Reflections of a Documentary Virgin

When we were handed the surveillance project, I figured it'd be a cakewalk. Our story was already written, our sets were already built, all our content already existed. Documentary was just plagiarizing life. 20 hours of grappling with Final Cut Pro later, I think I've had a change of heart.

What makes documentary hard is exactly what I thought would make it easy - you can't make everything up. In narrative, if a bridge between two events doesn't work, you build it yourself. In documentary, you actually have to go out and find that bridge. But that doesn't mean the imagination has no place in documentary. The creator still has to organize the facts and decide how to present them. Seeing the range of documentary styles presented in class only reinforced the importance of these choices to me.

Our group's single biggest difficulty had to be incorporating our interviews. Don't get me wrong - we had two well-spoken, knowledgeable subjects, but there's a difference between a good argument in person and a good argument on camera. Much of our content was unusable because it wasn't self-contained. If every sentence relies on the previous sentence for meaning, then the editor is forced to treat the entire speech as a single unit and include or exclude the entire thing. While

• Have the interviewee repeat and summarize all arguments in two or three sentences
• If you plan on featuring the interviews by themselves, make sure the interviewee doesn't refer to "you" the interviewer who doesn't exist on screen.
  
• Shoot interviews from low angles (it makes the subject look more authoritative)
• Shoot B-roll - random shots to fill time - ex: shots of surveillance cameras, students, etc. (montages of Googled images look obvious and often unprofessional)
• Stills are usually boring on-screen (shoot videos of still objects or create pans and zooms in the editing room to keep things interesting)
  
• Don't shoot in front of windows or reflective surfaces (sunlight blows out and ruins an otherwise good shot)
  
• Don't have the interviewee talk directly into the camera (this is awkward for the audience and will make them uncomfortable)
• Check to see if your battery, camera, and mikes work when you check them out (sounds simple but can save you two wasted round trips to the IML lab and the embarrassing cinematic equivalent of performance anxiety)

And most important of all, if you're going to shoot a documentary, pick a topic that interests you... a lot. Shooting a documentary is like getting married. There's a lot of good choices out there, but take your time because once you pick one, you're stuck together for a long time.