Box Office Hit Nature Documentaries: Tricks of the Trade to Engage Audiences

Nature documentaries, which is a genre of a film about animals, nature, and plants, can provide us informative knowledge, showing what we can rarely see. For one of our classes, we watched two Hollywood box office hit nature documentaries, “March of the Penguins” and “Chimpanzee.”

In this context, a question at hand is how those nature documentaries can best engage the audience. Even though it is rare to see how the animals live and act, the scenes of their ordinary life may not able to fascinate the audience enough because the reality of wild animals’ lives is not so dramatic. However, those films successfully attract viewers, getting their interests in the wildlife. So which kinds of effects do the Hollywood box office hit nature documentaries use to attract viewers? And how can those effects approach the audience?

Anthropomorphism

First of all, anthropomorphism, ascribing human-attributes or behavior to non-human beings is one of the powerful elements to engage the viewers. Some wildlife documentaries use it and generate empathy among the audience by emphasizing human-animal continuity (Rust et al. 117). Human social norms and structures are markedly present in the anthropomorphized animal narratives. Both “March of the Penguins” and “Chimpanzee” are good examples. The narration of “March of the Penguins,” for instance, informs of the Emperor Penguins’ anthropomorphized figures, such as “a heterosexual division of labor, nuclear family, parental self-sacrifice, and grief expressed at the death of offspring.”(Rust et al. 118) Also, long shots of marching birds as references to them as a “lost tribe” in the narration enhance the sense of human qualities (Rust et al. 118). In “Chimpanzee,” its voiceover can create a humanized story by giving each chimp his/her own name and characters. Those characters and chimp’s human-like social structures, given by the voiceover, can promote feelings of intimacy, emotional involvement with them among the viewers. In general, many viewers can immerse themselves in films when they feel emotional connections to the contents. Therefore, anthropomorphized narration in nature documentaries can contribute to engaging more audiences.

Techniques of visual intensification

The second element is the films’ camera technologies, the use of “varying camera angles, continuity editing, montage editing, slow motion, “impossible” close-ups” (Bousé 8). These techniques of visual intensification enable the control of time and space and create dramatized images in documentaries. I will focus on continuity editing.

Continuity editing is the process in film and video creation where you combine related shots, or different components of a single shot, into a sequence that directs the audience's attention to the consistency of the story across time and location (Hallerman).

Investigations into what visual features capture attention give us evidence for the effects of continuity editing. Examples of the features include the following: abrupt onsets of visual objects, abrupt disappearances, motion onset, apparent motion, contrast/luminance changes, and unique and changing colors (Smith 38). These are features of continuity editing that are widely seen in films, including recent nature documentaries. “March of the Penguins” and “Chimpanzee” also utilize those features and camera techniques to keep the audience’s attention.

Conclusion

There are many critiques about nature documentaries using anthropomorphism and sophisticated camera technologies. It’s because both humanized narratives and dramatized wildlife images can give viewers wrong perceptions about nature and seem merely entertainment. However, we cannot deny that the Hollywood nature documentaries have engaged so many audiences and contributed to increasing their interests in the wildlife and environment. Voiceover and visual intensification by camera technologies are currently the crucial elements for documentaries in attracting more viewers.

Reference

Stephen Rust, Salma Monami, & Sean Cubitt. Ecocinema Theory and Practice. 1st ed., Routledge, 2013.

Derek, Bousé. Wildlife Films. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000

Jason, Hallerman. “Editing 101: What is continuity editing?” Nofilmschool, Oct1. 2020, https://nofilmschool.com/what-is-continuity-editing.

Tim, Smith. “An Attentional Theory of Continuity Editing.” University of Edinburgh. College of Science and Engineering. School of Informatics, 2005, pp38-39, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/83943535.pdf.