Chapter 4
Proposing and Pitching a Short Documentary
This chapter covers developing an initial documentary idea to the point where you can pitch it to other people. The term, which comes from baseball, signifies giving a brief, orally delivered description from which other people can “see” your film and react to it. From this you can get an audience reaction to your film even before you’ve made it and learn what changes your idea needs in order to become really striking.
Why you Need a Proposal
People making their first documentary often do so with little or no preparation. They feel they have a compelling subject and must shoot immediately. So they shoot… and shoot, and shoot. The problem is that, when you run the camera without focused ideas, everything looks potentially significant, so what you shoot is… everything. Later at the computer, you face hours of footage with no narrative thread or point of view. The lesson is you must focus your ideas ahead of shooting, so you can look for particular material. That’s directing as opposed to archiving.
Shape your ideas and clarify your intentions by developing a proposal. If you don’t, you will probably shoot everything that moves. This leads to misery when you edit.
But, you protest, shouldn’t I shoot with an open mind and not decide beforehand what’s going to happen? Yes and no. What you need is a plan that narrows and deepens your quest. Armed with this, you either see what you hope for as you shoot or you’ll register new aspects. With plans in mind, you know whether to incorporate the new or discard it.
Here are the preparation steps:
- Write a working hypothesis. This crystallizes your intentions for the filming.
- Develop a film proposal on paper.
- Develop an oral pitch of your film. An audience assesses your likely film, and you get an audience reaction to help you go further.
Write proposals in the present tense and active voice, and you produce writing that is compact and closest to the viewing experience.
Film Writing is Different
Film scripts or proposal materials are always in the present tense and active voice. This produces compact writing that is closest to the viewing experience. First, you’ll probably write, “He will be shown digging his garden.” Realizing you’ve put this in the future tense, passive voice, you change it to the present tense, active voice: “He is digging his garden.” Better yet would be “He digs his garden.” See how compact and purposeful these four words are, compared with the original seven? Because passive constructions are indispensable to our “I’m not responsible—don’t blame me” culture, you may have to do what I do, which is set your word processor to spot them and prompt you when you come off the rails.1
Project 4-1: Developing a Brief Working Hypothesis
Use the eight prompts below to develop any documentary idea into a working hypothesis, which is really a delivery system for your documentary’s convictions:
- Prompt 1 asks for your conviction as the starting point.
- Prompts 2 through 6 are the body of ideas, purposes, and concepts that make your film persuasive to an audience.
- Prompts 7 and 8 are the target—an audience member’s heart and mind.
On the following page is the eight-stage Working Hypothesis Helper. The examples in the right-hand column help you answer the prompts on the left. Work to compress your answers until you have the briefest, most compact and comprehensive statements you can manage. For the more advanced version, go to Chapter 23, The Advanced Proposal.
Working Hypothesis Helper
One Conviction, Many Films
Examples 1 to 3 in the Working Hypothesis Helper table show that different fiideas can emerge from the same conviction. This I could paraphrase more proactively as:
You can avoid failure by not trying, but life keeps facing you with tests. Overcome even something minor, and you feel great.
The same principle turns up in three different interpretations: one involving a boy at school, another a disadvantaged puppy in a kennel, and a third in the shape of a contemptibly small machine in a mechanized jungle. Many, many more are possible.
Project 4-2: Pitching a Subject
You will have to repeatedly sell your current project when you go looking for crew, finance, or other support. By pitching your film, you rehearse with audiences until you can explain its essentials rapidly and attractively. In professional situations, you may get 10 minutes to convey a feature-length documentary, so you should be able to pitch a 5- to 20-minute film in 3 to 5 minutes. You can pitch ideas at all stages of their evolution as a check on how the idea is developing.
Pitching is seldom easy or comfortable. Be enthusiastic and use colorful language so you convey a clear pictorial sense of what the film will be like and why you and nobody else should make it. What you must convey is your passion and belief in the special qualities of the story. Rehearse before a mirror or camcorder so you can make a well-judged presentation. There is no set formula, and part of the challenge is to present your idea in whatever narrative steps best suit its nature. Here’s what you might cover for a short, event-driven documentary.
Make notes so you can explain:
- Background of the topic
- Character or characters and what makes them special
- Problem or situation that puts the main character(s) under revealing pressure
- Style of the coverage and the editing
- Any changes or growth you expect during the filming
- Why it’s important that this film gets made and why you are the person to make it.
A Typical Pitch
Here is a pitch worked out from using (1) through (6) above:
This is your chance to show your intentions for a film and get a first audience response. It is normal to be imaginative and propose what you hope to capture, even though the reality may turn out different. After you finish, listen to the comments, take notes, and say as little as possible. Your film idea has had its chance to communicate; now open yourself to its effects so that you can redraft it for another pitch to another audience.
- Several days later, pitch your film again, taking into account all the critique that you found useful.
- Pitch it a third time and see what your audience thought of the latest version. Even if the idea hasn’t improved, your delivery probably has.
When your early audiences light up, you have the ingredients for a good film. Where they don’t, keep changing your approach until your experience shows that every aspect is masterful. Pitch a new documentary idea every week to anyone willing to listen and respond. You’ll be amazed at how many good ideas you can come up with and how much you learn from pitching them. Afraid that someone will steal your idea? You won’t be, when you have too many.
Expanding the Pitch to a Proposal
Here are samples of pitches expanded into three formal proposals. Each film now suggests a distinct area of endeavor in the human or natural worlds.
1. The Swimming Lesson
In a noisy, inner-city schoolroom the children boisterously finish up their work. As they get ready for an outing they yell excitedly in spite of their teacher’s plea to be quieter. The camera concentrates on a timid, foreign-looking boy who watches the others to see what he should do. He is new and unsure what is expected. When he must interact he speaks haltingly with a foreign accent. At the swimming pool, his confusion turns to fear: He is with the few who are learning to swim. One by one the nonswimmers have to take their feet off the floor and thrash forward a few paces. Our boy looks more and more concerned as it gets nearer his turn. Other kids seem to laugh at him, but the instructor is patient and understanding. He helps him until he has swum a few strokes. The other kids applaud. His face goes pink with pride and relief. He has survived. In the event that he fails, we will follow further visits until the experienced and sympathetic instructor helps this boy, as he does other children, to finally swim.
2. The Litter
A breeding kennel is 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 underequipped 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. This cycle repeats. 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 its 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 (the owner? someone else?) ready to mediate if the smallest is threatened.
3. Bobcat
The sun is rising at an urban building site. Concentrated together, huge cranes, cement delivery trucks, bulldozers, and giant hole-borers are 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 the film on a montage of heroic, static machines, including the Bobcat, framed to make it look as large as the other machines.
The first is a drama, the second a tragedy, and the third a Chaplinesque comedy realized through machines. All three depart from the same philosophic starting point, yet they arrive in rather different destinations. You could get another hundred films from that one conviction.
Proposals for Some Actual Films
As models, here are short proposals for some films made at the International Film & Video Workshops at Rockport, Maine (see www.theworkshops.com for information about the school and go to http://directingthedocumentary.com to see the films online). They are from a month-long class taught by myself and Chandler Griffin, who now leads Barefoot Workshops (see www.barefootwork-shops.org). Our 14 students, whose ages spanned from the 20s to the 50s, learned from scratch to conceive and propose a short documentary, to shoot using an advanced Panasonic® camera, and to edit using Final Cut Pro®. Working in groups of three, each person directed and edited a 5-minute film and crewed on two others. Rockport is a small coastal town where all the students were outsiders, so each had to pound the pavement to find a local subject. All succeeded, with only one subject backing out and needing replacement. There being insufficient time for formal written work, the students delivered their proposals orally. I have therefore written the kind of proposal that led to the film you see. Needless to say, each film sprung surprises on its makers and didn’t necessarily reflect the pitch they made. Most, however, surpassed expectations.
Dreaming of Blueberries (2005, Evan Briggs; Figure 4-1)
Jestine Bridges is 17 and lives with her family on their farm in Maine’s blueberry country. She dreams of becoming the Blueberry Queen in a local beauty competition. We shall follow her through the stages of preparation and learn what it feels like to be a shy young woman on the threshold of her life, getting ready to try her chances at the fair. This event-centered film will end after the judges have announced the winner.
The Writing on the Wall (2005, Melinda Binks; Figure 4-2)
Tom Jacobs, visiting his mother’s grave, tells how he came to care for her during her last, long illness—Alzheimer’s disease. Interwoven is his account of what being a caring son is like while the beloved patient gradually loses all mental capacity. In fact, they exchange roles: He becomes the parent, she the child. Tom thinks it a small sacrifice but now faces having to do the same all over again for his father, also diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The film will evoke the feeling of her continuing presence in the little wooden house, and the camera will feature the empty chair that she used to sit in.
Blaikie Hines (2005, Orna Shavitt; Figure 4-3)
Blaikie is a painter and Civil War historian whose life at one time was heading on a downward path. At the lowest point in his life he had a moving encounter with God and later found salvation in learning to paint.
FIGURE 4-1 In Dreaming of Blueberries, Jestine tries her luck in a Maine beauty contest (frame from film).
FIGURE 4-2 A man recounts his mother’s journey to dementia in The Writing on the Wall (frame from film).
FIGURE 4-3 A Vietnam draft dodger becomes a religious man, then a painter and Civil War expert in Blaikie Hines (frame from film).
He believes that the keys to the present lie in the past, so he not only writes about history but also dresses up in authentic costume to teach it.
The Yellow House (2005, Monica Ahlstrom; Figure 4-4)
William Anderson lives alone and seems to own the only house in Rockport that isn’t painted the regulation white. At 30 years of age, during a Concord reenactment, he lost his hands in a cannon accident. As a follower of the Transcendentalists who loves walking, he made the choice to live by and for photography and refused to let the damage to his hands stop him from searching for the beauty in nature and in his grandchildren. The film will relate this during one of his walking trips.
FIGURE 4-4 Photographer William Anderson in The Yellow House looks at his granddaughter (frame from film).
My Commentary
Dreaming of Blueberries is a process film—that is, it introduces Jestine and takes as its forward movement her process after she decides to enter the competition. Its momentum and modest tension come from wondering whether she will win. Impressionistically it builds a lyrical, rather ornate picture of its shy 17-year-old central character. Its director was a young woman looking forward to getting married, and the film reflects the safety and pleasure to be found in loving family relations. The director went on to study documentary at Stanford University.
Tom Jacobs in The Writing on the Wall makes a circular journey of reminiscence that starts at his mother’s graveside. He tells how he repaid his dues as a son once his mother began losing her memory. The journey became dark and troubled as his mother became ever more fearful and alienated. Against pictures of him as a child with his mother, he recounts how he became the parent and she the child. The film, starting and ending by looking through a rain-drenched window at Tom next to his mother’s grave, gives the effect of looking through a veil of tears. His account, delivered without self-pity and in the gloom of her cottage from one of his parents’ two chairs, is almost an interior voice that speaks for them. At the end we learn that now, with a weary heart, he faces the same one-way journey with his father toward senility and death. The director Melinda Binks began as assistant to a famous wildlife photographer and now makes documentaries for aid and other organizations worldwide.
Blaikie Hines is an autobiographical memoir, its structure hinging at the moment of redemption that is its turning point. Blaikie’s autobiographical account takes us on his downward path when, as a Vietnam draft dodger, he sank into drink and drugs on the run in England. He reached a state of feeling he was “buried alive.” Failing to reach his sister during an emotional crisis, he began praying and found God. After this his life and art came miraculously together. Returning to the present, we find him readying himself in Civil War uniform to give a history presentation. In his final incarnation as a painter and Civil War historian, he repays a debt to the lost young men of the 1860s. The director is an Israeli genetic scientist whose life was indelibly scarred as a young girl when her beloved father was killed during the Six Day War in Israel and his body lost on the battlefield for a week. She and her daughter are now working on a film about this.
The Yellow House is more of an event-centered film that makes effective use of connotation in its images. Its structure uses William Anderson’s circular journey up to, and then back from, the water’s edge where he takes photographs. During this circuit we learn of the terrible accident that changed his life when his hands were blown off by a cannon. His yellow house is his starting and ending point. Note how it was abandoned and needed fixing up and that he rebelliously painted it yellow instead of the locally approved white. The film has made the house into a metaphor for Anderson himself—a solitary, dissident personality who elected to study and record the beauty of the world in spite of (or because of?) his damaged hands. The film’s director, Monica Ahlstrom, specializes in search-and-rescue operations for those lost in the Canadian wilds.
FIGURE 4-5 Graph superimposing the arcs of Dreaming of Blueberries, The Writing on the Wall, Blaikie Hines, and The Yellow House to show how hope fluctuates through their stories.
Three of the films give older men’s viewpoints; the fourth, that of a girl approaching womanhood. For comparison I have made a graph superimposing the rise and fall of optimism in each story (Figure 4-5). Passing through highsand lows, the curve for each is different through its span. Possibly they refl what’s characteristic for their subjects’ place on life’s great road, but the trajectories are also intrinsic to the way their makers have chosen to tell their stories. The more common graphing for stories—by intensity of feeling—produces the dramatic arc or dramatic curve, which you can read about in Chapter 18, Time, Development, and Structure, under “Drama and the Three-Act Structure.”
The next chapter looks at the range of film language that documentaries use and how it developed in parallel to the technology available to filmmakers.
Note
1 In newer versions of Microsoft® Word® for the PC, click on the Review tab and in the Proofing group, click on Spelling & Grammar. At the first passive sentence in your writing, the program should report “passive voice.” If not, click “Options …” in the Spelling and Grammar pane and set the writing problems for which you’d like alerts. It’s good but not infallible, by the way.