Other than going out to practice, making and learning from mistakes, I felt that there was not much I can draw from in week two. Most of the readings were discussions about what is a documentary, how should you start and the many different types of documentaries. I guess that reading these articles would be a good opportunity to observe the spectrum of documentaries.

There are two extremes of the general type of documentaries. One side would be for entertainment and the other then is educational/informative. Reality TV shows such as Jersey shore or Big Brother contain documentary style of film making. However, these lack the educational and informative side. It is still a documentary because it is an account of events, though interviews and commentary, but serve no other purpose other than to entertain. In contrast, some thing that may fall in the middle of the spectrum, or a little bit biased towards the educational side would be David Attenborough’s ‘Planet Earth’. This form of documentary has plenty of educational content, but draws in a bigger audience because they animate the animals in such way that makes the content very entertaining. An example of a predominately informative style of documentary would be the ‘Invention of the Automobile’. This kind of documentary would not appeal to the masses as the bulk of the content is just educational with a less to none dramatisation in the narrative.