Before planning the documentary, it is important to understand how to undergo documenting a subjects life and the ethics of documentary filming. Things to consider are as followed:
- Accuracy: It is important to be as accurate as you can when presenting information in a documentary as it can seen as being very biased or can cause offence to the subject or viewers. An example of this is ensuring that you have spelt someone’s name correctly or data is presented correctly at the time of filming.
- Balance: Every documentary should try to be balanced, unless there is a specific reason for it not to be, however when documenting two different sides, it is important to balance the documentary out with each side of the argument and not to be biased.
- Impartiality: Similar to balance impartiality is about keeping equal treatment of both rivals, in documentaries which have two sides.
- Objectivity: When documenting about peoples opinions or religion etc. it is important to be as objective as possible. This means not showing your own opinions and taking a third person view on what is being documented, leaving the audience to make up their own minds.
- Representation: When questioning a subject, it is important to think about how the documentary is going to represent a subject to an audience, and whether or not that is how they would like to be represented. This is sometimes a difficult thing to think about but must be thought about throughly in all stages of the documentary process.
- Privacy: Privacy is very important in documentaries, as it is easy to ‘show too much’ to an audience. Although you are documenting somebody’s life, you also have to think about the things they don’t want people to see, such as where they live as an example. When questioning a subject and you know something sensitive about them, it is important not to invade their privacy if they do not want to talk about certain things, or pressure them into telling you. You should always ask before following up your question.
References:
New Challenges for Documentary – Alan Rosenthal & John Corner
BBC Editorial Values
https://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidelines/bbc-editorial-values/editorial-values
-Joshua Poole- 