After having searched a while through YouTube and watching a handful of 3 minute wonders there were a few that stood out to me and that I found most interesting. Taking a look at the first video that I found, it was called 'Home' and was a really touching documentary as it explores our collective sense of home through a visual poem, spoken by Joe McGarry, he speaks about the journey of finding his home within himself. If I was to categorise this, it would definitely be expository, I say this because it is done in such way as it presents a topic which is demonstrated visually with various images and a voice over (also a typical characteristic of this style) which addresses the situation about home, not only that but it is neatly linked in with the dialogue being a poem, this is simple and easy to understand, well at least I found it easy to understand and I really like how each photograph represents the different homes, yet it's irrelevant to the message he is trying to get across. This is a simple way of creating a documentary and yet it is a very powerful one, which is why it is one of my favourites from the selection I watched.
Secondly I found one which was very different, especially the documentary style, but it was still addressing a topic, but this was done in an interactive and observational style. The documentary was called 'This Is Our Youth: Carrot Crew' and was trying to promote healthy eating but nobody would listen to their argument and the 'Crisp Crew' were the ones who never got in trouble. This documentary had the interactive style as we have one sided interviews with the 'Carrot Crew' as they give their opinions about what they are trying to do and also the opinions on how others have reacted to them. Though there are usually two sided interviews in interactive documentaries, this still sets up an argument and I guess the 'Crisp Crew' are the other side, though we never do see an interviewer. There is also the observational side which is when we see shots of the 'Carrot Crew' at lunch time switching the food and also when they are about to enter their lesson, this just shows the real life events without the film maker making any interruptions to what is going on and therefore is an observation. This was one of my favourites as I liked they mix of both documentary styles and I also thought what they were doing was really inventive and it was quite amusing which is why I enjoyed it.
Finally, I found another video which was really quite strange, in fact, I'm not sure how to explain it at all, it was completely different and the camera angles and the way it had been shot was something that really stood out making it just a really strange documentary. This was called 'King Of Laughter' and was about a man who travelled to England as he wanted to cheer up England with laughter. There are various scenes cut together showing the responses of people laughing, the people that he cheered up, and this is done to show how he has improved and is making people laugh, in some way I find this documentary a little manipulative because I am sure not everybody laughed (me being grumpy and all) therefore these clips were assembled in a little montage of laughter sequence to show his improvements and this to me doesn't seem to be real, but all of the clips are observational as he goes out in daily life to see these people and observe there life though he does partake in the action alongside a voice over which could be slightly interactive but the voice over itself can be expository. I am not sure how to explain the video as it is very strange but I feel that the guy is trying to hard to make it seem like he has cheered everyone up because that's just not possible, maybe I just don't have the belief that it could happen like the man does and therefore it's a strange but interesting documentary.
Overall, I find a lot of the three minute documentaries quite different and inspiring to others all in there own independent way, each one seems to be unique which makes it valuable for the time slot that it is played in which really does give a chance to get the directors known because they have something different. I think that these documentaries all show different areas of interest using a mix of Bill Nichol's styles and it was interesting to research the 3 minute wonders.
Documentary Marketing Research
Looking at TV listings, we (Steve and I) went through the Sky TV Listings and looked at a couple of channels to see how many Documentaries were on in a week. With this we looked at the amount of programs shown and how many hours it calculated up to, counting from today 12am to Wednesday 12pm. Firstly we looked at Channel 4 and counted all of the documentaries during that week, there were only twenty documentaries that were being viewed, the total hours of TV in a week is 168hrs and only 15hrs and 50minutes were documentary, this is a mere 9.52% of TV in a week that is documentary. Furthermore we went on to search how many documentaries were on during peak time. Having searched when peak time was, we found that it was during the hours of 6pm and 10:30pm, then working out how many of those documentaries were during that time was only eight, this means that only 40% of the documentaries shown in a week are shown during peak time.
After doing this channel we then looked at another set of TV listings and compared Channel 4 with BBC1, firstly we thought that there would be a much smaller amount of documentaries that were shown on this channel and that's why we picked it, though we were shocked to find that there are sixteen episodes that are shown. Though two of those programs every morning (excluding Saturday) have an 1hr and 15minutes of documentary that are a daily episode. Altogether that was 12hrs that were shown on TV, compared to the 9.52% that are on Channel 4 there is a 7.14% on BBC1. There may not be a huge difference but having found a higher outcome than we thought, we then looked into the peak time and there were only two programs that were shown during peak time compared to the eight that are on Channel 4, in percentage thats 16.67% for BBC1 and 40% for Channel 4, this is a huge comparison, and shows that documentaries are shown a lot more on Channel 4. This was interesting to find out and I am surprised there are still a really small amount of documentaries shown on TV.
BARB is where we went to look for more information about documentaries and how many views that some programs got. When here I looked at Channel 4's TV views and found that for the documentaries there were a fair amount of views, making them quite popular, for instance out of the top ten of the most viewed there are six documentaries, one being Benefits Street: The Last Word, which has 3.13 million views, which is even more than Hollyoaks, a well known popular drama which has 1.24 million views, this shows that the documentary is a lot more popular and that specific documentary has been a huge success, showing that documentaries can be really good and popular, shown within the Channel 4's viewing results we can see this.
Good discussion of the 3MWs and good market research into genre popularity.
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