Theory

The purpose of a documentary is to 'document' ie report, with evidence something that has actually happened. It can show this by using acuality footage or a reconstructions of footage. Actuality footage is something actualy happening where as a reconstruction is something real that is then acted out by actors. It can use a narrators voice over to anchor the meaning or rely on the participants theemselves with the accasionl interjection by an unseen narrator.

According to John Corner from The University Of Liverpool, there are 5 central elements to a documentary.

1)Observation- the camera just observes whats going on and participants do not acknowledge it. Thid places the viewer in thr role of an eye witness, just asif you where there.

2)Interview- which obviously rely on real and good quality interviews to make up the documentary.

3)Dramatisation- a sense of drama though the observational element.

4)Mise En Scene- a careful composition of shots is used to show the audience certain things the maker wants them to see.

5)Exposition- This is the most important point. This is the main point of the documentary, what it is saying and what point it is trying to get across.

Types of documentary

• Fully narrated documentary- the voice over is used to make sense of the visuals and dominates there meaning. This type of documentary is most commonly used in natural history documentarys, however some of the animal sound you wll here are fake.
• Fly on the wall documentary- influenced by cinemaverite. It offers a 'true/real' picture of events. However quotation marks are used because some people beleive that it is not real as the participants are aware of the camera's. 
•  Mixed documentary- using a combination of interview, observation and narritive.
•  Self reflexive documentarys- participants acknowledge the presense of the camera and often speak directly to the documentary maker.
•  Docusoaps- following the daily lives of particular individuals.

There are various types of narrative structure in a documentary. For example;

• Open documentary and closed documentary. Open means that questions are left unanswered, this usually occurs in cliff hangers where then all of the questions are anwered in the next episode.
• Linear a nd non linear documentaries. Linear is when the documentary follows a chronilgical order and non linear is when it doesnt. For example it has flash backs or flash forwards. These are mostly used in film and drama not soaps and not documentaries.
• Single strand and multi strand. Single strand is where there is only one narrative thread ( one story) and multi strand is where there is more than one narrative thread, these will converge throughout the documentary. For example television soaps, where more than one stories are shown.