The Directing Plan

• 1. Decide:
  1. Casting—Which people will you use, and who is your central character?
  2. Who or what is in conflict—Question your choices rigorously, as it’s easy to get this one wrong (see note 1C on page 372)
  3. Dialectics of your film—Determining the central point and counterpoint of its argument will help you collect all the materials you need (see note 1D on page 373).
  4. Confrontation—How can you ensure that your movie’s antithetical forces will collide (see note 1E on page 373)?
  5. Thematic or other goals—Identify goals for each sequence and for the film as a whole.
• 2. List:
  1. Expository information that the audience needs in order to understand each sequence
  2. What’s typical and atypical in each sequence, to guide your filming
  3. Imagery such as cityscapes, landscapes, and workplaces that are emblematic of your participants’ type, place, or condition
• 3. Define:
  1. Main point of view, whose it is, why it matters, and how you’ll make us empathize
  2. Secondary points of view, as you might tell the story through secondary (see Point of View and Storyteller’s Angle [3 and 4] on page 373)
• 4. Define your own angle or point of view, codifying what you want to say and with what emphasis so you collect the materials to do it. This is for your private use only (see Point of View and Storyteller’s Angle [3 and 4] on page 373).

Addressing Aesthetic Concerns

• 5. Style—Define:
  1. What best serves each sequence
  2. How point of view might affect style (in each sequence and in the whole film)
  3. The stylistic characteristics of the film as a whole
  4. Anything to avoid definition is also creative)
  5. The genre you are making (what is it closest to?) (see note 6 below)
• 6. Parallel narrative traditions—What can your film borrow from other forms?

Testing your Assumptions

• 7. Pitch your ideas to anyone who will listen and solicit their reactions. Pitch to different victims until you get a consistently good audience response.
• 8. Ask people to read the proposal and to comment on what it makes them expect. Do they see the film you see?

Near Shooting

• 9. Make the final draft of your intentions. Even if you have nobody to satisfy but yourself, work over all the considerations prior to shooting. Originality does not come from talent (whatever that is) but from sustained, determined thought about the tasks and choices that lie ahead.
• 10. Obtain permissions.
  1. People—Secure a commitment for agreed dates and the amount of time and involvement from those you intend to film.
  2. Places—Secure written permissions for 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.
  3. Copyright—If music or other copyrighted material is necessary, now’s the time to secure it.

• 11. Secure your crew and put them under contract.
• 12. Decide what insurance you will need.
• 13. Make a shooting schedule and build in options to deal with foreseeable difficulties such as inclement weather or unavailability of a major element or participant.
• 14. Do any necessary trial shooting to:
  1. “Audition” doubtful participants.
  2. Work out communications with a new crew.
  3. Set standards for work you are going to do together.
  4. Test new or unfamiliar technology.

Who or what is in Conflict? (1C)

This is fatally easy to decide superficially. Deciding who is in struggle is easy, but deciding what really is at stake—for your participants, for those around them, or for society at large—takes a lot of hard, careful thought. It’s not enough to list issues—you must decide which is paramount. This is the key to giving your film the definition and clarity it needs to be effective.

Film Dielectics (1D)

Who and what are pitted against each other? In what hierarchy might these oppositions play out? Their prominence and strength depend very much on how you capture them and how you orchestrate them later during editing. This gives muscle and sinew to your drama. Right now you need to be fully aware of what’s available to work with.

Confrontation (1E)

Once you know the main oppositional forces in your film, you must ensure they meet in confrontation. A documentary does not reach its potential if its racketeering landlord never meets the tenant association that wants heat in the winter and rats evicted. You may have to finagle things to make confrontations happen.

Point of View and Storyteller’s Angle (3 and 4)

Who, among those in the film, must we specially understand and sympathize with? How will you take us inside these emotional viewpoints? 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?

Most importantly, what are your attitudes as the Storyteller toward the story you are telling—is it “an endlessly repeating cycle” or “a small-town tragedy”? Is it a “Frankie and Johnnie ballad” or a “defeat snatched from the jaws of victory” type of tale? Is it a tragedy, farce, tall story, or cautionary tale? Don’t just give us a record of events and leave your tale to find its own nature. How you shoot and edit your story should give it a clear, exciting identity as a type of story. Whichever it is, tell it with style, panache, and gusto. To do this you must adopt a storytelling role rather than work from your modest, retiring self. Michael Moore has said he was terrified in Bowling for Columbine while confronting Charlton Heston over the National Rifle Association’s stance. Taking on social icons comes no more naturally to him than it does to you or me; he does it because he feels someone must. Can you do likewise?

Genre (6)

Every film stands on the shoulders of those before it. Your documentary’s antecedents will suggest ideas or approaches that can enrich it and take your film farther.

Parallel Narrative Traditions (7)

Your film parallels works in other art forms such as music, opera, theater, folktale, or mythology that pursue a similar theme, tell a similar tale, or use a similar form. The parallels you find can help intensify your work and move it toward the universal.

Scouting the Locations

During preproduction, the director of photography, sound recordist, and director should check out locations for problems. See Chapter 9, Camera Equipment and Chapter 10, Lighting, for the fundamentals.

Logistics and the Schedule

Estimating how long each type of scene takes to shoot comes with experience. A 30-minute documentary can take between 3 and 8 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 10 days later. International travel requires careful planning, as you probably need to comply with customs regulations concerning equipment both going and returning.
• Amount and complexity of lighting setups
• Complexity of sound setups
• Amount of randomness inherent in the subject matter—To film a spontaneous scuffle between boys during a school yard break, you may have to hang around for days, but to film a postman delivering a particular letter may take no more than 10 minutes.

Schedule two or, at the most, three sequences in a day’s work unless you are using available light and are certain that what you want is straightforward. Avoid overly optimistic scheduling by making best-case and worst-case estimates and 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
• Special equipment or personnel required in each location
• Clear navigational instructions
• Photocopies of maps marked up with locations and phone numbers
• The names of people with mobile phones who are allotted to each vehicle whenever it is necessary to converge at a prearranged place and time (to provide for someone getting lost or having car trouble)

Expect trouble and you won’t be disappointed. There’s a reason why film-making is so often described in the language of military invasion.

Ensuring Change

One luxury peculiar to the independent filmmaker (and there are few) is that you can shoot follow-up material over a long period. Independent filmmakers tend to work as a group and on multiple projects, so occasionally deploying a crew for follow-up is not difficult. Returning at 6-month intervals for a couple of years may capture real changes. Reality shows, which borrow from documentary, accelerate change by putting contestants under extreme tests of endurance, strength, or ingenuity.

Permission to Film at Location Facilities

You must secure permission to film in a location in writing before you start shooting (Figure 24-1; see also Figure 7-1 in Chapter 7). A film of mine was once held up for a year after getting written permission to film an exhibition in a synagogue. Although I had secured permission for the building, the traveling exhibition’s owner, after hugely enjoying himself presenting exhibition items to the camera, later denied he had ever given me permission to film.

All events on private property (which may include a city transportation system) must be cleared by the relevant authority unless you care to risk being

FIGURE 24-1 Location Agreement Form from Clearance and Copyright, by courtesy of Michael C. Donaldson, who notes that if you are paying this person more than $600, you will need the releaser’s Social Security number so you can fill out a W-2 tax form. Otherwise, leave it off. Download this form at www.clearanceandcopyright.com.

taken to court for invasion of privacy. This risk rises as you or your company become worth suing. Sometimes—and this is a great hazard to investigative journalism—a malicious party will initiate legal action as a pretext for obtaining a court injunction that will block your film from showing.

Anything unrestrictedly open to public entry and view (such as the street, markets, public meetings) may be filmed without asking anyone’s permission. Handheld cameras count as newsgathering and are protected under freedom of speech; however, cities often restrict street filming from a tripod or other camera support system. This arises from a film crew’s potential to become a spectacle that blocks or disrupts traffic flow. Accordingly, you must get police permission and perhaps pay for a cop to control traffic or wave away troublesome bystanders. Once you put up the tripod, you technically speaking cross into the big time, but there may be nobody around who cares. Chicago is still film friendly, while in Paris and New York the honeymoon is long over. To film at any urban location, you must work through a special division of the mayor’s office or state film commission. They require proof that you carry the relevant liability insurance in case your activities cause injury.

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 solution gets risky in authoritarian countries where the authorities identify cameras as engines of subversion. Moving images from a phone camera can provide powerful, instant, and worldwide evidence of wrongdoing, as the Burmese government discovered after beating up monks who were peacefully demonstrating. The Los Angeles police department went on trial before the world for the Rodney King beating. Years of asserting police brutality had gotten black people nowhere until the evidence was inarguable. Two minutes of footage shot by the alert owner of a camcorder changed history.

The Individual Release Form

In this document the signatory releases to you the right to make public use of the material you have shot (Figure 24-2). You ask for the signature immediately after shooting. To soften the predatory nature of the request, you may want to give the person, say, 24 hours in which to call you to discuss anything they might want to retract.

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 say on-camera that they give permission to be filmed and that their name and address are such and such. A verbal release, however, is no protection against someone who decides at a late hour to pull out, sending an entire project down the drain with a whoosh. Participants know that you can, if challenged, always play their footage in court. Note that neither a verbal release nor a signed document protects you against charges of slander or deception.

FIGURE 24-2 Individual Release Form from Clearance and Copyright, by courtesy of Michael C. Donaldson, who comments that many individuals will not authorize the use of their likeness in your advertising without substantial extra payment. It is generally not worth the extra money, so you may have to take out that provision. Download this form at www.clearanceandcopyright.com.

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.

Crowd Scene Releases

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. So you normally seek signed releases from speaking participants only. Securing the release prevents participants from pulling out arbitrarily or from hitting you up for money once they know that the work you’ve invested in depends on their contribution.

Legal Issues

For all film-related legal matters, consult Michael C. Donaldson’s highly readable and comprehensive Clearance and Copyright: Everything the Independent Filmmaker Needs to Know, 2nd ed. (2003, Silman-James). These aspects 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

Paying Participants

Fiction filmmakers pay actors, but documentary makers don’t normally pay their participants, even when they have quite large budgets. This is because paying someone means you are potentially purchasing the truth you want to hear. For the audience this reduces or disables your film’s credibility. There are a couple of exceptions to this.