Codes and Conventions - Risha Jethwa

Codes and Convention

As a group we decided to research the elements behind a documentary, however from this research we will identify the important features and gain more ideas for our documentary when planning and producing.

Firstly as part of our research we defined what a documentary is, as it will help us identify the aspects. A documentary is a film or TV program presenting the facts about a person or event. Most importantly the objective of a documentary is to emphasizing or express things as perceived without distortion of personal feelings, insertion of fictional matter, or interpretation.

Most importantly documentaries can be divided up into many genres for instances frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness, consonance, unexpectedness, continuity, composition, reference to elite person and nations, personalisation, negativity and finally visulisation. From this from our documentary topic is based on ‘Is student behaviour declining in secondary schools?’ The appropriate news value our documentary fits into is consonance, continuity and negativity. The reason for this is because consonance meets the expectations of media, secondly continuity shows that once and event has been covered, it is convenient to cover it some more as it shows a running story. Finally negativity shows that bad news is good news. This shows that all these news values are key elements to a documentary category.

Another reason is that documentaries have important conventions such as a voiceover, interview, titles, narrative, sub-heading, statistics and facts and figures. In this case these conventions allow the documentary to be fun, interesting and educational to watch. Despite this many conventions also engage the audience as the documentary become more appealing, however this is done by titles, interviews and sub-heading. This shows that titles and headings become more attractive by the appearance and colour as it maybe bold, italic or underlined.