Re-inventing TV documentaries

Re-inventing TV documentaries

After Mekong Chronicles and Train Chronicles, TV stations in Vietnam are exploring a new way of making documentaries that requires a great deal of money, global trekking, and attention to viewers tastes.

Old-style documentaries

For a long time, TV documentaries have been considered dry, boring and formulaic. According to a director in charge of censoring documentaries at VTV, of the 20 films broadcast monthly, only 20% receive favourable public feedback. Viewers give neither good nor bad comments on 30% of them and the remaining 50% are either not watched or judged in an unfavourable light.

During a recent conference on documentaries, a director cited many examples of films using the same formulas over and over again. For instance, documentaries about poor people overcoming poverty often include scenes of poverty, narrators talking about the main characters, and the main characters recalling how they have fought against poverty.

President of HCM City TV Huynh Van Nam said, œNow that game shows are losing their popularity, interactive programmes and reality shows are being welcomed. As for documentaries, viewers are getting sick of old-style trite ones.

Ambitious projects

In order to attract viewers, TV stations are abandoning old ways of making documentaries and embarking on a journey to create new ones.

œTo lure young audiences, documentaries must focus on interaction with audience members. Verbose narration should be minimised since images will speak for themselves. HTV is investing in this new way of making documentaries, said Huynh Van Nam.

And new-style documentaries arent cheap. In the upcoming months, HTV will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on each of its new projects: Amazon Chronicles, Discovering Vanuatu and the Ganges Chronicles.

Vietnam TV (VTV) wont lag behind. It will invest nearly a million dollars on a 20-episode documentary called Lan Thuong-Mekong, which will be produced by a 120-member film team including directors, reporters, cameramen, and technicians from 6 countries. The film will be available in 7 languages and broadcast all over the world.

It was HTV most expensive project ever, Mekong Chronicles, that first proved the success of new-style documentaries. It set a record in DVD sales for documentaries with 62,000 DVDs of the film sold, while for years, Vietnamese TV documentary makers only hoped for several thousand DVDs at most.

Train Chronicles, which is being broadcast by HTV and other stations, is another success. Thousands of its DVDs have been sold.

According to Quang Trung, Head of the Documentary Department at HCM City Television Film Station (TFS), the success of Mekong Chronicles and Train Chronicles is due to the fact that their topics are seen through the eyes of Vietnamese people and there are interactions and exchanges with viewers.

Most new-style documentaries enable audience members to follow daily journeys of filmmakers as well as talk with them through emails. New information is also constantly updated on stations websites.

Stations are also orchestrating large-scale marketing campaigns, broadcasting their films during busy hours when many viewers tune in to watch their programmes, as well as are actively calling for outside investment.