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Documentary unit: Research - watching a documentary

The most hated family in America - A documentary by Louis Theroux

To research how to shoot our documentary, I watched one made by one of the most well-known documentary makers ever, Louis Theroux, as I thought if my​ group could imitate some of his styles, like shooting, interviews and voiceover, then it could greatly improve the quality of our own documentary.


I chose this documentary due to me hearing things about the Westbro Baptist church before, but I didn't know a lot about them. I had heard that they went to very extreme measures and had opinions on certain subjects that are considered by everyone else as extremely offensive. This documentary really opened my eyes to how far people are willing to go in order to try and make their point. 

 While watching this documentary, I took notice of how Louis conducted his interviews. They were quite informal, as he and the person he was interviewing were not always just sat down talking to each other. Most of the time, they were talking in-between actions, such as at a protest. I felt that this was a good technique to use, but then thought that being more formal in our interviews would be a better fit to the tone of our documentary, so we decided to have the interviewer and interviewee sitting in front of each other, like most other interviews. 

 The questions Louis asked were also quite good, as he expanded his point during the question, allowing for a more detailed answer from the person he was interviewing. We tried to incorporate this technique into some of the questions that we asked during our two interviews, but due to time restraints, we could not use all of the answer in the final piece, as the questions were sometimes drawn out to much. 

 The camera was more fluent in this documentary that it is in ours, due to the nature of the subject that is being filmed. In Theroux's documentary, the camera is all handheld, as there is action going on all around him at almost all times. In our documentary, we are fixed on one action, so the camera is more fixated, especially in the interviews. 

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