Analyse genre: Documentaries

Documentary 

Typical Examples

Planet earth -2006
Life -2009
Life on earth -1979
The blue planet -2001
The life of mammals -2002 to 2003

I have picked a scene from the 2006 Planet Earth episode one (voiced by David attenborough).
In the genre of documentary the typical subject and layout of a documentary would be an animal watching one such as the example i have chosen Planet Earth and the other ones i have listed above. this genre is usually narrated by a well known person of this genre such as David attenborough or even ones voiced over by celebrities such as the South Pacific which was voiced by various different people. This particular documentary has various episodes which cover up a 50 minuet span. in the case of animal documentaries it takes a considerable amount of time to film due to certain rare findings of animals and unseen moments such as in the video below.There many different types of genre in documentary such as crime documentaries or story documentaries and even the animal documentaries i am using.

Planet earth :

Hungry polar bear surprises a seal - The Hunt: Episode 2 Preview - BBC One

In this scene David attenborough narrates how polar bares barely catch there pray and n the case of the polar bare we see he is extremely skinny due to not being to lucky with catching his pray. As it unfolds in the documentary David narrates every action taken by the polar bare such as when the clip start he starts telling us why he is so skinny this shows that he is informing use on whats going on and also why this is happening, the soul objective for a documentary is to inform us on hidden truths or things that we wouldn't know ourselves.In a way documentaries answer questions that we want to ask such as at the start of the clip we see a obviously skinny polar bare and because we have never seen this before these are things that the creators of documentaries thinks about and due to this they incorporate the answers this is why this type of documentary is purely information based.

People watch these types of documentaries because they want to know certain things and may see this as interesting also the way it is displayed such as graphics and film quality makes a big difference in what you watch for instance if you was watching it in bad quality you are most likely to just stop due to it maybe being blurry or poor sound quality and for documentaries such as this the sound and visual qualities have to be top notch.This is set in the antarctic due to that being the thing of topic at this point in time in the documentary. In a documentary you are telling someones story or informing someone of something.

The main audience for this would be the aspirer this is due to it giving knowledge and information and the main goal for the aspirer is to succeed. older people would have been draw to this in the past and still are but now more teenagers and even some kids aged 10-12 are watching more animal based documentaries this is due to more and more people being intrigued by them. The overall age of the audience for these types of documentaries is around 15-50 this is so wide spread due to over the years more kids and teens are watching more shows/documentaries such as this one so the age gape of the audience keeps growing.

Planet earth :

Wolves hunting Caribou - Planet Earth - BBC

With this scene from Planet earth it shows a time laps effect this is used to show a long period of time in one short few second clip such as that scene may have taken hours to film but they sped it up and condensed it into mere seconds this is efficient in documentaries such as this because you may need to show a certain point in the filming to show what is going on but it may take long to do so they condense it to save time and because even though they may need to show it it could still be a small and insignificant part of the overall story.

in this they also used a helicopter to show a over head view of whats going on in the sequence this is also used to save time due to it taking a long time to do this on the ground. in this they used various panning shots to show how big a thing is such as in the case of the video it would be to show how wide spread the hard of caribou are.

In this genre of documentaries voice over is always used as they are unable to do it wail filming. The voice overs could be in person this is seen in the new planet earth 2 voiced by David attenborough.
In this series they use various camera angles and camera shots that are always changing to focus and un focus on specific events in the show.They have used various close up to make you feel as if you are there watching the animals your selves.