Commissions Unit: What is a Documentary?

Despite the fact that I've watched countless amounts of documentaries, defining what a documentary actually is turns out to be quite difficult due to the wide variety of the type of television - not forgetting all the sub genres and hybrids as well. For example, a documentary could vary from the entertaining male dominating documentary show 'Top Gear', to something more emotive and serious like 'The boy whose Skin fell off'.

So how do you define the term 'documentary'? After researching this, the general idea is quite simple - it is basically 'documenting' (or capturing) reality, therefore non-fiction film. All documentaries provide factual evidence which tend to focus and 'teach' the audience unknown and interesting topics.

Which links me to my next point, all documentaries primarily focus on originality - a sense of the programme being unique and diversifying information which you are likely unable to see in other programmes. Not only is the plot and idea of the documentary individual itself, but it could also be the style and the way it is shown, i.e. informal/formal tone, use of the camera, etc.

But what makes a good documentary?

To me, the most important element of a documentary is its realism. I feel more attached to a story knowing that the information they provide is real, or how a story is believable. For example, do we know that people who get interviewed are telling the truth, as well as any statistics - if they have been modified to make the facts seem more effective and dramatic?

Similar to this, physically getting people to tell you the truth and finding out factual evidence is in my opinion looking like the difficult part of abstracting and putting into a documentary. This has the potential to ruin a documentary if perhaps the interviewees are not quite as you expected them to be (i.e. generally not a good person to interview) or if the statistics you find aren't quite as effective as planned, then the documentary itself won't be perhaps not as interesting as you though it would be. Additionally, a good documentary tends to be those whom remain emotive and delicate for the audience, or generally something which the audience can relate to plus ones which are completely surprising and unexpected i.e. 'The Elephant Man'.

'The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off'

An example of which I think is a successful documentary would be this. The title instantly grabs your attention as immediately it is a story which is generally quite shocking let alone real - thus making the audience want to know why his skin has fallen off, how, etc. 

John Kennedy - 'The boy whose skin fell off'

Reasons why I feel that this is so effective is primarily because of the deep effectiveness of the emotions - we learn the life of the character in a short amount of time (as the programme runs for around 1 hour), such as how he adapts to his illness, raising money for charity, his background, etc. This makes some of the audience create almost a physical bondage with the character, thus making the programme more emotional as the audience empathise with Jonny Kennedy (main character) and his terminal illness.

Despite the programme showing the fatality of Jonny, you can argue that the audience don't feel as uncomfortable as expected due to Jonny's humour and general casual outtake on life. This links to how I feel that the programme works extremely well by showing uncomfortable moments which some of the audience may not want to see i.e. showing his skin, beginning showing the death of the character, picking a coffin, etc.

Nonetheless, to me this is an idea of an effective documentary mainly from the way we empathise with the character's loss. It is clear that the sources are good and the story isn't fake.