Preface to the Fifth Edition
You want to make documentary films? Most of what you’ll need is here to encourage you. Using a hands-on, project-oriented approach and talking to you as an artist and colleague, the book guides you from beginning to advanced levels of competency. Many people are experiential learners and unsuited to absorbing masses of untried information, so the book accommodates several different kinds of learner. See if your profile is here:
- I learn best from doing, not from a lot of intellectual preparation. Jump in, do the projects, and use the text for problem-solving when solid issues take shape.
- I like to feel prepared before I undertake practical work. Each phase of production includes an introduction, practical hands-on information, and analogies from everyday life to help you adopt a documentarian’s procedures and mindset.
- I really want to direct fiction but think documentary skills might be useful. Indeed they are. In Chapter 36, From Film School to Film Industry, you’ll see how documentary experience develops the confidence to improvise, experiment, and capitalize on spontaneity.
- I’m doing routine media craft work for a living and wonder whether I can direct documentaries. Working on the technical side often saps people’s confidence to direct, but this is an accessible manual that believes you can make the leap.
- I have neither time nor money for schooling. Can I still learn to make documentaries? Emphatically, yes! Many self-starters have used earlier editions of this book to get on their feet. This one should be better still.
This, the fifth edition, has been thoroughly revised and expanded to reflect changing technology and the torrent of fascinating new work. Its changes respond to developments in the learning style, knowledge, and enthusiasm that the Internet generation brings to the genre. It is now two complementary books, each designed to empower a different level of experience and learning. You will now start shooting with less prior reading, and its juxtapositional layout—illustrations, diagrams, boxes containing definitions and project suggestions—reflects today’s preference for multilayered information. Bibliographic or Web site information appears where you need it in the text. Suggestions for practical projects appear wherever they are useful. A detailed table of contents precedes each part.
Book I: Fundamentals
For the beginner needing concise, practical information who wants to start getting films up on the screen without delay. Filmmaking is something you must do anyway before theoretical issues gain substance.
Part 1: You and Your Ideas. Recognizes the ambitions you bring to beginning documentary making; introduces what the life is like and helps you recognize formative experiences underlying your artistic identity (yes, it will show you that you already have one).
Part 2: Documentaries and Film Language. How documentaries, technology, and documentary language evolved symbiotically. At each stage, there is a project with which you can explore and internalize the particular language it offers.
Part 3: Preproduction. Creating a brief proposal; turning it into a shooting plan; basic budgeting; getting permissions to shoot; developing a crew.
Part 4: Production. Choosing equipment; camera controls and handling; two-person shooting; basic lighting; essential location sound; directing participants and crew; basic interviewing.
Part 5: Postproduction. Editorial housekeeping; viewings; getting the most from each editing stage; refining your cut; trying it out on trial audiences; preparing and mixing sound; titling; press kit; Web site; shopping your film around festivals where recognition awaits if your work is good enough.
Signposting at salient points in Book I directs you to Book II’s information in greater depth, while Book II directs you back to missed or forgotten fundamentals in Book I.
Book II: Advanced Issues
For those ready for professional-level concepts and practices.
Part 6: Documentary Aesthetics. Introduces the notion of the documentary storyteller and what it takes to achieve an individual “voice” in your work. Explores point of view, reflexivity, types of discourse, plot and the three-act structure, the dramatic arc, structuring narrative time. Also, form and style, setting creative limits, using mixed forms such as the docudrama or reconstruction. Questionnaires help you find aesthetic options for any project.
Part 7: Advanced Production Issues. Addresses advanced challenges and difficulties that typically surface during the production cycle. Highlights are:
Part 7A: Advanced Preproduction. Types of research; evidence and exposition; representation and speaking for others; mission and identity issues of the filmmaker; proposing advanced documentaries; the treatment; budget planning; the prospectus. Also, making a directing plan; ensuring dialectics; developing a storyteller’s angle; scouting locations; scheduling; solving permission and legal issues.
Part 7B: Advanced Production. Lens optics: space and perception; choosing lens types; perspective and image texture; controlling the look of the film. Drawing up the equipment list; camera settings; options; aesthetics. Advanced location sound: single or double systems; recorders; mixers; microphone types and handling. Organization of the larger crew; procedures; social and formal issues. Advanced directing: psychology of actors in relation to documentary participants; how the camera changes people; camera coverage options. Also, conducting interviews; camera placement and directing; strategies for interviewing in depth; inward journey monologues.
Part 7C: Advanced Postproduction. Making a script from transcripts; creating narration; improvising for spontaneity. Library music; working with a composer. Editing refinements and structural problems; rhythm and flow; subtexts; diagnostic methods for identifying further problems and solutions.
Part 8: Education and Starting Your Career. Planning a career; choosing a film school and type of degree; internships and creating contacts for life beyond graduation; finding or making a job; creating an identity in the film industry; searching for subjects and markets; applying to funds and foundations; job information and journals; documentary as a prelude to directing fiction.
Appendix. Thirty-two hands-on discovery projects in a common checklist format: Analysis Projects (8), Development Projects (6), Budgeting Projects (2), Shooting Projects (14), and Postproduction Projects (2).
Thanks
Over the last two decades many have contributed help and ideas to this book. My thanks to Peter Attipetty, Camilla Calamandrei, Dr. Judd Chesler, Michael Ciesla, Dan Dinello, Dennis Keeling, Tod Lending, Cezar Pawlowski, Barb Roos, Paul Ruddock, and Bill Yancey. For pictures and pictorial sources, my gratitude to Dirk Matthews and Milos Stehlik of Facets Multimedia.
Thanks to my esteemed teaching colleagues Chap Freeman, Madeleine Bergh, Rolf Orthel, and Otto Schuurman; to CILECT; and to all the teachers and students who made the VISIONS European documentary workshops the undertaking of a lifetime.
At New York University, thanks to Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell, Ken Dancyger, and George Stoney (doyen of the American documentary), as well as the film faculty and students at the Tisch School, for the rare privilege of working with them.
Most of the information for the music chapter came from Paul Rabiger, a composer for film and television. Joanna Rabiger, a documentary editor and researcher, helps keep me current in documentary development. Penelope Rabiger-Hakak, a teacher expert in learning styles, made me understand my early difficulties with traditional education and why I opted for other paths.
Thanks to Doe Mayer, Jed Dannenbaum, and Carroll Hodge for the inspiring exchanges, formal and informal, preceding the publication of their work Creative Filmmaking from the Inside Out (2003, Simon & Schuster). My thanks for their permission to summarize some of its ideas.
My greatest debt of gratitude is to Columbia College Chicago, which over three decades encouraged me to implement so many of my ideas. Through the support and vision of Bert Gall and Caroline Latta, the Film/Video Department was radically rethought, expanded, and rehoused during my tenure as chair. Over the years, the college and its Film/Video Department, now under the able leadership of Bruce Sheridan, have shown me great affection and trust.
This edition benefited particularly from generous criticism and suggestions by Ken Dancyger of New York University; Valerie Brown, University of Central Lancashire, U.K.; Michael C. Donaldson; Michael Farrell, University of Nebraska – Lincoln; Tom Fletcher of Fletcher Chicago; Daniel Gaucher, Emerson College; Susan Hogue, University of South Carolina; Mary Healey Jamiel, University of Rhode Island; Laura Kissell, University of South Carolina; Jan Kravitz, Stanford University; David Krupp; Andy Opel, Florida State University; Geoffrey Poister, Boston University; Jennifer Proctor, Grand Valley State University; Linda Sever, University of Central Lancashire, U.K.; Heidi Solbrig, Bentley College; and Shannon Silva, University of North Carolina at Wilmington. If only I was equal to implementing all their suggestions!
Warm thanks to filmmakers Tod Lending, Monica Ahlstrom, Melinda Binks, Evan Briggs, and Orna Shavitt, as well as to the Maine Media Workshops for permission to show Maine work on this book’s Web site.
The Focal Press staff has always been a pleasure to know and work with. In particular I want to thank Elinor Actipis, Acquisitions Editor, and Michele Cronin, Associate Acquisitions Editor, for their outstanding encouragement, good humor, and professionalism.
Lastly, heartfelt thanks to my wife Nancy Mattei for her help, patience, and unfailingly kind and astute encouragement. With so much help from so many people, all errors and omissions are mine alone. I should perhaps add that I have no relationship of gain with any of the manufacturers, services, or institutions named in this book and that uncredited images are from my photographic or film work.
Michael Rabiger
Chicago, 2008