Capturing reality | What it took to create my first short documentary

Last year I made my first documentary film as part of my graduate thesis project. Yes, I did this purely because it was required to graduate but it ended up being accepted into my first film festival. So not only did I get my masters degree, it ended up having a way bigger purpose than I initially thought it would. But just like my narrative short film, it came with its own set of challenges. Here’s my journey to creating my first documentary.

Finding My Story (Subject/Topic)

Unlike a narrative short film, you aren’t coming up with a story on your own. I would say for a documentary, you are finding a story and deciding what is the best way to tell it. So the story you find can be about a person or historical event. It can be about pretty much anything but it’s important that your story is something of interest to you because you have to really get a lot of footage and talk to quite a bit of people about it. For my documentary, I decided to tell the story of my community. And the best way that I felt I could tell this story was to highlight the good and bad of residing there and talking to individuals, nonprofits and businesses that were making an impact.

Pre-production

Maybe it’s possible to just wing it when it comes to filming a documentary. Me however, I couldn’t do that. I had to come up with a plan. For starters, I needed to find notable individuals in my community who were willing to be interviewed and filmed. Once I found them I had to schedule times that not only worked for me, but more importantly, them. I also had to make note of key spots and events in my community that I could film. My description of my pre-production process may seem pretty short, but there was plenty of planning ahead of time before I even picked up the camera.

Production

After having individuals and events set for my dcumentary, it was time to film. I feel it’s important to note that I did not have a big film crew with me. It was basically just me and one other person to help me lug the heavy equipment around. So, I was the sole person responsible for set up and filming. For interviews, more equipment plus signed release forms were needed. For all planned interviews, I set up 2 lights with light stands, a mic stand with a boom attachment, my rented canon c300 camera, 24 to 70 mm lens, and tripod. All interviews weren’t planned however. For interviews that I caught on the fly, I basically had the mic mounted on the camera and set on a tripod. And that was also my same quick set up for filming b-roll and capturing life and events in the community which is more than likely how you find more people that you didn’t have planned to interview. With everything you film, you want to make sure you have more than enough footage. Because with too little footage, you’re likely going back out there to get some more.

Post-Production

Now that I had gathered so much footage and I talked to some really interesting people, it was time to start postproduction. I couldn’t do it without importing and organizing my footage. I found moments from events and interviews that I just had to have for my story. I also transcribed my interviews and created a structured outline of how I wanted my documentary to flow. Then I started editing the documentary with interviews and b-roll. As I kept editing, I decided on other elements to add such as graphics and music to enhance the story. Music accompanied by a passionate storyteller is a really powerful thing when it comes to telling stories like this. For me, because I was in grad school when I did this, I got some feedback from one of my professors and adjusted the edit before I finalized the documentary. I also created a poster for my doc to promote it. And then it was time for project defenses.

At the end of the semester, I defended my project and was notified that I passed. It wasn’t perfect. There were things beyond my control that I had a hard time fixing if I could do that at all. But I did the best that I could and just took a chance on submitting it to a film festival. And in the end, it all worked out.