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ELA 5: Documentary 33 Views
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Description:
Who says documentaries are boring? This video's basically a mini documentary about documentaries and it's awesome. Right everyone? Right? ...We'll take your silence as a yes.
Transcript
- 00:04
[Coop and Dino singing]
- 00:13
What do you think of when you hear “documentary”? [People watching a documentary]
- 00:16
Boring, British people talking about floods?
- 00:19
Morgan Freeman and penguins?
- 00:21
Your aunt’s YouTube channel of cat videos? [Aunt holding a kitten]
Full Transcript
- 00:23
Well, a documentary is a non-fictional movie that aims to document some part of reality.
- 00:28
But they can be a lot cooler than all of that stuff! [Coop explaining a documentary]
- 00:31
Not that your aunt’s cat channel isn't cool… We’d never say that.
- 00:35
Unlike a fictional movie, where the director hires actors…
- 00:38
… shoots on a set… [Batman and Joker on a film set]
- 00:39
…. and maybe throws in some special effects…
- 00:41
… the idea behind a documentary film is that the director simply sets up their camera
- 00:45
and observes real life as it happens. [Woman with a camera on a beach]
- 00:47
And, sure, sometimes real life can be pretty boring…
- 00:49
But real life is also the thing that brought us sharks…
- 00:53
extreme surfing…
- 00:54
and moon landing!
- 00:56
And documentary films are there to capture it all. [Documentary film of moon landing]
- 00:59
Documentaries usually provide information about real places, people, and events.
- 01:03
Some of the tools documentaries use are images…
- 01:06
… interviews with experts…
- 01:07
… and artifacts.
- 01:09
Traditional documentary styles are biopic profiles, which tell the story of real people, [Coop discussing biopic profiles]
- 01:13
or pieces about actual events in history.
- 01:15
But just like Pokémon, the documentary as an art form is continuing to evolve, and sometimes
- 01:21
the boundaries of the genre can be unclear.
- 01:23
Which isn’t always a bad thing. [Girl walking towards fiction]
- 01:25
One new development in documentaries is known as the Reflexive style. This is a documentary
- 01:30
that isn’t just about a subject…
- 01:32
… it’s also about how the documentary itself was made. [Dino teaching about reflexive documentaries]
- 01:35
It’s like documentary inception.
- 01:37
The coolest thing about documentary films is how versatile they can be.
- 01:41
Almost anything can be the subject of a documentary…
- 01:43
…and as the genre grows more popular, so do the topics it touches. For example, a documentary
- 01:49
might look at some obscure or unusual interest, like, say “Competitive Stamp Collecting…” [Boys in stamp collecting competition]
- 01:53
Or look at a common concept from an unusual angle… like… the U.S. Economy… as seen
- 01:58
from the perspective of bunnies.
- 02:00
But don’t think that documentaries are perfect.
- 02:03
Because they’re made by people, they can be biased. [Girl with camera on beach and stamped biased]
- 02:05
The bias could be the result of what equipment they choose to film with…
- 02:09
… what they choose to film…
- 02:10
… and even how they plan to release it once it’s done. [Boy and girl walk to entrance of theatre]
- 02:13
So even though documentaries can be totally informative and cool, don’t assume that
- 02:17
they're 100% truthful all the time.
- 02:19
Who knows what went into making those cat videos… [Aunt giving thumbs up]
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