Hi, guess what I’m doing, what I was doing before? That’s right making a documentary film. Hi, I’m Mike and this is the Film Lab and its hotDOC’s week and I have here on the Substream.com or it was a hotDOCs week and I have here on the Substream.com if you are watching this in the future which to you will be the present. And hotDOC’s week and a half here on Substream.com was awesome.
Last week in the Film Lab, the interview fairy visited and helped us with four very good tips on how to make the most out of your onscreen interviews when you’re making a documentary film or video or documentary movie.
And this week I want to talk about something that’s even more important than those four tips and I know that you are going to ignore me. Just like I ignored what a smart person told me when I first started out when I was in film school making a documentary film because I then like you now thought that what the smart person that was talking to me then, which is me now talking to you, said was really a stupid idea. But it wasn’t and it isn’t, so hear me now and believe me later.
When you’re making a documentary film, before you start, there are two things that matter. Number one, research. Well, obviously; number two, write a script. “But Mike you say to me, what is a documentary if not the capturing of the contestants of the now, the lightning, fresh shutters, smash, re-coordination of the raw realness of reality. Unravelling before the rapacious rivals of Rodney and Rebecca, for instance there, the director and her husband the cameraman of the documentary.
How do you script that? Okay so, what you do is you’re thinking in your brain about the movie that you want to make as documentary. About the argument that you’re trying to put out there, trying to convince somebody something, about the issues that you want to cover; if you don’t want to make one argument, you want to talk about a bunch of arguments or the atmospheric kind of like miasmic thing, like kind of exploratory thing that you want to do if you to make one of those and then you think like okay, what pictures are going to be on the screen and what noise is going to come out of the stereo and then you write that down on a paper to help you plan on how to do it. Like okay, I understand, you can’t script or write. But what you can do is write in your script, there is a riot. Police teaser and naked, fat dude and he pees. Tear gas happens and then you write the rest of your movie, it’s easy.
Sure okay, like I had some romantic notions about documentary filmmaking when I was in film school. Based mostly on the fact that I like the observational style but what I came to realize after I made my first, really shitty documentary is that I didn’t have millions of dollars and months of time and all kinds of resources to shoot hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of footage to boil it down later and do something that was cohesive. I’ve a weekend and thirty bucks. I didn’t plan anything. I didn’t script anything. I thought I’ll just see what happens and I’ll let the moment take me and my film will be what was and what is and my documentary sucked, spunk, it didn’t do anything. It was just seems unrelated to each other that kind of they definitely happened. I definitely captured reality except the film didn’t say anything because I didn’t write a script. So please just do that.
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