I will present 5 different types of documentary formats in the media industry.

This type of documentary exposes someone’s life, and often has a narrator speaking directly to the audience. This type of documentary can include interviews, facts, narrators and footage. This type of Documentary often will expose a subject that not many people know properly about. Expository

A documentary or TV show that is based around a certain person, that are being followed constantly by a camera crew. A good example of this is where people follow people at the airport showing there normal day, or documentaries where things are made such as processing meat etc. Observational

This is different from the everyday professionally made TV documentary because it is planned and filmed by a group or community addressing any issues or telling any story that they want to cover. This is a good code and convention because it allows individuals to present themselves, instead of being represented. This will allow the community to come together as one, this type of Documentary type is made for a specific audiences and with certain objectives in mind before executing the Documentary. Participatory

This type of Documentary focus entirely on the realism and quality of the product being made. The documentary makers show the content being filmed, and allowing the viewer to see the problems and issues that filmmakers have to address on a daily basis. Documentary making isn’t as easy as people think. Most documentaries of this type are barely edited and avoid special effects being used, this is to keep the realism and truth of the documentary. Reflexive

They are strongly personal, unconventional, perhaps poetic and/or experimental, and might include hypothetical enactments of events designed to make us experience what it might be like for us to possess a certain specific perspective on the world that is not our own, for example that of black, gay men in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) or Jenny Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1991). This sub-genre might also lend itself to certain groups to ‘speak about themselves.’ Often, a battery of techniques, many borrowed from fiction or avant-garde films, are used. Performative docs often link up personal accounts or experiences with larger political or historical realities. Performative