Today people are shooting actuality as never before, using consumer cameras to shoot friends, children, or pets, and smartphones to cover demonstrations or document the retribution meted out by “security forces.” On the front lines of human conflict, courageous men and women risk their lives to document war and natural disasters that turn human life into an atrocious struggle. This they do, I believe, because something noble and brave in them believes that people should not suffer alone. The resulting torrent of documentaries—committed, quirky, funny, outrageous, and sometimes horrific—creates an appetite not only to see films reflecting reality, but to make them.
Which is where this how-to book comes in. Today, anyone can make a documentary, and to save you having to reinvent the wheel, here is my half-century of experience in filmmaking and teaching for you to use. I will talk to you as an equal, and give you a reliable path to follow while you figure out your own esoteric ways of operating. Don’t be intimidated—the book is not meant as a survival course, but as a cornucopia of resources from which you choose according to your temperament and current needs. Start filmmaking immediately: you learn filmmaking best from doing it.
To keep the book portable (a big complaint with the last edition), many of its suggested projects are now downloadable from www.directingthedocumentary.com. See “Contents of Companion Website” following this preface for what the website offers. You will find analysis, development, shooting, and postproduction projects, as well as short film examples, logs, and forms to help you during production.
The resources to make nonfiction film are now widely accessible, which means you face stiff competition if you want to make documentary your career. If your films are to cross national and linguistic frontiers, you will need to think originally and in terms of pictorial narrative rather than the “radio with pictures” that television has long given us. A film is really a subtly controlled stream of consciousness for an audience, so I shall often remind you that work which is fresh and personal comes from valuing the primacy of your own life-experience. By learning to notice how you receive and process powerful impressions, you will learn how to use the screen not only personally, but effectively, universally, and accessibly.
If you are lucky and have an experienced mentor, he or she will undoubtedly explain or rationalize some aspects of documentary differently from me. This is because making films is an art, not a science. My way is not “the” way, but a path for you to use as you move toward reliance on your own stock of filmmaking experience—the ultimate and truest authority of all.
As you gain in abilities, please share your skills, ideas, and discoveries with anyone interested. The best way to develop is always to try teaching it to someone else.
This new edition has a top-to-bottom, revised, and clarified structure that aims to put best practice information in your hands. Locate anything quickly using the comprehensive table of Contents at the front, where you see that this book is in fact two books—one for each of the major learning phases it takes to become an accomplished storyteller.
First, like an aspiring musician, you practice to master today’s digital instruments—the camera and the editing program—to document personalities and events that develop spontaneously and outside your control. This relatively self-effacing form of authorship suits many temperaments (mine included), and can produce documentaries of high potential as art and social observation. The Parts include:
Part 1: You and Your Ideas helps you articulate your own most valuable potential—the marks your life has made on you. The aim is to define your own particular thematic material, and to confirm the values and convictions that are your documentarian’s wellsprings.
Part 2: Documentaries and Film Language describes how documentary expression evolved in tandem with its technology, and how each new form of documentary sets about making a revised construct of reality. The text demystifies film language by showing that techniques of camerawork and editing in fact mimic human habits of perception and physical adaptation.
Part 3: Preproduction covers the pre-shooting stages when you begin to look for, assess, and develop documentary ideas. To solicit audience feedback at an early stage, you develop a working hypothesis, then research, write a proposal, and pitch (make an oral presentation of) the film idea to listeners. From their reactions, you develop your film approach.
Part 4: Production outlines the fundamentals of observational filmmaking, along with the technology and techniques of basic lighting, capturing clear sound, and producing fluid, engaged camerawork. This section also deals with the collaborative practices of film teamwork.
Part 5: Postproduction covers the highly creative processes of editing, and describes the critical viewing sessions of dailies (uncut material just as the camera shot it). You then find a structure and proper duration for your film, produce a smooth, well-paced cut, and seek feedback from test audiences.
Graduating to longer and more complex films means working hard to attract and hold an audience’s attention. Films of all kinds need not just a good subject, but the style, purpose, and “voice” of an entertaining storyteller. This involves self-knowledge as well as planning your film’s aesthetics and narrative style. It further means seeking to control all the logistical and technical requirements at a high level of professionalism. Almost certainly you will use a more intercessional style of filmmaking to do this.
Part 6: Documentary Aesthetics deals with the narrative universals of point of view, dramaturgy, form, and style. Bigger projects pose bigger problems of dramatic structure, and clarifying the values, ethics, and choices in your documentary becomes an especially fascinating challenge.
Part 7A: Advanced Preproduction describes techniques necessary for advanced ideation, research, and “casting” for all kinds of nonfiction film. This section emphasizes the importance of finding evidence that is visual and behavioral rather than verbal, and metaphorical as much as literal. An important chapter describes advanced digital technology, the perils of workflow, and its repercussions in budgeting and scheduling. There is how to tackle the more sophisticated promotional writing necessary to approach funds and foundations, and make use of crowdfunding.
Part 7B: Advanced Production outlines the technical choices a director makes that affect the audience’s perception of space, depth, and the aesthetic consequences of composition. Larger productions usually take a larger and more specialized crew, with the added complication of sound shot with a separate recorder, sync references, and the appropriate record-keeping. Advanced directing also requires planning the style and amount of coverage. Since you and your crew have the power to make filming enjoyable and natural for participants, there is material on developing a keen understanding of their states of mind while being filmed. An extended chapter deals with interviewing—often crucial to the trust and relationship between you and your human subjects—both on-camera or off-camera during research.
Part 7C: Advanced Postproduction outlines how to build a particular kind of film from transcripts, and ways of creating narration so that it sounds natural and spontaneous. Most important are the principles behind fitting words to images: done well, it can transform your film into a seamless flow of consciousness for the audience. There is working through problems of structure and pacing, and diagnostic procedures to help you. Music, important to today’s more lyrical documentary, often depends on your rapport with a composer.
Part 8: Work. Read this early, because it can help you decide how to plan out a career in docu-mentary. While you work to develop a directing reputation, expect to do paid crew work for others. Getting work as a freelancer will mean using the networking and social skills that allow any entrepreneur to prosper, and this section outlines the long-term resources you will rely on.
Of particular help while I prepared this edition were the following important people: Mick Hurbis-Cherrier, my esteemed co-writer for the latest edition of the sister volume to this book, Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics, fifth edition. With his kind permission I adapted his chapter on technology to documentary needs. Help for the music composition chapter came from my son Paul Rabiger, a film composer in Cologne, Germany. For the career development aspects of the book, I turned to Dirk Matthews, educator, filmmaker, counselor, and co-founder of the Portfolio Center of Columbia College Chicago. For grant-writing and proposal development I sought help from my daughter Joanna Rabiger of Austin, Texas, whose specialty is story development and proposal writing for documentary, and from Tod Lending, long-time friend and Academy-nominated maker of many documentaries shown on Public Broadcasting Service. Any errors, I must add, are wholly my own.
For all her support over the years I would like to thank Eleanor Actipis, my former editor at Focal Press during its publication under the Elsevier imprint. For this edition I would like to thank Dennis McGonagle and Peter Linsley of Taylor and Francis, for their kind support, forbearance, and encouragement.
Lastly, I owe enduring gratitude to my wife Nancy Mattei for her ever-constructive critical acumen, humor, love, and patience with the hermit-crab habits of a writer.
Michael Rabiger
Chicago, 2014