Writing the Documentary

1. Writing the Documentary Tips & pointers to a successful documentary

2. The Three Stages of Documentary Making • Pre-production: Planning the video • Production: Shooting it • Post-production: Putting it together

3. Pre-Production • Team assignments • "The Pitch“ • Story outlining/storyboarding • Research • Arranging interviews • Scouting Locations • Shot list

4. Production • Shooting Video • Conducting Interviews • Capturing Audio • Collecting Still Images • Keeping a Shot Log

5. Post Production • Transcribing interviews • Annotating shot log • Uploading footage • Story planning • Script writing • Editing

6. Planning - the topic • Manageability. (Consider ) • What do I already know about the topic? • Do I have a strong emotional connection to the topic? • What is unusual or interesting about the topic? • How narrowly can the programme focus its attention? • Think small, Think local. • Now start the planning proper.

7. Planning - Research • Researching the topic. Consider: • What are you focusing on? • What can be shown? • Who do you need to talk to? What do you need to ask? • What is the central idea under pinning the documentary?

8. Planning - Research • kinds of research material filmmaker must look for • The ‘Top’ of the issue • The ‘Heart’ of the issue • The ‘Root’ of the issue • The ‘Branches’ of the issue • Finding Challenges

9. Planning - Visualising • What can you show? • Where can you use action over talking heads? • Where can you get the most dramatic scenes or activity to demonstrate your argument? Remember: You can only tell that part of the story the pictures allow you to tell. (Peter Couchman - TV reporter )

10. Planning - The Interview Who are you interviewing and why? • Your interviewee should be lively and spontaneous and should be able to react to your questions in some detail. • Select your “expert” with care- will they make good TV? Where are you interviewing? • Remember setting affects meaning. Consider the dramatic impact of the setting. • An interview with the person in costume against the background of a reenactment is better than the person sitting in a room merely talking about the re-enactment group.

11. Planning - The Interview The Questions: • A good interview doesn’t just happen. You must plan it. • Begin with factual questions then move on to the more important ones. • Make sure your questions lead to either an understanding of the topic or a revelation about your interviewee before you begin. • Be prepared to go past your prepared questions if the subject provides a new insight or detail about the topic. Remember you can stop the filming and start again if you need to follow up on the new information or angle.

12. Planning - The Interview The Vox Pops; • These are light or humorous relief from the in-depth interview or narration. • Depending on the responses and your editing decisions the vox pops can suggest agreement or disagreement with the positions taken by the main participants in your film. • Be careful how you use them. They should be a useful contribution to the documentary - not a filler.

13. Planning - The Central Idea The central idea will form the base for your initial script. • Try writing it as a single sentence. e.g. “People who join re-enactment societies want to return to “the good old days” to escape the problems of the present.” • Plan your script around this idea. • List your supporting evidence under this premise. • Identify the interviews and footage you want to use to support the premise. BUT Be prepared to modify the exposition as you gather material for your film.

14. EssentialElements • Images: people, places, things, text, etc. • Sound: narration, voices, music, sound effects, background sounds ("nats") • Edits: The integration of images and sound

15. ESSENTIAL SCRIPT ELEMENTS • There are three elements of film ‘language’ that should be studied by a script writer and incorporated into a script • Visual Elements • Sound Elements • Story Elements

16. Narrative Arc • Sometime simply called "arc" or "story arc," narrative arc refers to the chronological construction of plot in a novel or story. • Typically, a narrative arc looks something like a pyramid, made up of the following components: • exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.

17. Narrative Arc • Exposition: The introduction the story in which characters are introduced, setting is revealed. • Rising Action: A series of events that complicate matters for the protagonist, creating a rise in the story's suspense or tension.

18. Narrative Arc • Climax: The point of greatest tension in the story and the turning point in the narrative arc from rising action to falling action. • Falling Action: After the climax, the unfolding of events in a story's plot and the release of tension leading toward the resolution.

19. Narrative Arc • Resolution: The end of the story, typically, in which the problems of the story and of the protagonists are resolved.

20. The Structure • The narrative conventions: • You need a definite beginning, middle and end to be effective. • The beginning: Capture the audience as quickly as possible. • Pose your central question early. • Consider using either dramatic action or quick interview cuts showing conflicting opinions.

21. The Beginning • Creates an audiovisual ‘hook’ to catch the audience’s interest. • A ‘hook’ is something that demands attention and places the film contextually in space and time. • It sets up the flavour of things to come, both in a story and audiovisual sense.

22. The Beginning • Establishes the ‘core assertion’ of the film, which is the point the filmmaker wants to make through the documentary and the message he wants to communicate to the audience. • It is this message around which the entire film is built going forward.

23. The Beginning • Creates curiosity among the audience. • A good beginning reveals the subject and issue at hand to the audience in such a way that they become keen to see the events that follow in the film.

24. The Beginning • Shows change or the promise of change, which is one of the inherent elements of story and of film. • Creates the element of consequence, which is one event leading to another. • Cause and effect will direct the audience and increase their understanding of the subject matter.

25. The Beginning • The Inciting Incident is often a common feature used in the beginning to start a story. • It is an incident that radically upsets the balance of forces within the film’s story. • It is a dynamic and fully developed event, not something vague.

26. The Beginning • For example; • the leader of a small desert community could be informed that a large corporation was planning to buy the nearest oasis from the government, effectively creating a water crunch in his community.

27. The Beginning • The leader could be spurred to then organize his people to ensure the government doesn’t sell their precious natural water supply. • The leader obtaining the knowledge that his community’s water supply was in trouble is the inciting incident. This incident upset the balance of forces and impelled them to react.

28. The Middle • The narrative conventions: • You need a definite beginning, middle and end to be effective. • The Middle: This is the point where you develop your case. • Examine the issue in human terms - focus on the people involved and their opinions. • If there is conflict now is the time to demonstrate and explain it.

29. The Middle • A good middle consists of good sequences, which also have their own beginnings, middles and ends. • These sequences must be related to each other and unified as a whole in order to give the film a flow. • The scriptwriter can use the following criteria to relate and unify them:

30. The Middle • Concept, idea, thought – The most common link between sequences is subject matter. • Each sequence is related with the others through the common issues it deals with. • Action – Sequences can be related to each other through the kinds of events and actions they portray

31. The Middle • Setting – Many of the sequences may share a common location and many more may have different locations within a common, larger setting. • Character – Sequences in a film often share the same characters and are, therefore, unified by these common characters.

32. The Middle • Mood – Sequences can often relate to each other by having a common flavour or mood. • For example, one sequence could show slum streets around the world, another could show the defeated faces of employment seekers. • The two sequences are related by the gravity and desolation of their mood.

33. The Middle • The Elements of Pacing - Rhythm and Tempo • Because a story is a metaphor of life, we expect it to feel like life, to have the pace, rhythm and tempo of life. • Rhythm is set by the length of sequences. It is important to vary the length of sequences and not keep them long or repetitive.

34. The Middle • Most sequences are visually expressive in one location within two or three minutes. • A sequence held too long in one place becomes redundant and loses audience attention • Tempo is the level of activity within a sequence. • A person staring out of a window contemplating life may have a low tempo; a riot will naturally have a high tempo.

35. The Middle • In a well-told story, the progression of sequences normally accelerates pace. • As he heads toward a dramatic point in the film, the scriptwriter could take advantage of rhythm and tempo to progressively shorten scenes while the actions in them become more and more brisk.

36. The Middle • Beats’ • Beats are a useful technique often used by scriptwriters in creating pace for the film. • A beat is the smallest element of structural technique. It is an exchange of behavior in action/reaction. • Beat by beat these changing behaviors shape a sequence with multiple actions, and each action is one beat.

37. The Middle • For example; A man could walk into a room, walk to the window and look out, sit down on a chair, pick up a book and read it, put down the book, get up and leave the room. • This sequence has five beats – • 1.Walking into the room, 2. Looking out the window, 3. Sitting down, 4. Reading a • book 5. Getting up and out of the room.

38. The Middle • Linear Vs Non-linear time • The scriptwriter also has a choice whether to order the sequences in linear time, • meaning a temporal order of the events that occurred, • or in non-linear time, a random order where the film can switch back and forth between events that occurred at different points of time without any temporal continuity.

39. The Middle • Whereas linear time is a more traditional method of arranging sequences, many documentary scriptwriters these days opt for non-linear time to tell a story. • The scriptwriter can also combine the two arrangements to the extent that he can have some sequences arranged chronologically and occasionally slip into the future or the past using flashbacks and recreations.

40. Transitions • Every story needs to have a seamless progression between sequences for the entire thing to work. • For this, it needs to have something to link the tail of each sequence to the head of the next sequence.

41. Transitions • Generally, we find this linking element in one of two possibilities: what the two sequences have in common, or what they have in opposition. • A ‘Transition’ is something held in common by two sequences or counter pointed between them.

42. The Structure • The narrative conventions: • You need a definite beginning, middle and end to be effective. • The Ending: Bring your argument to its conclusion. Resolve any complications you may have introduced during your exposition. • Make it clear what your documentary was saying or what course of action you think the audience should take based on the evidence you have presented.

43. The Structure • The narrative conventions: • Conflict: • Conflict makes a good documentary topic. This does not always mean physical conflict. It can be intellectual, a debate. BUT • You need to show the conflict in action. You will need to consider how you might script the conflict to allow the audience to move from an abstract idea to a more concrete view or interpretation of the case.

44. The Structure • The Movement • Your documentary will gain in strength if it has a sense of movement - a dynamic development. Consider: • Spatial movement - a journey, a change in location… • Temporal movement - a sense of time passing. How might this be represented? • Psychological movement - the change in your subject as they overcome an obstacle or fear to achieve success.

45. The Structure • The Soundscape • Your documentary will gain in strength if it gets an emotional response from the audience. • Your choice of sound can affect the interpretation of the film. e.g. How do you react to a series of pictures of beautiful Pacific islands accompanied with a sound track of a clicking and beeping that echo scientific equipment? • You should make conscious well thought out decisions about the type of music and sounds you will use to accompany both the visual image and the narration or spoken tracks.

46. The Structure • The visual order. • How are you going to tell your story in film? Consider: • Chronological order of events • An order based on location - a journey. • Classification order - how does this problem affect different groups of people or different locations. • Cause & Effect order. • Problem & solution order.

47. The Structure • The Narration. • How are you going to tell your story in voice? Consider: • How does the narration hold the film together? • Does your narration re-enforce and/or comment on the visual images? • Does your narration clarify the images being shown. Does it clarify the argument your are putting forward?

48. The Structure • The Narration. • How are you going to tell your story in voice? Consider: • Keeping the narration concise and allowing the visual to tell the story. Explain don’t describe. • Use a mix of on-camera and off-camera narration. • Try and maintain a conversational tone. • Relate the narration to the progress of the exposition. • Use narration to either support the image or to conflict with it to create another meaning. e.g. A narration describing the past beauty of a destroyed landscape will accentuate the sense of loss.