Codes & Coventions of Documentaries

Documentaries = artificial life-editing, they're a construction of reality, heavily edited and use a variety of camerawork such as hand held cam (used to capturereactions as they happen),
Documentaries are made using gatekeeping a way of selecting and rejecting which information will be used.

Narrative Structure
Narrative structure is the way a story is told.
Documentaries are either open or closed narrative. Open is when there are loose ends and unanswered questions remaining at the end of the narrative e.g. soap operas are open narratives. Closed is when all questions are answered (no loose ends) an example of this is the film "Finding Nemo".

A documentary following the open narrative structure will raise a question as its premise, in the documentary "The Devil Made Me Do It" the question was did Marilyn Manson's music cause the nuns murder by influencing the girls.

Single/Multi Strand
Documentaries are either single strand or multi-strand, single is when they follow one narrative, mutli strands have more than one narrative thread.
Most documentaries are single strand to keep it simple and easy for the audience to understand, an example of multi-strand is soap operas.

Linear/Non-Linear
Documentaries are also either linear or non-linear.
Linear is when a documentary is structured to be chronological. Non-linear is when the time flow is disrupted and events don't follow the order they happened e.g thorugh use of flashbacks or flashforwards.

A circular narrative is when the start and end point are the same (its linked to open narrative), generally raises a question and has the exposition of the arguments.