A documentary is a film, television, or radio program that provides a factual report on a particular subject using pictures, interviews, or official documents. Some key conventions of documentaries include: exposition to inform viewers and create interest; a voiceover allowing the filmmaker to speak to viewers; interviews for specific questions; archival footage using genuine recordings to bring events to life; titles and text to provide context; and reconstructions to depict past events.

1. Conventions of
Documentaries

2. What is a documentary?
- A Documentary is a film or television or radio program that
provides a factual report on a particular subject.
- it uses using pictures or interviews with people involved in real
events to provide a factual report on a particular subject.
- consisting of or based on official documents.

3. What are the conventions of a
documentary?

4. Exposition
A documentary film is a film story concerning factual topics (i.e.
someone or something). These films have a variety of aims, to
record important events and ideas; to inform viewers; to convey
opinions and to create public interest

5. Voice over
A voice over is when the documentary reporter/film maker talks
over footage or is added to the soundtrack during the
production , this allows the film maker to be able to talk to the
viewers.

6. Interviews
The interview is one of the most common documentary
teqnques as it allows the film maker to ask very specific
questions about any related subject. Some interviews are held in
specific backrounds to add some visual coding

7. Archival footage (Real footage)
Archival footage is another way of saying real footage this
means that it is all genuine footage of what happened.Many
documentaries have archival footage because it brings the film
to life. Documentaries are non-fiction. However, a convention of
a documentary is that events are to be seen as ‘real’.

8. 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 un-
questioningly and are a quick cheap way of conveying
information.

9. Reconstructions
Reconstructions of events that happened in the past but also
typically setting up ‘typical scenes’. So if you want to quickly
convey a classroom you might ask a class to put their hands up
like there is a lesson going on and the teacher just asked a
question.