FIGURE 25-1
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his cousin John Gates at the Allegheny Courthouse looking over their ancestors’ property records in African American Lives.
Documentaries frequently seem improvised, which may make a directing plan seem pointless. Think of it instead as an important plank in your all-important development work before you leap into the fray. Much of your true directing will result directly from your preproduction preparation.
Plan multiple coverage of anything vital, such as expository information crucial to the coherence and impact of your story. Some reminders:
Have you decided,
● Who you will film, have you secured their agreement, and is “informed consent” required?
● Who will be your central character(s) and why?
● What metaphoric role best fits each member of your cast?
Have you listed,
Drama and Dialectics: This is the key to giving your film definition and clarity, and is easy to get wrong. Question your choices rigorously!
● Your story’s progression and meaning?
● The forces in opposition that your film is handling?
● Expository information the audience must have?
● Who and what is central to your story’s conflict?
● Have you ensured a confrontation? Once you know the main oppositional forces in your film, you must ensure they meet.
● What is at stake for the main character or characters and should you do anything to raise the stakes!
● Typical and atypical action?
Imagery such as cityscapes, landscapes, workplaces that are emblematic of,
● Your participants’ type, place, or condition.
● What are the points and counterpoints of your film’s argument, so you can be sure to collect all the materials you need?
Point of view:
● Who must we specially understand and sympathize with, and why?
● How will you make us empathize with him/her/them (through secondary characters’ points of view, perhaps)?
● Whose POV will you favor for
● each sequence?
● the film as a whole?
Development:
● Who ideally should grow and change?
● What are the chances this will or won’t happen?
● What changes in thinking and feeling do you want us to experience as we follow the story?
● What should we feel and think by the end?
Thematic or other goals. What is your expected theme for,
● Each sequence?
● The film as a whole?
Aesthetic concerns: Define,
● What form and style best serve each sequence.
● The style you want for the film as a whole.
● What your film can borrow from other forms or from specific films.
● How the prevailing point of view in each sequence can affect its style.
● Anything to avoid (negative definition is also creative).
The genre your film fits into. Is it, for instance,
● A small town tragedy?
● A “Frankie and Johnnie ballad”?
● A “defeat snatched from the jaws of victory” type of story?
● A tragedy, farce, tall story, cautionary tale, or action documentary?
Storyteller POV. Most importantly,
● What storytelling role will you adopt, so your tale emerges with style, panache, and gusto?
● How will you shoot and edit your story to give it a clear, exciting identity as a type of story?
Check your intentions with trusted colleagues. That is,>
● Pitch your project to anyone who will listen and give you feedback. Do so with different listeners until you get a consistently positive audience response.
● Ask people to read the proposal and comment on what it makes them expect. Are they seeing the film you see, and if not, why not?
Forethought given to permissions, agreements, releases, and contracting can save you grief later:
People: Secure a commitment for agreed dates, amount of time, and involvement from those you intend to film.
Places: Secure written permissions from owners or administrators of non-public locations. Many cities require you to get a permit from the authorities to film in the streets or on public transportation.
Copyright: if music or other copyrighted material is necessary, now’s the time to secure it.
Crew: if possible put them under contract.
Insurance: Do you need special coverage? (See Chapter 24: Advanced Technology and Budgeting.)
Do what is necessary to,
● “Audition” doubtful participants.
● Work out field communications with a new crew.
● Set standards for work you are going to do together.
● Test new or unfamiliar technology.
For the fundamentals, review Chapter 11: Lighting and Chapter 12: Camera. During preproduction, the DP, sound recordist, and director should check out locations for problems.
Camera:
● When is available light at its most useful? (Carry a compass so you can estimate the angle of the sun at different times of day.)
● What setups look promising?
● Is enough electricity available for lighting interiors?
● Can power cables pass under doors when you close windows during shooting?
● Where can you place lighting stands for maximum shooting freedom?
● How reflective are the walls and how high is the ceiling?
● Where might the camera go if it’s a public event and you must shoot unobtrusively off a tripod using a long lens?
● Can doors and windows be closed for sound isolation?
● Alignment of surfaces likely to cause standing waves (sound bouncing to and fro between opposing surfaces, augmenting and cross-modulating the source sound)?
● Are drapes, carpet, soft furniture available to break up the unwanted movement of sound within the space?
● Does the location space have intrusive resonances (mainly a problem with concrete or tile surfaces)?
● Can participants walk, and cameras be mobile, without the floor letting out tortured squeaks during dialogue scenes?
● Does ambient sound and noise penetrate from the outside? Intermittent sound intrusions might come from:
● Wildlife or domestic animals.
● An airport flight path.
● An expressway, railroad, or subway.
● Refrigeration, air conditioning, or other sound-generating equipment that runs intermittently and will cause problems unless you can turn it off while shooting.
● Construction sites. You scouted the location at a weekend, not realizing that come Monday morning, a pile driver and four jackhammers compete to greet the dawn. You have no hope of stopping them.
● A school. Expect hue and cry at set times of day.
Estimating how long each type of scene takes to shoot comes with experience. A 30-minute documentary can take between three and eight working days to shoot, depending on
● Distance of travel. (Tearing down much equipment in the old location and setting it up anew is time consuming, so allow plenty of time for transport between the two. Also, a new film unit is slow at the start and faster ten days later). International travel needs careful planning as you probably need to comply with customs regulations concerning equipment—both going and returning.
● Lighting amount and complexity. Scenes with multiple key lights sometimes require walkthroughs and experiment in order to eliminate illogical shadow patterns.
● Sound setup amount and complexity. Scenes with multiple mikes and that require on-site audio mixing may take some time to set up.
● Randomness of subject matter. To film a postman delivering a particular letter may take no more than 10 minutes, but to film a spontaneous scuffle between schoolchildren during a lunch break, you may have to hang around for days.
Avoid over-optimistic scheduling by making a best-case and a worst-case estimate and then allotting something in between. Whether your shooting is drawn-out or compact, make a draft schedule and solicit comment from the crew. In each schedule include,
● Everyone’s mobile phone number.
● A phone contact for each location.
● Equipment or personnel required for such-and-such a time at each location.
● Maps marked with locations, phone numbers, and clear navigational instructions.
● Whenever the crew must converge at a prearranged place and time, ensure that each vehicle carries a mobile phone. This provides for a car getting lost or having trouble.
Expect trouble and you won’t be disappointed. There’s a reason why filmmaking is so often described in the language of military invasion.
One luxury peculiar to the independent filmmaker (and there are few) is that you can shoot follow-up material over a long period. Independents often work as a group and on multiple projects, so occasionally deploying a crew for some follow-up may not be difficult. Returning at six-month intervals for a couple of years may capture real changes. Reality shows, which often use documentary techniques, have to accelerate change by artificially applying extreme tests of endurance, strength, or ingenuity.
You must secure permission to film in a location in writing before you start shooting. See the website www.directingthedocumentary.com to download a location permission form. A film of mine was once held up for a year after getting written permission to film an exhibition in a synagogue. I secured permission to film in the building, but the traveling exhibition’s owner, after hugely enjoying himself presenting exhibition items to the camera, later denied he had given permission to film.
On private property (which may include a city transportation system) you must get written clearance by the relevant authority unless you care to risk being taken to court for invasion of privacy. The risk rises the more that you or your company look worth suing. Sometimes—and this is a great hazard to investigative journalism—a malicious party will initiate legal action just to get a court injunction so that your film cannot be shown.
Handheld cameras count as newsgathering and are generally protected under freedom of speech in the USA. Anything unrestrictedly open to public entry and view (such as the street, markets, public meetings) may be filmed without asking anyone’s permission but there is often nobody around who cares.
Cities often restrict street filming when you use a tripod or other camera support. Ostensibly this is because a film crew has the potential to become a spectacle blocking or disrupting traffic flow. Thus to film at any urban location you usually must work through a special division of the mayor’s office or state film commission, who will require proof that you carry the relevant liability insurance. You may also need police permission and a cop to control traffic or to wave away troublesome bystanders.
By tradition, documentary makers often shoot first and ask questions later, knowing that if somebody takes exception, the combination of ideals and poverty will probably lead to nothing more than an irritable dismissal. This gets risky in countries where the authorities regard cameras as engines of subversion. Moving images from a phone camera can provide powerful, instant, and worldwide evidence of wrongdoing, as governments discover when their agents can be seen beating up or killing people, only to appear damningly on YouTube within the hour.
In the document called a personal release (see www.directingthedocumentary.com) the signatory releases to you the right to make public use of the material you have shot. Ask for the signature immediately after shooting, and to soften the predatory appearance of the request, you may want to offer a 24-hour window in which they can call you to discuss anything they might not want used.
Al Maysles asks people to sign, one after another, under a common declaration in an ordinary notebook. Signing seems less momentous when they can see that others have signed before them. Other documentarians—Fred Wiseman reputedly among them—secure a record of agreement by asking participants to give their name, address, and phone number on camera and to say that they give permission to be filmed. Participants know you can always play their verbal permission in court, but it offers little protection against someone who decides to pull out at a late hour, sending a whole project down the toilet with a whoosh. Neither a verbal release nor any signed document protects you against charges of slander or deception.
Whichever means you use, get personal releases signed in the euphoria immediately after the participant’s filming. No signature is valid without the $1 minimum legal payment, which you solemnly hand over as symbolic payment. Minors cannot sign legal forms themselves and will need the clearance of a parent or legal guardian.
You can’t get, nor do you need, releases from all the people who appear in a street shot, which contains what anyone in lawful transit might see. Normally you seek signed releases from speaking participants only.
For all film-related legal matters, consult Lisa Allif and Michael C. Donaldson’s highly readable and comprehensive The American Bar Association’s Legal Guide to Independent Filmmaking (American Bar Association, 2011). The following are of particular interest to independent documentary-makers:
● Copyright and ideas
● Public domain
● Personal rights
● Hiring a scriptwriter and working with a partner
● Provisions common to most agreements
● Registering copyright of the script
● Chain of title
● Others who may have rights in your film
● Title clearance
● Errors and omissions insurance
● All the things that the camera sees
● Clearing music
● Hiring a composer
● Fair use doctrine
● Parody
● Clearing film clips
● Registering copyright of your completed film
● Copyright infringement
● Copyright on the Internet
● Legal referral services
Fiction filmmakers pay actors, but documentary-makers never normally pay their participants even when they have quite large budgets. To pay people would mean you were purchasing the truth you want to hear, which destroys your film’s credibility. There are a couple of exceptions to this.
If you engaged a history specialist like Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr., famed as the creator of multi-part series such as PBS’ African American Lives (USA, 2006, Figure 25-1), you would be drawing on his time and expertise, and would of course need to compensate him for it. You’d probably also pay an honorarium to any celebrities he interviewed in order to reserve some of their precious time and respect their status. Some might do it free out of friendship for the host, but any sums involved would all be decided through delicate negotiation during the proposal stage for the series.
FIGURE 25-1
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his cousin John Gates at the Allegheny Courthouse looking over their ancestors’ property records in African American Lives.
You emphatically do not pay a politician or other public servant. If in doubt, consider how your proposed action appears—do you endanger our trust in your film by paying or not paying? Could payments change what we learned? Are they appropriate in the circumstances?
If you film destitute tornado victims telling your camera what they have lost, or you show the desperate daily life of an AIDS sufferer who faces dying because he cannot afford medicine from Big Pharma, you’d have a heart of stone not to give something to help out as you left. If you are from the First World, and enhancing your career by showing suffering in the Third World, the least you can do is compensate those with so little to give, and who gave it anyway in a generous spirit. Ten dollars is little enough to you, but may be a week’s income where you are filming. Give it freely afterwards; do not let it be a precondition for filming. In any community be careful to remain consistent with your giving, because people compare notes.
For Personal Release and Location Agreement forms see under Miscellaneous at the book’s website, www.directingthedocumentary.com.