What is the difference between narrative cinema and documentary filmmaking? Very simply stated, narrative filmmaking is a pre-scripted movie with actors.Documentary filmmaking is capturing reality in some way with the script often written AFTER the shooting has begun.
Narrative film, fictional film or fiction film is a motion picture that tells a fictional or fictionalized story, event or narrative. Commercial narrative films with running times of over an hour are often referred to as feature films, or feature-length films.
A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record".
What is the difference between a documentary and a fictional film narrative?
Real Life vs. Fantasy -- In general, documentaries are meant to capture in some way "real life" whereas a feature film creates a whole new world that may or may not be based on real events or real people. The difference here is fact vs. fiction.
3 Act Story Structure In Documentary Filmmaking by Kevin Knoblock
Are narrative films and documentary films the same?
In documentary films, reality is being shot as it unfolds. In narratives, preconceived images are shot to tell a specific story, often fictional and not based in reality. These shots are typically established by shot listing, a technique commonly used in narrative movies and not documentary films.
Narration is a distinct innovation of the expositional mode of documentary. Initially manifesting as an omnipresent, omniscient, and objective voice intoned over footage, narration holds the weight of explaining and arguing a film's rhetorical content.
In 1991, American film critic and theoretician Bill Nichols proposed that there were six different modes of documentary—poetic, expository, reflexive, observational, performative, and participatory—each containing its own specific characteristics.
An observational documentary does not contain any interviews or narration. It is simply depicting events as they happened without any additional commentary. This leaves the audience to really form their own opinion about the subject without being swayed by the filmmaker.
In a narrative film, there is typically a beginning, middle and end that make sense to the viewer. In a non-narrative film, there is no straightforward plot or storyline. There is no apparent cause and effect relationship between the images you see on the screen, nor is there a main character with an explicit goal.
What is the difference between film and documentary?
The difference between documentary and feature film lies in their purpose and subject matter. Documentary aims to educate, inform and inspire the viewers whereas feature films aim to entertain the audience. Documentary deals with facts and reality whereas feature films deal with fiction.
What are the three major components of a film narrative?
The three-act-screenplay structure is a story-telling model that goes back to Aristotle's dramatic theory as outlined in Poetics. It is loosely defined as a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. We can also think of the three-act structure as the Setup, the Confrontation, and the Resolution.
What are the three most common types of documentaries?
In this VOD we examine 3 different types of documentaries: Observational, Expository and Participatory. You will see examples of films that have used each of the 3 types of genre successfully.
One of the most familiar and popular types of documentary is Expository Documentaries. These are designed to help convince, inform or persuade viewers. It uses a narrator throughout the film and often presents an argument for what is right or wrong.
It is a genre of movie making that uses video & film scenes, photographs and/or sound of real people and real events which when edited together creates a particular story, viewpoint, message or experience.
These films showcase the power of the genre to bring about change and spark important conversations. To do this, they employ the following key elements of a documentary: interviews, cutaways, archival footage, cinema verité and process footage.
One basic requirement of documentary is the use of nonactors ("real people" who "play themselves") rather than actors (who are cast, costumed, and made tip to play "roles"). The other basic requirement is shooting on location (rather than on sound stages or studio backlots). In documentaries no sets are constructed.
The next documentary style is narrator-led. This style of filmmaking is when footage or images are shown with a narrator's voice describing the story. Often the narrator will be providing context to a scenes or giving the audience additional information to a sequence.
Can we combine both aspects of documentary and narrative together?
Documentaries can have fictional elements and narrative films can have factual elements, placing them in the Hybrid category. Hybrid films tend to be documentaries with fictional elements, but can also be the other way around.
