In this Essay I am going to watch four different documentaries, all with different topics. I will analyse them and then work out how they offer gratifications to the audiences.

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In this Essay I am going to watch four different documentaries, all with different topics. I will analyse them and then work out how they offer gratifications to the audiences. I will write about what affect they have and why they are used. I watched four different documentaries with four different topics: Historical (Pirates - The Golden Age), Mystery (Vanished - The plane that disappeared), Nature (Blue Planet) and horror / mystery (The Burkitsville Seven). All are very successful and have many different ways in which they individually gratify the audience and explain the set topic. First I will explain about how the documentaries are similar and how they differ, I will then talk about how they are individual in there own ways.

The Pirates documentary is a documentary based on the lives of pirates and how they lived when they were most victorious and most feared. The next I will watch is the horizon documentary - Vanished, this is the story of how a plane over thirty years ago vanished without a trace. The third documentary is The Burkitsville Seven - This is the story of how seven children were mysteriously kidnapped and murdered. The final documentary is the Blue Planet; this takes us to the bottom of the ocean never seen before in other documentaries.

All the aspects of each documentary are there for a reason, some may be there for one point and another might use the same technique but mean it in a different point of view. A good example of this is the documentaries narratives. They all have them but some are used in different ways. All of the documentaries have multistory lines with an exception to the Burkitsville Seven - its storyline happens periodically from when the events happen until he grows old and is put into an asylum. The Vanished documentary has a split narrative structure skipping from scenes of the airplane to when the soldiers are sent up on the investigation - this is the only documentary, which is structured this way and works very well it bounces back and forth in time. This technique is used because it builds a suspense for the viewer and just a crucial moment is near it will switch so the viewer will continue watching until it switches back again to the main screen, it gratifies the audience when it is shown again. The Blue Planet has a very linear structure like the Burkitsville Seven (the beginning of the documentary is shallow and it ends up at the bottom of the ocean) but at the end they have a sub section demonstrating how the produced the documentary and proving its reality, this is a form of self-reflexive filming. They do not need to build suspense because it is not that genre of documentary. The Pirate documentary as well as the Burkitsville Seven and the Blue Planet happens periodically but this differs as there is a much larger timescale - instead of one main focus the are many sub plots about the different pirates of the time, this gratifies the audience as it uses a wide range of stories and each one is different and has a wide range of events so the viewer watches for the range of events. This is a little like the Blue Planet as in that in goes from shallow, to middle, to the bottom and focuses on a different range of fish but I think that the main story is just about fish and how they live under water but that could be said for the pirates as well but I think there is a wider range of sub- plots for the pirates in that it explores how they begun and finally ended. Like the pirates documentary there is a suspense factor but there is more suspense in the storyline and not how information is withheld. This gratifies the audience because it has a different storyline.
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Another aspect of the narrative structure is suspense; the timing for this has to be right. For example, if you wrote a crime thriller and said how they did it at the beginning people wouldn't read on until the end. The documentaries use suspense well because in most of the documentaries the main point of the documentary is withheld until the end. The Burkitsville Seven, the Vanished and the Pirates documentaries use this structure. In the Burkitsville Seven and vanished the truth is held until the end forcing the viewer to stay focused on the documentary. Clues are ...

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