic or issue in
society.
Persuasive:
Manipulating the
audience’s
perception
(subjective).
Informative
Factual
Investigative: Investigating issues
that are not available in normal
social groups.
Entertaining
3. Informative
The documentary can provide insight on subjects such as people, political
issues or wildlife that the audience want to know. For example the documentary
may contain information on plants or animals that the audience want to learn
about and cannot go and see themselves or because it easier and cheaper to
watch the documentary, simply stay at home and watch it instead. In this
capacity the documentary will likely deliver statistics related to the topic which
can be displayed to the audience as graphs, percentages, fractions etc. to allow
the information to be more easily assimilated.
4. Persuasive
The persuasiveness of a documentary depends on many things including the
information provided. It also hinges on being able to make the information
provided seem genuine and believable. Objective information will likely be shot
and provide a fair representation of the subject to the audience, however
mediating the footage the provide their suggested readings. For example, some
documentaries may take seconds of objective information out of context and
make it sound more negative than it was originally intended to be. On the other
hand, subjective information will be used to provide a biased representation of
the subject and influence the audience. For example if the documentary
provides subjective information towards a political party then they can persuade
the audience whether they are right or wrong by showing flaws in their agendas
rather than positives.
5. Raising Awareness
Documentaries can be used to raise awareness of issues that are unclear in the
media or are not heard of in certain social forums. For example a documentary
about the Amazon rainforest is likely to make the audience aware of
deforestation and use subjective information to persuade them that it is wrong
and that the companies cutting down the trees are bad people. By talking to
experts or people associated with the topic, the information is made more
morally real, authentic and sometimes concerning for the audience. With the
delivery of this type of information along with facts and figures, the audience is
informed about something that needs to be brought in to the limelight.
6. Investigative
Documentaries can be based around investigations in to criminal cases or just
societal issues. The documentary would throughout focus on getting to the
bottom of or explaining certain facts about a topic. The majority of the time
investigative areas of documentaries contain a lot of interviews/ personal
experiences to provide the audience with evidence. They may also contain
recreations of scenes that are believed to have taken place; for example a
murder. A conclusion is almost always provided, casing together all the
information provided to the audience to give them a sense of interest after
viewing the documentary.
7. Entertaining
Usually documentaries are meant to be entertaining, as that is how they get
viewers. Documentaries such as ‘Benefits Street’ are considered docu-soaps as
they are made to appeal as dramatized documentaries to entertain the
audience. Usually entertainment overrules the other purposes of a documentary
and can cause it to become more subjective than objective and cause an altered
to reality representation of the subjects such as the lower class members of
Benefit Street. To provide greater entertainment value, some documentaries
have a stronger narrative than others, showing a chronological series of events
perhaps in a ‘day in the life’ style and cutting less and having more of the same
story, rather than cutting to completely different people or locations. Music can
also be used as a way of increasing interest in a section of the documentary or
to make the space between sections less boring.
8. Factual
Documentaries are, in the audience’s eyes, supposed to carry legitimate facts
and figures for them to learn. Unlike a drama a documentary is supposed to be
objective and provide real life accounts, facts and figures. However, the
expectation of the audience can be used to make them susceptible to
persuasion as they are likely to believe they are being told accurate and un-
biased facts.
9. Preferred Purposes
As one of the group’s initial ideas was to do a social media addiction focused
documentary an investigative style is likely to be employed to help us find out
the root of the problem . In my opinion the investigative style is more
entertaining than other styles as it is likely to contain a reconstruction and
includes quite a lot of evidence and facts to support certain conclusions. In turn
this would possibly aid the audience in finding the cause of their social media
addiction. As a result the documentary would cover quite a few different
purposes in the process including being a source of entertainment, being
factual and most importantly for the specific topic, being informative.
