Chapter 3
Structuring the Documentary
We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these . . . We can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories.
Roger C. Schank, from Tell Me A Story 1
■ Basic Approaches To Documentary Storytelling
Documentaries are a form of storytelling. They originate from someone trying to communicate an experience, information about an issue, or an idea about the world we inhabit. And they speak to an audience in an organized fashion. As we saw in the last chapter, documentaries take many forms. Some are more literal and communicate more directly, while others employ more observational or impressionistic methods. But whatever their stylistic approach, documentaries take us on a journey over time, often using storytelling techniques that have emerged over thousands of years and that humans—even across many cultures—recognize.
Broadly speaking, documentaries draw on two of the oldest traditions in Western culture: drama and rhetoric. In drama lies the origins of stories of human life—the myths that explain human fate, our gods, our hearts. The origins of rhetoric lie in the political speeches, debates, and discussions that were at the heart of ancient Greek and Roman democracy. These are two distinct approaches. Some documentaries will favor one or the other approach, while many use a combination. Also, being a creative form, documentaries usually don’t fit entirely into neat categories and very often use and blend methods beyond the scope of these two traditions.
Drama: Goals, Conflict, and Stakes
What makes any story compelling is, on some level, conflict. In character-based films, the conflict could be between two characters (see Nobody’s Business, pp. 12–13), a person’s internal conflict with themself (see Fog of War, p. 318), or a person’s conflict with a social institution or barrier. At other times, it could be the conflict a community faces when it finds itself up against larger outside forces like a corporation or a political structure (see A Village Called Versailles, pp. 42–45). In this type of film, characters want things and have goals. They want to save the family farm, understand their parents better, fight discrimination, or simply find self-determination in one form or another. They act and struggle to get what they want or need, while facing opposition and obstacles that they either overcome or fail to overcome. In character-driven documentaries, the relationship of conflict to story is similar to the way things work in narrative fiction storytelling (see Dramatic Structure, p. 30).
Some documentaries, however, are based more on information and argument than characters in conflict (though they may include characters as part of a strategy to humanize the issues). In these cases, conflict is present too, but in a slightly different form. Here, we find that conflict is closely related to the idea of stakes. Stakes refer to the investment the characters in a film, or the audience, have in the outcome of the story or argument. Why does it matter if a character achieves their goal? What will happen if they don’t? Why do we, as an audience, care about whether charter schools are better than public ones, or vice versa, to use the example of Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman (2010)? What’s at stake, in the case of Waiting for Superman, could be the future of quality education as a right all people share equally. In order for the audience to be connected to your film, you need to make sure they understand the stakes as you see them.
Often filmmakers will start to screen an early cut of a documentary, only to find that it fails to engage a viewer. Asking “Why does this film matter?” or “Why do you care about this?” can often reveal the underlying investment that they (and often their characters) have in the outcome of the situation documented in the film. Identifying the stakes in a film is critical because without stakes, there is no drama. In another way, the question of stakes involves us as audience members. It is a particular characteristic of documentary that its audience is, by definition, part of the world of the film. In a well-crafted documentary, we care about the issues at hand, or about what happens to the people in the film, because their issues are our issues. We might be literally facing the same problem they are, but even if we aren’t, our shared reality bonds us with them and creates an ethical framework within which we are asked to care about what happens.
Dramatic Structure
A film must move. A documentary must start somewhere and take us to a different place. What moves it forward is its dramatic structure. Many documentaries, especially those that are character-based, make use of the three-act structure first defined by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle posited that a story must have “a beginning, a middle and an end.” While this might seem obvious—what film doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, and an end?—it becomes more useful when we realize the difficulty of keeping an audience engaged over time. Some films, especially in their early forms (before editing is finished), seem to stall, repeat themselves, or lose the narrative thread that keeps the audience fully engaged. Often, this is because the dramatic structure has not been fully or thoughtfully worked out.
Documentary makers do not just deliver information; they shape it into a compelling story by creating provocative questions in the mind of the audience that need to be answered. What’s going to happen next? Will she find justice? How can this go on? What does the other guy think? Why did he do that? And so on.
One major way of moving things forward is through the introduction and resolution of conflict in individual scenes, and in the story as a whole. Here, a traditional narrative dramatic arc (Figure 3.1) can be extremely helpful in thinking about your documentary’s structure.
Here are some brief definitions of the various parts of the dramatic arc.
Opening
The opening of your film is one of the most important, and most difficult, parts to conceptualize and create. It must, at a minimum:
- draw the audience into your story
- give them a basic sense of what the topic is
- introduce your audience to at least one of the main characters
- establish the style of your film, including major elements
- give your viewer a sense of the scope of the discussion (is this about one person, or a community, or an issue as it impacts people in many places?)
■ Figure 3.1 The stages of the basic documentary dramatic arc.
Finally, your opening should include a narrative promise. This is hard to define exactly, but it means that you give your audience a taste of what is to come and a sense of what they will get from watching your film. For coauthor Kelly Anderson and Tami Gold’s documentary Every Mother’s Son (2004), about abuse of force by New York City police officers, the promise suggests,
If you stick around for the next hour, you will learn something about issues of police use of deadly force. While this film foregrounds the experience of family members of people killed, it will also include the perspective of law enforcement.
The stakes are clearly very high and stark in this film—life and death, safety and loss— but defining the stakes, no matter how dramatic or subtle, is equally important for all films.
Openings often include exposition, information the viewer needs to know in order to understand what’s happening on the screen. Exposition can take the form of narration, text on screen, interviews with subjects or experts, dialogue between characters, or a visual that gives us information about where we are, who is involved, or what is happening. While it can, and should, occur at multiple points in your film, it is particularly necessary in the opening moments of your documentary.
Sheila Curran Bernard, in her book Documentary Storytelling: Creative Nonfiction on Screen, defines exposition as “the information that grounds you in a story: who, what, where, when and why. It gives audience members the tools they need to follow the story . . . and, more importantly, it allows them inside the story.”2
In Every Mother’s Son, the exposition includes two text cards that place the story in the context of a wider national debate about policing:
In the 1990s, under Mayor Giuliani’s administration, policing in New York City became more aggressive—a pattern that could be seen in many cities across the United States.
This film tells the story of three women—Iris Baez, Kadiatou Diallo and Doris Busch-Boskey—who turn the tragedy of having a son killed by police into an opportunity for change.
Every Mother’s Son. Dir. Tami Gold and Kelly Anderson. New Day Films, 2004. DVD
■ Figure 3.2 In Every Mother’s Son, the conflict is introduced when a wayward football hits an NYPD patrol car and police officer Francis Livoti puts Anthony Baez in a chokehold.
These two cards give the audience a very basic outline of what is to come, but leave out enough information about the specifics of the stories for the audience to remain engaged. Finding the balance between giving viewers enough information, while keeping them curious enough to keep watching, is one of the challenges of any kind of storytelling.
Following Every Mother’s Son’s introductory text cards and opening titles, we see images of Iris Baez, one of the film’s three main characters, walking in her Bronx neighborhood. We hear her talking about raising children—six adopted and five biological. “We have two kitchens—this is for the early eaters, and upstairs is for the night eaters,” she explains with a smile from a seat in the “downstairs kitchen.” The images here include children running around the house, and playing outside in the yard. This sequence is part of the exposition of the film. It gives us information about who Iris is, the kind of close-knit family she heads up, and the deep identification she has with being a mother. We also receive visual information (graffiti-covered walls in the neighborhood, the elevated subway rumbling overhead) that tells us this family isn’t wealthy, and that they live in a part of town that is far from the luxury skyscrapers and power brokers of Manhattan.
Introducing the Conflict
Soon into any film, you must introduce the central conflict that sets the film in motion, often called the “inciting incident.” In a character-driven film, it may be the point where an event happens that changes the course of the main character’s life. In Every Mother’s Son, this moment occurs when several of the Baez boys are playing football in the street and the ball hits a police car, resulting in a confrontation with Officer Francis Livoti (Figure 3.2). Within minutes, Anthony Baez is dead, and questions abound: What happened? Did Anthony die of an asthma attack, as the NYPD claimed, or did Livoti choke him to death? How will the Baez family deal with this tragedy, and will the city take any responsibility? It’s important to remember that as a documentary filmmaker you not only deliver information; you also must raise provocative questions that need answers. This lies at the center of involving the audience in your story.
Rising Action
The rising action is the bulk of the film. Here we develop the voices, the events, and the nuances that contextualize the basic conflict to create a larger and more complex picture. As scenes play out, we see the stakes escalate for the characters and for the audience. In Every Mother’s Son, we eventually meet three mothers whose sons were killed by NYPD officers under circumstances that seem unjust. The rising action of the film is each mother’s attempt to understand what happened to her son, the realization that something profoundly wrong has occurred, and an effort to get some form of justice. At each turn, obstacles present themselves: a “blue wall of silence” in the police department that makes it difficult to find information, district attorneys who fail to make indictments despite ample evidence that a murder has occurred, a political structure that is complicit with the police department. There are also obstacles that are internal to the characters, including debilitating depression and loss of hope that make it difficult to persevere. Each of these obstacles adds information, adds dimension, and raises the stakes as the mothers and we, as viewers, realize that the desire for justice isn’t just an individual matter. Each obstacle is a learning moment for the audience, as we come to understand that without policy reforms, these mothers’ sons will, in fact, have died in vain.
When you are embarking on a character-based documentary, make sure that your subjects have goals that you can articulate, and that there are likely to be obstacles along the path they take to achieve those goals that you can highlight. This will ensure that your film has enough conflict to keep the narrative moving forward and the audience engaged as you layer on factual information for context.
Climax
The climax of a film is the moment of highest emotional impact, where the conflicts that have been put into motion come to a head. This is where the efforts of the characters lead them to go toe-to-toe with whatever is opposing them, whether that opposing force is a person, an institution, or something more abstract like ignorance or apathy. In Every Mother’s Son, this is the moment where the three mothers connect with one another, and take their individual stories to a more collective level, joining forces to fight for policy changes. The climax always occurs near the end of the film.
Results and Ending
After the climax, you generally give the audience some time and information that allows them to process what has happened, and to think about what it means. Obviously, in a documentary, we cannot manufacture resolutions or happy endings. The actual conflict may be too pernicious to be resolved, but you need to tell us where we have come as a result of all of this information, and effort. Are we enlightened? Has our awareness of our world been expanded? And, of course, you must tell us where we are leaving the characters. If there is no resolution for them, is there hope? Have their voices been heard? For Every Mother’s Son, the resolution lies in the mothers’ commitment to continuing to work to change policing policy, so that their sons’ deaths will not be in vain. We also receive information, via text cards, about where each mother’s legal case stands in 2004, when the film ends.
If you analyze the structure of documentaries, you will see many variations on the traditional dramatic arc. Every Mother’s Son, for example, had three separate stories integrated into one film. Its dramatic arc looks something like this (Figure 3.3).
■ Figure 3.3 Story arc for Every Mother’s Son.
There are three individual stories, and each plays out in full before we move to the next. The first is Iris’ story, and it contains its own opening, conflict, goals, obstacles, and rising stakes. At the height of its dramatic arc, we leave this story and pick up Kadiatou’s. Hers has its own arc, and then we leave it and begin Doris’ story. With multiple stories like this, there is always a danger of them feeling too similar. In Every Mother’s Son, this is avoided by having each story introduce a new set of issues related to police brutality. This developing revelation of the complexity of the issue keeps the audience on their toes as they develop a more complete understanding. The final climax of the film, when the mothers come together to fight for justice, is the highest emotional point because it offers a potential real-world resolution to a devastating problem.
Some films with multiple characters intercut the stories more often, which would result in another dramatic arc involving parallel action across multiple stories. So you could start with character A, go to character B, then character C, and then repeat several more times over the course of the film. The result would be a different type of dramatic arc. Trying to map out your own film’s arc can be a very useful exercise.
Imposing a Structure on Real Life?
Structure and story should be part of your concern from the beginning of your research process, and should periodically be rethought, along with your hypothesis, throughout production. This might seem counterintuitive. Unlike fiction films, documentaries are based on “real life.” How then can we impose a story structure on them? The answer to that question brings us to one of the most unique, challenging, and thrilling aspects of documentary: the tension between what exists in the world and your representation of it on screen. Questions of story will determine which parts of a real situation you will capture, how you will film them, and how you will assemble what you’ve shot in the edit room. If you are sensitive to your story as it unfolds, the people, their goals, and the events will suggest an appropriate structure. You must be willing to allow for new chemistry and new possibilities as production unfolds. Keep in mind all the time how an audience, unfamiliar with the world you are exploring, can be brought into this world of people, events, and issues, and how they are to truly understand it. You will never be able to represent everything that happened; your film will necessarily only show some aspects of what actually occurred, and from certain perspectives. Shaping your representation so that it is true to your understanding of events, and also has compelling narrative structure, can be challenging.
Rhetorical Structure
Often documentarians find themselves wanting to explore an issue in a way that gives audiences more information or analysis than can be delivered by simply following individual stories. This is where more overtly rhetorical approaches to documentary come in, and where we tap into the goals of educating an audience that have always characterized many documentary films (Chapter 2).
Let’s say you wanted to make a film about the 2008 financial crisis. One approach might be to follow an individual who is losing their home because of a badly structured mortgage. This would be emotionally moving, but might not lead to a serious analysis of the root causes of the crisis. Another approach might be the one that director Charles Ferguson takes in Inside Job (2010). This film presents a carefully structured argument, using a narration read by actor Matt Damon and interviews with a variety of influential figures to provide the core points. There is much at stake, as the film states that the global recession “cost the world tens of trillions of dollars, rendered 30 million people unemployed and doubled the national debt of the United States.”
This film, which is expository in style, employs a rhetorical approach. Rhetoric is concerned with the impact of a message on an audience. Examples of rhetoric include political speeches, lectures, and legal arguments. Many documentaries borrow from these traditions as they explore real-life situations and conflict, crafting arguments through the presentation of events, evidence, information, and analysis.
In Inside Job, Ferguson lays out an assertion: an out-of-control and unregulated financial sector caused the 2008 global financial crisis. Much like a courtroom argument, Inside Job presents evidence in the form of documents, testimony at hearings, and interviews with people actually involved in the events. It also uses expert testimony, including interviews with former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, several business professors at prestigious universities, politicians such as Representative Barney Frank, and journalists. Finally, employing some excellent on-camera interviewing, Inside Job uses a strategy akin to legal cross-examination, as in the following exchange about whether the government under President George W. Bush had neglected to heed warnings about the looming financial crisis. David McCormick, Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs from 2007 to 2009, is being interviewed (Figure 3.4):
McCormick: Secretary (of the Treasury) Paulson spoke throughout the Fall, and all the potential root causes of this, and there are plenty, he called them. So I’m not sure . . .
Andrew Ferguson (Director, off-camera): You’re not being serious about that, are you?
McCormick: I am being serious. What would you have expected? What were you looking for that you didn’t see?
Ferguson: He was the senior advocate for prohibiting the regulation of credit-default swaps, and also lifting the leverage limits on the investment banks. He mentioned those things? I never heard him mention those things.
McCormick (to the camera operator): Could we turn this off for a second?
■ Figure 3.4 Charles Ferguson’s interview with David McCormick, Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, in Inside Job feels very much like a courtroom cross-examination.
in practice
■ Hearing Both Sides of the Argument
Jay Rosenstein’s In Whose Honor? (1997), about the use of Native American mascots in sports, takes a strongly critical position on the Chief Illiniwek mascot used by the University of Illinois sports teams. In his film, he allows administration officials who support the mascot to speak at length, however. He explains why:
I made sure to include characters who would vocalize the other side, including trustees from the university, the head of the alumni association, the Chief Illiniwek at that time, and a state representative who proposed a state law that would make Chief Illiniwek the official mascot by state law. I also did a bunch of “man on the street” interviews, going out to the tailgate parties before the games and asking various people how they felt about the mascot.
In allowing these people to speak, I was presenting arguments that were contrary to the point of view of my film. If you are going to make an argument, and you ignore the other side, ultimately you undercut what you are trying to achieve and you make your own argument weaker. I’ve always felt that by acknowledging the other side, and at the very least trying to counter some of their arguments, not only do you strengthen the film, but you enhance its credibility too.
Audiences are inherently skeptical, and nobody wants to be given a one-sided argument about an issue. Addressing their doubts about your film’s messaging head-on is a powerful way to strengthen your claims. And a good conflict between perspectives also builds dramatic tension.
If you are sort of afraid that the counter-argument will overtake your argument, then maybe that should be a sign that you don’t have such a strong argument to begin with! 3
The exchange is damning evidence of the cover-up and spin used by government officials and others to deny their responsibility for the crisis. Ferguson also keeps viewers engaged by introducing us to different categories of players. First we meet the bankers, then the government officials who are supposed to be regulating them, and finally the academics who are generally thought to be more impartial, only to find they are also part of the problem. In this film, the stakes are so high, and the argument is so well-crafted, that even in the absence of strong character development the film has a gripping narrative arc.
One rhetorical strategy used in Inside Job, and in expository documentaries in general, is the refutative argument. This involves presenting the opinions of people who counteract the essential claim of the documentary. To continue the court analogy, this is similar to a courtroom defense and prosecution presenting evidence as vigorously as possible, and refuting the veracity of their opponents’ arguments. With documentary, the theory is that the truth will be revealed in the end.
Mixed Approaches
In most contemporary documentary films, dramatic and rhetorical storylines coexist and run parallel throughout the film. If you are making a documentary that deals with big policy issues, it’s very common to personalize the argument with dramatic human stories. If you are a filmmaker with an amazing human drama, you may want to broaden out the issues the characters are dealing with so that the stories resonate on a more societal or universal level.
Another way to think of a mixed approach is that there is always a tension between a subject in your film being who they are, a real person with a real life, and the role they play in your film as a representative of an issue. It’s up to you to contain that tension in a creative way so that viewers see the way larger issues impact people’s lives, without turning your subjects into illustrations, or losing the bigger picture that gives their story broad appeal.
■ Alternative Structures
Some films resist conventional structures altogether, whether rhetorical or dramatic. There are many reasons for an alternative approach. Some makers want to create a more nuanced approach to documentary “truth,” even to question the idea that anything is really knowable. Others seek a language that is more aesthetic and associative, and less linear. Watermark (2013) is a documentary film by Jennifer Baichwal, in collaboration with photographer Edward Burtynsky, about human interaction with water (Figure 3.5). Baichwal says:
I would say the film is more philosophically based than narratively based. It’s not a story with a beginning, middle and end. It’s like beads on a string that are tied together by this theme of human interaction with water. And there are these little existential moments where you as a viewer get to be in the rice paddies for a moment, or the construction site of the Xiluodu Dam or at the Kumbh Mela with 30 million other people making a sacred vow. The rhythm of it was intended to flow a bit like water.4
It’s important, however, to take a pause before deciding to abandon a dramatic or rhetorical structure for your film. One of the reasons Watermark is able to hold viewers’ attention for 92 minutes, despite a lack of traditional dramatic structure, is the breathtaking cinematography by Nick de Pencier, and the acute directorial eyes of Baichwal and Burtynsky. As de Pencier explains, “(Ed Burtynsky) doesn’t choose subjects that don’t resonate with layers of meaning and information underneath.” The film, which is based on Burtynsky’s photographs, works without a lot of exposition because the image itself is dense with meaning.5 In this way, the film is similar to the impressionistic films described in Chapter 2.
Also remember that just because your film eschews traditional structure, it does not mean that it has no structure. Every filmmaker, no matter what their approach, needs to be clear about the particular organizing principle of their story. Every film must have a conscious and thoughtfully constructed organization of material to create a compelling experience that can communicate to a viewer. As Baichwal explains, in her films there is no shortage of advance planning and thinking about questions of structure and theme: “We always have an outline and a vision and a philosophical idea of what we’re trying to do, and then we go into the field.”6
■ The Short Documentary
Many documentaries are much shorter than the feature-length examples we have discussed above. Many run 2 to 3 minutes, others 10 to 15, and they are typically structured differently from longer works. If you are just starting out making documentaries, it is a great idea to make short projects to hone your technical and storytelling skills. Creating short documentaries will allow you to explore a variety of themes, styles, and structures within a short period of time. In addition, you will be able to spend much more of your time actually making the film, rather than trying to find the resources required for a feature.
■ Figure 3.5 Watermark builds its case about humans’ interaction with water through a structure based on thematic imagery rather than a traditional dramatic or rhetorical structure.
The short form isn’t always a “stepping stone” to feature documentary production, however. Many filmmakers prefer the short form and make short documentaries their entire lives. Keith Wilson, whose short film The Shrimp (2009) is analyzed below, says:
Early in my career I subscribed to the widely held belief that the ultimate filmmaking goal was feature length fare. But my interests are wide-ranging, my attention span is short, and my financial resources are limited. So I gravitate towards short films that are conceptually contained and formally focused, because they make my life as a creative person sustainable.7
Short documentaries don’t have much time for character development, or for conflict to develop organically, and most don’t follow the traditional dramatic arc. Instead they tend to fall into one of these categories:
- Issue-Based Films
- Profile of a Person
- Portrait of a Place
- Single Event Story
- Process Film
Issue-Based Films
Issue-based short documentaries present us with a quick glimpse of a social problem. They often begin with a presentation of the problem, then delve into possible causes, and end by providing us with some potential solutions. They have little time for character development, but people often function as experts or eyewitnesses. An example is Meerkat Media’s Every Third Bite (2008), a 9-minute documentary about the phenomenon of “bee colony collapse.” We meet one scientist, and several beekeepers in Nantucket (MA), Chicago, Long Island (NY), and New York City. Through interviews, mostly with beekeepers as they work, we learn that millions of bees have abandoned their hives, about the connection between bees and agriculture (“every third bite of food we eat is pollinated by a honeybee”), and that large-scale industrial honey production is a likely cause of the problem. We are also presented with a solution in the example of small-scale farmers, even some who are farming on rooftops in the city, as a way of creating employment as well as saving bees.
■ Figure 3.6 A Conversation with My Black Son is an example of an issue-based short documentary on the New York Times Op-Docs Video Channel.
The New York Times Op-Docs Video Channel (www.nytimes.com/video/op-docs/), which premiered on the newspaper’s website in 2012, is a good place to view and analyze issue-based short documentaries. An example is Geeta Gandbhir and Blair Foster’s formally sparse but powerful 5-minute film A Conversation with My Black Son (2015). This short documentary consists entirely of parents, sitting before a black backdrop, talking about why and how they talk to their black sons about interactions with police. The comments at first address why they feel the need to have this conversation, and how they feel about it, then what they tell their children specifically. The intimacy and honesty of their accounts is disarming, and invites all parents to share a common love for their children and come to terms with a world that treats them differently based on race. The piece ends with several of the parents talking directly to camera, as if to their sons, telling them how much they love them and why. Over the end credits, the parents hold up pictures of their sons. It is the first time we see them, and seeing such small children after hearing the burden society places on them is heartbreaking (Figure 3.6).
Profile of a Person
Many short documentaries take the form of a personal profile. With the right choice of subject, this is a highly economical form because the filming is generally contained to interviews with one person and some observational footage of them doing what they do. The key is to find a person whose life will resonate beyond their specific story, touching on broad themes that have universal appeal. An example is Marie’s Dictionary (2014), a 9-minute and 30-second documentary by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee about Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Native American Wukchumni language (Figure 3.7). The film is based on interviews with Marie, her daughter, and her grandson. We see many beautiful shots of Marie working on her dictionary as she discusses her 7-year effort to create it. We then see how her grandson has begun recording her dictionary so that there will be an audio as well as a written record of the language. Observational moments showing interactions between these three characters enrich the documentary by giving us a deeper sense of who these people are, and their relationships to one another. In one scene, we see that Marie is frustrated with her daughter, who has trouble pronouncing the Wukchumni words. Later, though, we see Marie conversing with her grandson, who seems much more fluent in the language. This gives us hope that this nearly extinct language may survive after all. The film works because of the strength of its characters, but also because it speaks to important themes of cultural preservation and identity. Like most successful portrait documentaries, it touches on an issue as it presents us with a person.
■ Figure 3.7 Marie Wilcox (right) and her daughter work on the Wukchumni dictionary in Marie’s Dictionary.
Portrait of a Place
Another strategy for making a story feasible for a short documentary is to confine shooting to one place. Elizabeth Lo’s 8-minute film Hotel 22 (2015), shows us one night on the #22 bus, a 24-hour route that has attracted many homeless people displaced by the tech boom in California’s Silicon Valley (Figure 3.8). Shot in a purely observational style, with no interviews at all, the film is a slice of life that conveys a sense of what it’s like to be homeless and have to sleep on a bus. We witness “regular” passengers berating the homeless for being there, and the homeless riders asking the bus driver to turn up the heat so they won’t be cold. The structure follows one night, beginning with people waiting for the bus and ending with police waking everyone up and making them leave the bus so morning commuters can board.
Single Event Story
Just as it sounds, these short documentaries are built around a single event or occurrence. They often contain a mini dramatic arc, building to a climactic moment. An example is Last Minutes with ODEN (2009), a 6-minute documentary by Eliot Rausch (Figure 3.9). During the first minute of the film, we are introduced to Jason Wood. While seeing images of Jason carrying and riding his bike, with an emphasis on his tattooed arms, we learn that he is a former drug addict who was incarcerated for 10 years, and that he has a dog—ODEN—who has been a constant companion to Jason and his friends through many hard times. “My dog would get right next to them, and he wouldn’t leave, he was so loyal, he was so down for the guys I loved,” Wood says. “He showed me, through his example, how to love, and I loved him.” At this point, there is the introduction of the conflict: we see ODEN, and he has only three legs. The story builds as we see observational footage of Jason on the phone crying, picking his dog up from a friend’s house, and bringing him to various people to say goodbye. Through this footage, we realize that the dog is sick and will be put to sleep. The climax of the film is ODEN’s death as he is euthanized by a veterinarian. The result and ending are the aftermath, as we see Jason Wood and others crying, and then Jason biking as we hear him reflect on how ODEN’s unconditional love transformed him by teaching him to let down his guard and love people.
■ Figure 3.8 A city bus in California’s Silicon Valley has become an unofficial homeless shelter in the short documentary Hotel 22.
■ Figure 3.9 Jason Wood in Last Minutes with ODEN.
Process Film
■ Figure 3.10 The Shrimp uses the life cycle of a shrimp to tell us about an important Gulf Coast industry threatened by pollution.
Some short films focus on a process. Keith Wilson’s 15-minute The Shrimp (2009) is about shrimping on the Gulf Coast, and draws its structure from the life cycle of one shrimp (Figure 3.10). Except for a brief bit of context in the form of text cards at the beginning, which lets us know that “shrimp are an important source of food, income and culture for communities along the American South’s Atlantic Seaboard and Gulf Coast” and that “the viability of commercial shrimping is threatened by pollution, oil spills and cheaper foreign imports,” we are told very little and left to draw our own conclusions. Part of the film’s appeal, in fact, is our recognition that the story is structured to show us every phase of the food chain from catching shrimp, to cleaning, cooking, and eating it. Finally, in a humorous twist, the camera tracks across a row of houses and we hear water (and probably more) running through pipes. At a sewage treatment plant we see water being treated, and eventually returning to the spawning grounds where future shrimp will be born and the cycle will recur. Wilson’s film reminds us that attention to story structure in the preproduction phase will bear fruit all the way down the line.
■ Conclusion
In this chapter, we have tried to provide some guidance about how documentaries are commonly structured. While these ideas will likely be helpful, structure is something that emerges organically as you work. It is a dynamic process, not a static one. No quantity of organizational charts or structural containers will ever be a perfect fit for your material. This is why documentary filmmaking is exciting and challenging: you are creating the language to describe the world in a new way as you go.