Documentary film production all you need to know about it ✽
There are various mysterious, interesting, and unusual events that occur around the world, and due to their rarity and unknown nature, it is highly likely that such events would be documented or captured. These films are non-fiction which means that they happened in real life.
Various types of documentary films exist and they are further explained in the article below. There are also examples of the different types of documentaries along with various characteristics. The evolution of the documentary movies over the years is also described below.
What are documentary films?
Documentary films are a genre of films that are made to document real-life or non-fiction events. There are different types of documentary films. There are many topics for documentary films and they are not restricted to only a few, the topics could vary from wildlife to aliens and even to strange murder crimes.
What motivates documentary filmmakers is their ability to add content that would not be covered otherwise. Documentary films are also able to humanize brands and therefore send messages to the consumers that the brand is not a part of the capitalist world and rather cares about its customers.
Documentary films that were filmed for marketing campaigns of brands mostly received high praise and great results. Since most human beings care about emotions and feelings producing a documentary film for the brand would encourage its selling a lot more.
Types of documentary films
There are different types of documentaries and the main 6 types are mentioned as follows:
- Poetic Mode: usually this type of documentary does not require a narration and depends on the mood of the film and the way it was shot.
- Expository mode: this type of documentary usually presents a specific point of view and has a narration using the “voice-of-God” style. There are also archived images and footage used.
- Participatory mode: this type is where the person filming presents everything from his point of view and therefore presents his truth as the only truth.
- Observational mode: this type is used when subjects are being filmed and there are no interruptions to their lives from the cinematographer, filming using the “fly-on-the-wall”
technique. - Reflexive mode: this is the type where the documentary shoots behind the scene footage along with interviews, the editing process, and the setup of the movies.
- Performative mode: this type allows the cinematographer to show his interaction with the subject and explore truths, for example, supersize me is a documentary where Morgan Spurlock a filmmaker shoots himself eating MacDonald’s every day for a month and see the medical repercussions of it.
Example of documentary films
As mentioned above brands have started working on reaching their customers and connecting with them on a personal level that is why documentary film for brand marketing campaigns is the best way to reach that goal and Volkswagen Kombi van did an excellent job in executing this idea.
When Volkswagen decided to stop the production of their Kombi van they filmed a documentary for their “un launching” campaign of the model and this campaign documented the final journey of Kombi going around and giving the participants of the campaign some souvenirs such as the copy of the original sketch of the first Kombi and others, finally the journey ended with Kombi visiting the son of the man who came up with the idea of the Kombi van. The campaign was a huge success and all the Kombi vans were sold out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZuG2meedNs (video)
Evolution/history of documentary films https://www.simonsays.ai/blog/the-evolution-of-documentaries-over-a-century-b133364b4daf https://www.filmsite.org/docfilms.html
Documentaries have been around for a few decades, the first re-creation of a documentary was shot in 1906 called The Unwritten Law which dramatized true-life murder. Later in 1922 the first narrative documentary film was released titled Nanook of the North, this was an ethnographic film that looked at the harsh life of Canadian Inuit Eskimos living in the Arctic.
Later on, many documentary types emerged throughout the years and now they are a popular genre that even features on major networks and online viewing sites like Netflix. With the advancement in the types of the documentary genre, many new films were produced and gained large popularity as well as they were implemented in marketing campaigns.
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