Presenting Visual Evidence. Video is also, obviously, the primary medium for documenting real events and bringing their substance to an audience. One or two people with a video camera and some sound gear can go where an audience of hundreds or thousands not only wouldn't fit but might not be welcome. You can't take a crowd along to shoot the behavior of animals in the wild. And most of us will never take a safari to Africa or spend several months in the Alaska bush to see it for ourselves.
Video can also make experiences accessible to an audience that they have simply never noticed.
I made a documentary about the way young children learn for a teacher training project in early childhood education. We recorded kids from a few weeks old up to the age of five to show the tremendous amount of learning that takes place long before a child ever sets foot in a classroom. With this documentary we made accessible to teachers on four continents a view of young children that most had never seen before. A Young Child Is . . . Until then, most documentaries on early childhood were scripted by an academic expert and shot to illustrate whatever theories the expert propounded.