3 minute wonder research.

Research

What is a 3 minute wonder? A 3 minute wonder is a very short brief documentary that is typically shown on channel 4. These are a very short insight into someones life and can have many different meanings. These can be categorized in any of Bill Nichols categories.
In this is am going to pick  3 documentaries of different types and explain why they work and why I like them. Also I will be saying what documentary type they are and why.
I have watched 5 of these 3 minute wonders and I have chosen these to analyse as these are my favorite. One thing that I have noticed is that most of them are interactive or a mix of.

This documentary is used to describe the daily life of living with a bird of prey, this documentary gives details and routines for what you have to do to look after one and what you do with it. In this she says that she goes hunting with it. This is mostly an interactive documentary because it is showing the girl opinions and it includes interviews, but it also has some observational aspects to it for example when the bird is flying in the wild. I like this documentary because it is very good and informative, furthermore it is very well put together and is smooth.

This 3 minute wonder is made to show the story of a tattoo artist and how she started all the way to where she is now, also she says what they mean to her. Within this documentary she says what some of her tattoos meant to her and why she got some of them, I like this because it shows her dedication and commitment to her job. This is also a mix between observational and interactive as it shows both interviews and views hr doing her job from the sidelines.  This documentary is very different from the rest, this because it is entirely observational, but could be argued to be interactive as it is viewing a debate a so called piece of art from the sidelines, but it could be interactive because the people there are fully aware that they are on camera and sometimes look at it. This documentary is different and shows a debate between people. I like this because it shows an insight into peoples thoughts and is well represented. Even though jump cuts are used to make the argument run smoother it is still manipulated and does not show everyone's opinions. All in all I do like this as a 3 minute wonder. Documentaries Market Research After looking at TV listings we discovered that most of the documentaries are on Channel 4, After looking through an entire week of listings we counted up the number of programs and hours that they are shown, but also how much they are shown during peek times. After counting up the hours of documentaries we found that there were a total of 20 documentaries shown during the week which tallied up to 15 hours and 50 minutes. This meant that 9.42% of all programs on Channel 4 are documentaries. Furthermore looking at peek times which is between 6pm and 10:30pm we found out that 8 of these documentaries were within this time frame, this meant that 40% of all documentaries shown are within the peek times.  After doing this on Channel 4 we then decided to compare this to another channel. We chose BBC1 as we thought that there would be a large margin between numbers of documentaries as we thought there would be very little showings. We were slightly mistaken as there were 16 documentaries shown during the week that tallied up to 12 hours, this meant that only 7.14% of programs were documentaries. Even with the documentaries that were shown, only 2 hours of 2 different documentaries were at peek times. This meant that 16.67% of the documentaries were within peek times which is significantly less that Channel 4.  Documentaries aren't the most popular media production but are quite often shown. Although they are common some channels show them more than others, for example on BBC1 documentaries are not often shown. even when documentaries are shown on this channel they are not shown at peek times. On the other Channel 4 has regularly shown documentaries on a daily basis, furthermore they are also shown at peek times. As you can see out of the top 10 shows that Channel 4, 6 out of 10 of these are documentaries. This is significantly more than if you look at the top 10 for BBC1. I found out these results by going on the BARB website to find the top 30 shows on each channel.   Bibliography 

http://tv.sky.com/tv-guide#/day/0 http://www.barb.co.uk/viewing/weekly-top-30