Research

What is a documentary: A documentary is filming/documenting a particular subject with facts about the subject and addressing them to the viewers in a detailed and informative way. A documentary can range from a lot of things like one common example is a documentary about wildlife as well as the history of the world.

There are many different category types of documentaries:  The first type of documentary type is an objective which shares facts whilst staying unbiased towards the subject. the second type of documentary is a subjective documentary which may be based on personal beliefs and could be possibly biased to one side of the story.

Mockumentary - A mockumentary is a film that is created to appear as if it is 'real' whilst using satire for entertainment purposes, basically being a parody of documentaries. 

A few examples of mockumentaries are: Borat, People just do nothing, The Office and American Vandal.

The Blackfish - This was a social action documentary based on the treatment of Orca whales that were at Seaworld. This documentary is generally viewed to have a subjective viewpoint and coined the term known as 'The Blackfish Effect.' 

Poetic - A poetic documentary is usually made more for artistic reasons with the film mainly being loose and experimental with not a lot of strong narrative behind it.

Expository - This form of documentary uses a narrator to inform/persuade the viewer in relation to the provided topic, this documentary form also uses archive footage as well as B-rolls and reconstructions (reenactments with either animation or actors).

Observational - This has a more realism and immediacy compared to other documentary styles with each shot being incredibly long whilst being recorded by hand with a lot less voice overs and no reenactments.

Fly on the wall - This form of documentary is when the crew is given a great amount of access to the person or subject of the topic they are covering, this is more useful for music based documentaries.

Biographical - This one in particular is used to look back at the history of a specific person or subject and is more suited to be used for people or subjects that are no longer around anymore.

Participatory - A participatory documentary has the film maker themselves be part of the film with them directly interacting with the person or subject with them leaving a possible impact of the documentary.

Related Videos + Reviews

Here I watched a few documentary styled videos, with one of them being a documentary talking about the fast food industry and the other being related to MGSV and it's Anti-war themes and use of Moby Dick.

Both of these documentaries will have a word document reviewing them and I will link any available YT link to the document.

Super Size Me document:

Metal Gear Solid V video review document and video.

This video was also partially what inspired me to create my documentary in the first place and also what inspired me to formulate the questions that I made for the project.

This incorrect summary video was also an inspiration for me to create a MGSV documentary, more specifically through the use of the videos editing that I found extremely entertaining and it pushed me to choose this game as my topic.

Practical Work

For the practical work for this project I started off by doing some edits in Adobe After Effects which were to get us familiar for the title edits we will be doing for our documentary project.

The first edit I did was the rotating text edit which was done by turning the text into a 3D object and editing the X,Y,Z co-ordinates of the object. Once I made a few edits I exported it using another piece of Adobe software known as Media Encoder which I used to render it into a MP4 file and uploaded it onto YouTube.

This video is the finished product of the Rotating Text edit.

The second edit I did in Adobe After Effects was a blur text edit which was done by applying a blur effect onto the selected text, this is done with the same method to turn the text 3D by clicking on a little play icon with the text Animate next to it and apply the blur effect. Once I had done the edit to a degree I liked, I then exported it with Media Encoder and uploaded it onto YouTube.