Week 1 - What is Documentary?

Our first session of Documentary Video was a bit overwhelming. As you can imagine there are so many things to cover about this domain. And when you thing that we didn't even talked about a camera in 3 hours..

This session was more about an introduction to the Documentaries types, filmmakers and an overview of the Module structure.

One of the most interesting quote that I found is this one:

‘The main problem for those examining documentary is that it is too often thought of in essentialist terms. In other words, the assumption seems to be that there is somewhere ‘out there’, ‘the model’ or ‘typical’ documentary, against which all attempts at documentary are measured.’ (Ward 2005: 22)

Because I also thought that a "Documentary" means something exactly and you have certain guidelines that if you don't respect means that you don't have a Documentary.

Well is wrong. It turns out that you surely have some vogue guidelines but they aren't so strict. You can play along them. You can put your style on the documentary. 

In this session we also learned about the differences about the differences between Documentary and Fiction.

The differences from fiction are that documentary:

•talks about actual situations

•honours known facts

•its images and sounds represented stem directly from the historical world

•does not introduce new, unverifiable facts

•speaks about historical world

We also talked about a 1 minute project that we need to do about our 1st day at University or the downfalls of living alone.

Our group choose the second option.