Research into media forms

 A documentary is a form of entertainment/education which usually has a narrator that talks over footage of a past event or events. They do this so the viewer can understand more about the said event or events and makes the experience of these events more realistic and cinematic to the audience then what it would be if it was just a book.

Poetic Documentary 

The poetic documentary is a specific genre of documentary that started becoming popular in the 1920s and a poetic documentary instead of focusing on a story with voice overs from a narrator. It more goes for the feel of a time period or place with only music and visuals and is often not chronological most of the time. A poetic documentaries goal is to invoke an emotional response from the audience without explaining what is happening in the footage being presented.

Expository Documentary

Expository documentaries are documentaries that quite obviously have a narrator that narrates over footage that is being shown to the audience. In this style of documentary the narrator is something called the voice of god which means that they help the audience understand everything that is happening in the order they want to present the information as they know all of the information.

Participatory Documentary

The Participatory documentary is a style of documentary that very much involves the narrator a lot as they usually take part in the story the documentary is telling. These kinds of documentaries usually include comedy and a bit of drama as we follow the story with the narrator of the documentary.

Preformative Documentary

Performance documentaries often follow the filmmaker and the story is told through them and directly involves them and is almost always a fictional story.

Observational Documentary

Observational documentaries often allow the audience to see the story told in chronological order and don’t push any bias onto the view and they allow The viewer to create our own opinions of the story that the documentary tells.

Reflexive Documentary

Reflexive documentaries much like preformative documentaries include a story that actively involves the filmmaker but unlike performance documentaries it is not fiction.