Constructing a Television Documentary
Television documentaries can be looked at in two different ways. Both deal with the same primary building blocks from which films are put together—sounds, images, shots, sequences. The approaches differ in the way these materials are examined. If we think of film as a kind of language, we might see the distinction as similar to that between semantics—the study of the way words are used to create the meaning of a text—and syntax—the study of the rules governing the way the words are selected, adapted and connected together.
This is close to the familiar distinction between function and form. Film semantics gives us what can be called the functional approach: how do we use sounds, images, shots and sequences to tell the film’s story? Film syntax, sometimes called film grammar, leads us to look at the forms themselves: how do we select and compose the images, and how do they connect together into shots and sequences?
As with most creative constructions, function comes first.