Codes and Conventions of a Documentary

Codes and Conventions of Documentaries 
 What is documentary? 
 • A documentary is a non-fictional motion picture intended to document some aspects of reality. They focus on actual people and events, often in a social context.
 • A Documentaries purpose is to present factual information about the world, and answer a central question this allows the documentary to communicate to the audience what it is about.

 Conventions 
 • Archive images such as newsreel and footage. 
 • Interview or 'talking head', Vox Pops with members of the public.
 • Direct cinema- where an event is recorded 'as it happens' with minimal interference from the filmmaker (actuality) 
• Documentaries use narrative form- they tell a story. They need good characters, tension and a point of view. They can be planned or improvised. Modern documentaries are less scripted and appear observational.
 • Use parallelism (connects people through editing), ask audience to draw parallels between characters, settings and situations.
 • Quick snippets of interviews
 • Incidental music
 • Titles (graphics and banners)
 • Fly on wall, filming real people as they do real things. 
• Most common used camera is the hand-held. Documentaries don’t necessarily want a smooth camera movement, shaky shots make it seem more 'authentic' and 'real. 
 • Fade-out - when an image gradually darkens into blackness.
 • Fade-in - the opposite of the above and so the image lightens from blackness.
 • Dissolve - when the end of the shot is briefly superimposed with the beginning of the next. 
 • Wipe - when a shot is replaced by another using a line, which moves across the screen. 
 • Diegetic sound (when the sound has a source in the film) and Non-diegetic sound (when the sound comes from outside the film, e.g. a soundtrack, narrator, sound effect.) Documentaries heavily rely on non-diegetic sound to prompt the audience to respond in a certain way. 

 Textual Analysis of Louis Theroux “Behind Bars” 

Documentary Louis Theroux: Behind Bars is a television documentary written and presented by Louis Theroux about one of America's most notorious prisons, San Quentin. There, he meets and speaks to serial murderers, gang members, inmates and guards. Behind Bars follows typical documentary conventions for example it opens with a fade in to an establishing/master shot of the prison. This immediately sets the location of the documentary and foreshadows the main topic of the documentary. Following the conventions the documentaries logo cuts in alongside the start of the music, the BBC logo shown in the documentary is often associated with being genuine and a source of trust worthy journalism therefore gaining the trust of the audience. Within the opening of the documentary a “hook” is created through Theroux’s dialogue “500 years in jail” this provokes the question of what the inmate has done to be given such an extreme sentence and makes the audience want to find out. The handheld pans between Theroux and the inmate show how close and vulnerable he is around such dangerous characters, this gives the documentary a thrilling and exciting feeling of which helps capture audience’s interests. It shows how real and personal the documentary is. A voice over which is a common feature of a documentary and is used throughout the duration of the documentary in addition to a montage of shots that help capture the realism of the setting e.g. shots of the inmates uniforms and their living conditions. The documentary features key iconography for example the background/ambient sound of the inmates playing basketball is a connotation to the on goings of prison life, similarly the mise en scene of the orange jumpsuits is also key iconography of which lives up to typical connotations of life in prison. The use of the heavy dense metal cages within the setting gives the impression of the prison being high security and complete confinement giving the impression that this is no ordinary prison.