Now you can expand your preparatory writing into a brief story outline. This is a narrative using the present tense, active voice. It walks the reader through the experience of seeing and hearing the intended film, and uses one paragraph per sequence (a setting or block of time). You will need to establish the characters, the main character’s situation, and his/her problem (whatever he or she is trying to accomplish, overcome, solve and whatever obstructs this). Describe how you imagine the film develops, and what the likely outcome will be. Most important is to say why you and nobody else should make it. If you have significant imponderables and alternative possible endings, write about them. The reader needs to know you are ready to handle alternative outcomes.
Avoid promising to “investigate” anything while filming: this raises red flags because a proposal should demonstrate a thorough understanding of its subject, and the word “investigate” is a euphemism for “I haven’t researched this yet.” Try to bring vision and enthusiasm to what you expect to film, and to disperse all notion that you expect to float along passively with whatever happens.
The next step is to take your attractive documentary idea and pitch it to an audience. The term, derived from baseball, means giving a brief, orally delivered, colorful description from which listeners can easily visualize your film. From this, paradoxically enough, you can collect audience feedback and start shaping a better film—even when you haven’t shot a frame.
Pitching is salesmanship and acting, so at first it won’t be easy or comfortable. In professional situations you may get no more than 3–5 minutes for a 5–20 minute film and perhaps 10 minutes to pitch a 90-minute feature-length documentary. There is no set formula, and part of the challenge is to present your idea in whatever narrative steps best serve its nature. Use colorful and evocative language, and let your passion and belief in the special qualities of the story show. Here are some guidelines, which you should restructure to best serve your idea:
Supply the following in whatever order works best:
● Title, and background to the topic.
● Character or characters, and what makes them special.
● Problem or situation that makes the main character(s) active and interesting.
● Point of view. Through whose eyes and feelings will we mostly see?
● Style. The kind of camera and editing treatment you’ll give the events you’ve described.
● Resolution. Describe any changes or growth you expect during the filming and what outcome(s) you expect.
● Why this film must get made, and why you are the person to make it.
It may help to put prompts on a postcard as a reminder. Do not read from a script—it’s deadly. Look your listeners in the eye and talk to them. Once you improvise from memory, your speech will become lively and spontaneous.
The representative pitch below is developed from the working hypothesis in Table 7-2 for The Foreign Boy in the previous chapter. I have bolded the key concepts to show how I worked them in.
This 6-minute documentary is called The Foreign Boy, and deals with the lonely terrors of being foreign and trying to win the acceptance of one’s peers. Nine year-old Mohsen is a sheltered and introverted Iranian boy whose English is still limited. The setting is a rough-and-tumble urban grade school in an all-white district. The buildings are old and run down, and the kids are hard to discipline. Mohsen’s problem is that he is new to the school, new to the country, and speaks little English. Life at school is overpoweringly confusing.
In style, the observational camerawork and editing will give us a strongly subjective feeling of the way he sees and feels. There will be little dialogue and no interior monologue—everything we learn, we learn from watching, as Mohsen the foreign boy must do in his new surroundings. In the early classroom sequence, his raucous and lively classmates seem distant, distorted, and almost jeering at him. His experienced, overworked 50-year-old home-room teacher Mrs. Mullen notices his shyness and the way he watches the other kids, and imitates what they do. He has a strong drive to fit in with the other kids, to be accepted, and not to feel different.
The children go by bus to the local swimming baths. Mohsen hates taking his clothes off and shivers in the cold air. The staff separate the kids into those who can swim, and those who can’t. Mohsen now faces the ordeal of learning to swim. The pool is at first hellishly deafening and confusing. His sympathetic teacher Terry, a dedicated African American swimming instructor in his 30s, acts as if Mohsen can succeed. The camera will follow Mohsen underwater when he panics. Gradually as Terry calms him and gets him to concentrate, the noise recedes. He finds that the other kids are now aware of him and are encouraging him. Terry is likeable and treats all the kids considerately and sympathetically. The film concentrates on the relationship between Terry and Mohsen as the teacher aims to get the boy’s trust, and to get him to take a few strokes with his foot off the floor.
Sooner or later Mohsen will develop by making the advance that means so very much to him. If Mohsen takes his first strokes, the film’s resolution is Mohsen’s sense of accomplishment. If it doesn’t happen, we will keep shooting until Terry coaxes him into succeeding just a little—which Terry is sure will happen.
The film’s theme is that taking first steps in something frightening is the key to earning other people’s respect, and that it helps greatly to have someone who believes in you.
This film matters greatly to me because I went to four different schools between the ages of 9 and 11, and never felt I could fit in. My stomach still gets knotted up at the sound of a school yard. I want to exorcize these memories by revisiting the situation as an adult, and making a film sympathetic to a boy in a predicament I know only too well myself.
From this you can “show” your as-yet unmade film to an audience, and seek early responses. Like a theatre actor you can sense from moment to moment whether you are holding your audience’s interest. Make notes of any comments afterwards, and say as little as possible. Change your approach in subsequent pitches until every aspect works for every audience.
Try pitching a new five-minute documentary idea every week. You will be amazed at how many good ideas you can come up with, and how much you learn from pitching them. Afraid someone will steal your ideas? If you have plenty, you won’t be.
When a friend pitches a film to you, use the criteria in Table 8-1 to help you give practical feedback. This type of outcomes-oriented assessment is useful to any endeavor, and listing multiple goals helps you not forget any of them.
Question F concerning “Form” asks whether the way you intend telling the story looks promising, while question H on “Style” wants to know whether the film fits into a recognizable type of documentary, and makes use of what the audience expects of that genre.
| Criteria for a good pitch | 0 1 2 3 4 5 | |
| A | Situation: Clear and dramatically promising | |
| B | Characters: Clearly differentiated, inherently interesting | |
| C | POV character(s): Trying to get, do, or accomplish something tangible | |
| D | Stakes: Main character has a lot at stake | |
| E | Development and change in a main character seem likely | |
| F | Form: Inventive and cinematic, fits the subject | |
| G | Structure of the story is logical and organic to the events | |
| H | Style: Type of documentary is clear and appropriate | |
| I | Metaphor will be used productively in the film | |
| J | Socially critical attitude implied by the film toward its subject is evident and appropriate | |
| K | Commitment strongly demonstrated by filmmaker | |
| L | Strong audience appeal seems likely |
Here are two more ideas expanded into proposals, limited here to content and meaning, although you can add comments on style and production if you wish. Each film now suggests a distinct area of endeavor in the human or natural worlds:
The Smallest in the Litter
We see a breeding kennel in the distance. Unseen dogs of every age bark maniacally in every register. The owner carries food from pen to pen talking freely to us about the dogs and their puppies. Most litters, he explains, have a runt—a puppy that somehow got less in the womb and enters the world undersized and under-equipped to compete. The owner exits, leaving us alone with a litter of puppies. In extended observation and montage, we see that every puppy fights for a teat, feeds aggressively, goes wandering, gets tired and sleeps, then awakens to fight for a teat again in a repeating cycle. The poor little runt has a bad time, getting elbowed out of competition and having neither the energy nor curiosity of the larger pups to go exploring their pen. It’s a sad business until a human hand in close-up disconnects the most aggressively successful feeder and replaces him with the runt. In equally large close-up we see a concerned human face (is it the owner? someone else?) who is ready to mediate if the smallest is threatened.
Bobcat
Urban building site, sun rising. Concentrated together; huge cranes, cement delivery trucks, bulldozers, giant hole-borers all furiously at work with construction people yelling or talking into walkie-talkies. Uproar changes to orchestral music in which the larger, heavier instruments of the orchestra accompany the action of the larger, heavier machines in an extended ballet. Bobbing and weaving at the feet of all the huge machines is a small four-wheeled Bobcat earth pusher. It changes its direction not by steering but by skidding one set of wheels. This gives it crazy, jerky, frenzied movements that are quite different from all the other machines. The music has a fast, high, repeating melody that syncs comically with the Bobcat, which has to constantly defer to, or avoid, its more ponderous brethren. As the sun sinks, the machines all come to a halt and drivers leave their cabs. The Bobcat is the last to stop. Its driver gets out and joins the other men. As the music resolves to a harmonious close, the construction men joking with each other and picking up their lunch pails all look the same. End on a montage of heroic, static machines, including the Bobcat, framed to make it look as large as the other machines.
The Foreign Boy was a drama, The Smallest in the Litter a tragedy, and Bobcat a Chaplinesque comedy realized through machines, yet all three started from the same conviction in their working hypotheses. From any passionately held conviction you can generate a hundred good films.
To schedule a short film, break your material into intended sequences then allot reasonable time to shoot each, as well as time to travel between locations. Minimize time lost traveling by doing all your shooting at once in each location.
Expect to cover perhaps two lengthy sequences in a day of work, provided you can get from one to the other without too long a journey. Setting up lights not only gives novice participants the jitters, it greatly slows progress compared with shooting under available light. If you have exteriors that depend on a particular kind of weather, schedule them early and have interior shooting on standby in case you need it. If your film hinges on the success of a particular scene or situation, shoot it early in case failure renders the rest of the film moot.
More about scheduling appears in Chapter 24: Advanced Technology and Budgeting.
For each privately owned location you will need a signed permission called a location agreement before you shoot (see this book’s website, www.directingthedocumentary.com). You will need one to shoot in any building or on any piece of land that is not a public thoroughfare. No matter whether it’s an empty church, public park, or city transportation, each comes under the jurisdiction of a guardian body to which you must apply. This lets owners regulate shooting on their property, protects them against liability suits, and protects you against legal action too. When things go wrong it works like this: You shoot without permission on a bus with someone in the background, and he just happens to be running away with someone else’s wife. Their shot just happens to appear on national television, so he sues the bus company for allowing you to invade his privacy. Guess whom the bus company sues?
For an individual you obtain a signature on a release form after shooting. A brief one suitable for student productions appears in Chapter 13: Directing, under “Securing the Personal Release.” Fuller, more legally binding, and downloadable forms for location and individual release can be found in the book’s website, www.directingthedocumentary.com. These come by permission from Lisa Allif and Michael C. Donaldson’s excellent The American Bar Association’s Legal Guide to Independent Filmmaking (American Bar Association, 2011).
As an eye-opener, add up what your film would cost if you rented equipment and paid everyone, including yourself. Use the Internet to find approximate daily rates for professionals and their equipment, and budget a day of editing for every 2 minutes of final screen time. Allow a shooting ratio of 24:1, which means that the stock on which you shoot (hard disk or solid-state memory cards) has 24 times the capacity of your intended screen length. Thus for a screen time of 10 minutes you will need 24 × 10 = 240 minutes, or 4 hours of recording capacity.
Shocked at your budget grand total? Films cost big money, which is why surviving as a professional takes astute business skills.
You learn filmmaking best from doing it, so use your preparation thus far to propose and shoot a 5-minute documentary. Find a process or event that you can shoot in the observational mode (no directing action, no interviews, no lighting). Try to ensure you have a reliable beginning and ending. Some suggestions to stimulate your own ideas:
For typical processes show someone making and testing a kite; mixing, kneading, and baking their first loaf of bread; taking their driving test, full of fears.
For typical events, try using the camera to follow: a contestant in a sports meeting; someone taking shots for a photography competition; or an actor auditioning for a part in a play.
With a central character trying to get, do, or accomplish something, you will have some ready-made dramatic tension, always present when people deal with obstacles, difficulties, or resistance.
Give your work front and end titles, and incorporate the following camerawork:
● Some shots from a tripod and some handheld (think of what different situations call for a stationary or a moving camera).
● Some shots in which the camera stays abreast of someone on the move.
● Close-ups of salient detail and wide shots which establish the geography of each location.
Once you make short films, start planning to travel the festival circuit with a film of winning caliber so you can initiate relationships with distributors, make contact with other filmmakers, and start leveraging new projects.
At this book’s website (www.directingthedocumentary.com) you can see short film proposals and the actual films they became. These are good beginners’ films made during a month-long workshop at the summer school now called the Maine Media Workshops+College (www.mainemedia.edu).
For this chapter, DP-5 Basic Proposal can help you develop and present the essentials of a documentary idea for anyone you are seeking to persuade. Often this is a funder or granting committee. Persuasive writing is the prerequisite to persuasive filmmaking! You will also find BP-1 Basic Budget a good place to start if you are developing a budget for your proposed film. Since you will be pitching your films, try getting your audience to fill in DP-10 Criteria for a Good Pitch, so you can see how people think you are doing.