Documentaries

All three of these documentaries were very different in the way they came across to the viewer, or what impression they gave. The video about the basketball player caught my attention right away. Between the sounds of a clock ticking, heartbeats, and fast breathing, I found myself feeling just as nervous as Royce White did. To me, this documentary was a mix between a news story and a fictional story. Sometimes you could tell there was a camera crew there, like during the interviews, ext., but sometimes you could not. In the video about the record collector, I wasn’t as invested in the story. The documentary came across as purely an interview, and besides record playing in the background, no sound effects or information really captured my interest. The last video, about Korean netiquette, came across to me as a news special. The crew was very visible in this documentary—the interviewer/producer was in plain sight, asking questions and taking tours of the elementary school. It seemed a lot like a “60 Minutes” show. The basketball documentary had the most sound effects, and was separated by written information on the screen—we were notified about what time of the day it was, what was going on, so it was pretty easy to follow. This contributed to the “story” effect because it wasn’t just an interview; it was cameras capturing the entire day in the life of a NBA basketball contender. The captions in the record collecting video had a different meaning—instead of giving the time of day, they told how much money the collection was worth, how no one is buying it, ext. The only captions in the Internet documentary were captions in English—which also gave it a news broadcast feel.