Documentary films are films that show an angle or a point of view, its a nonfictional film that intends to document a certain feature of reality, mainly for the reason of instruction or keeping a documented historical record. Documentary film making is one of the subjects being covered by filmmaking school. Theres a very wide assortment of types of documentary films a film school student can make. Most of the time, documentaries are about historical events and its effects. Currently, political documentaries have become very popular. Another topic thats also well known to be turned to documentaries is the green movement or environment related issues.

An example of a political/environmental documentary is the "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore. This documentary showed the realities and the impact of global warming and climate change. a lot of people believed that global warming was just a mere cycle of climate change affecting the whole world. The documentary showed fact about the phenomenon and what it is doing to the worlds climate and the negative effects it is doing to humans, plants and animals. However, global warming is still not considered to be a fact by the scientific society. This makes the documentary bias to the issue. Documentaries should show both sided of the story.

Documentary films should be about showing not telling. An example of this is to show what poverty is in the film instead of having someone explain the meaning of the issue. With documentary films, the viewers are given their own way of defining and concluding. Filmmaking school students who are planning to create a documentary on poverty should think about filming places where poverty is rampant. They should try to show how people live in poverty such as their daily routine, the struggles they face, problems and issues brought up by the topic.

The Film should be a visual medium. The people who are watch it should understand the subject. Documentary films should be made interesting to watch. Simply looking at someone speaking is not very visually entertaining. This is why a documentary needs an interesting subject. This certain subject in film school allows the student to create a film about reality. Documentaries do not have scripts and most of the scenes shot for the movie are something that the subject usually does. However, some filmmaking school students take the documentary style and make a spoof out of it. These mocumentarys usually tackle issues and events in a homeruns angle.