The importance of narrative in documentaries…Research for our documentary

Narration0 Documentaries typically feature a narrator, enabling the

audience to listen to an authoritative voice who will aid their understanding and plot information across the film. The most common is the ‘voice of God’ of the ‘non-character voice’ which is anonymous and tells the audience the story.

0 Many TV documentaries, such as Who do you think you are and Big Brother feature a familiar voice which produces a level of trust in which the audience can listen to. The conventional voice-over will be a masculine, male voice but in more recent documentaries, female voice-overs are becoming increasingly apparent. For our documentary, we intend to feature a female voice over for this specific reason.

Different types of narration…

0Rhetorical: Presenting an argument to persuade the audience to adopt a specific opinion. Persuasive techniques are used to make the audience want to act on this.

0Storytelling: Presents a story of typically a real life situation, about people and places.

0Categorical: Information is told categorically.