Codes & Conventions Glossary

Voiceover

A voiceover is the voice of an unseen narrator speaking in a motion picture of television commercial, voice overs are mainly used in documentaries too, a voiceover is a production technique used to inform the viewers of the facts and what is going on. A voiceover is used in the documentary Captive for 18 years: Jaycee Lee Dugard. the voiceover basically narrates what is going on and in some what ways explains what/what is happening.
Another example is  Frozen Planet, they use a voice over to inform and tell the viewer what is happening during the documentary. The only way that frozen planet portrays there information is through the voice over.

'Real' footage of events

Documentaries are effectively seen as 'non-fiction' although there are debates around this. Generally most documentaries use some sort of real life footage. Documentaries often have had a lot of thought put into them in terms of trying to convince the audience that the subject is real and truthful and that the evidence of whatever the viewers are watching has not being altered in any way. The real footage should not be edited in any shape or form, however the only way this can be touched is when editing the footage by syncing the clips together to make it into one long documentary. An example in which I think shows this well is Fahrenheit 911, this documentary uses the news channel footage and filmed footage from the public to show the dramatic chaos which happened during 911. This helps to show how scary and disturbing it actually was.

Technicality of realism
Technicality of realism uses 'naural' sound and lighting. This can be used in many documentaries, the footage they film may not be outstanding however this will be shown that it is real. A good example of this could be an interview used on a new channel, where the majority of the time there is background noise from the public and other reporters near by. This is also used in Nick Bloomfields documentary 'Biggie and Tupac'. This shows some of the real footage used which has not been changed and shows some of the main events which happened in the young Hip-hop stars lives.

Archive Footage/Stills
Archive footage is used to back up the point of what the narrater is stating. They use clips from other sources which film maker would have produced and obtained themselves. A good example of this would be again Michael Moors documentary Fahrenheit 911, he uses news clips from the time of the attack, although everyone knows that 9/11 was a real event the news reports make the event more real to the audience. Archive footage can be over used when there is no narrater or facts to backup the archive footage.

Interviews with experts
Documentaries are informative pieces of footage, the best way to inform the audience is to show them an interview with an expert. Depending on the subject the expert may disagree or agree with the documentaries message, this is an oppotunity for the film maker to show a variety of options on the matter of the documentary. A good example of this being shown within a documentary is within Supersize Me, there are many different scenes whereby the director is interviewing doctors about the Mcdonalds food and whether or not it should be eaten at all, and the damage that it can do to a person.