Good examples of documentaries?

Milk

Milk

I want to shoot a documentary as if it was a serious competition.

We had a challenge in college - the muller corner challenge where 3 people who said they could easily eat 40 yoghurts in under an hour tried to do just that.

Unfortunatly i was late and got a pretty bad place. and therefore not great footage. However i'd like to film the training and i'd like a few pointers on how to shoot it. I want it to look deadly serious, and everything in his life before this moment was just building up to this.

I like the channel 4 documentaries about the parents who push their kids into things, and they follow their training regimes and things like this. i'd just like to know your opinions on this & any examples of entertaining documentaries i could learn from?

thanks.

i'm aware the training should've been shot beforehand. But i had other work to do.
 
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Look up works by a director by the name of Ken Burns.

He does epic scope documentaries on various subjects, usually about US History.

His multi-part documentary "The Civil War" was (for me) very powerful and well written.

He also did a memorable series on the history of Jazz.
 
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The stuff you're talking about isn't anything like Ken Burns (or anything like legitimate documentary). What you are describing is more akin to reality television. The key to making your story is clever editing of as much coverage you can possibly get. For every minute of your finished film, you should have an hour of extra coverage. Notate every shot you get. Then you can edit your bits together to tell whatever story you'd like.

It doesn't matter what actually happens; the only thing that matters is how you cut it to tell whatever story it is you are trying to tell. If you want one of the characters to have a serious expression on his face after learning what flavors of yogurt he'll be eating, ask him instead about something serious like teenage suicide. Notate "serious expression" and edit it in accordingly.
 
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If you're doing this as a comedy I would suggest "Best in Show"...

Otherwise check out the food contest documentary about the little oriental man who weighed 100 pounds beat the football player "The Fridge" in a hotdog eating contest. I don't know the name but it aired on the Discovery channel, could probably pull it up on you-tube. Search William Perry/eating contest/japanese...
 
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I think you're going for comedy here right? Making fun of documentaries?

If so, id say a good place for you to start developing your ideas would be to watch several regular documentaries and note how they film them. Then exaggerate the same shots, dialogue etc...
 
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Confessions of a Superhero has a pretty big buildup, for the Superman look-alike competition.

The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters also has a lot of drama building up to the ultimate challenge.

Is that the kind of thing you are looking for?

Both of those are on instant-watch at NetFlix, btw.
 
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My bad, I just saw "suggest Documentary" and my blinders went to Ken Burns :lol:

If you are going parody/humor route, what the above posters suggested(Best in show was great for that).

I'll be hiding in the corner anyone needs me:blush:
 
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In line with King of Kong and Confessions of a Superhero, one of my favs is Wordplay.

Please Vote for Me is a pretty hilarious Chinese docu about a class experimenting with democracy when they are picking their class leader. I can't say I agree what they were doing was democracy really, it was more teaching them about competition and calling it democracy, but it was veeeery entertaining :D
 
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