June 19, 2024

How do you shape a mountain of footage into an impactful and entertaining documentary?  I’m excited to teach a new class this Saturday on Story Structure and Trailer Editing. Co-hosted with Carole Dean, President of From the Heart Productions, this class will delve into classic structural templates. For example, you’ll learn the challenges and art of adapting narrative devices to films about real life. Participants will also learn how to configure a compelling trailer in three distinct movements. Carole is offering this class to my newsletter list for free! Just join Zoom on June 22nd at 9 a.m. PT.Topic: Producer…

November 24, 2023

This holiday I’m offering something new… You can buy The Ultimate Guide to Structuring Your Documentary for $50 (formerly sold for $297.97). I’m also including for free: – My most popular seminar: “Editing the Character Driven Documentary” (do not buy from this page, just read it); – Tutorial on Trailer Editing: Seven Essential Rules; – Tutorial: Cut Until It Bleeds (how to cut down a string out or feature doc). Click here to buy The Ultimate Guide to Structuring Your Documentary for $50 and receive the other seminar and tutorials for free.  This offer comes with a 100% money-back guarantee!

September 21, 2023

Since retiring from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, I’ve continued teaching story structure at film organizations. Even today, one of my most popular exercises is a worksheet that will help you focus your documentary’s story or essay. Enjoy rethinking your own footage with this Story Focusing Exercise. You’ll get single-minded, structural guidance in 3 exercises: Exercise 1: Questions to Focus Story Concepts for Character‐Driven Documentaries Exercise 2: Defining the three acts in three sentences (for Character‐Driven Docs). Exercise 3: Crafting the Essay‐Style Doc

May 10, 2022

I hit a serious roadblock editing my own (fifth) documentary. At the time I was teaching editing at UC Berkeley’s #1-ranked documentary program–so you’d think I’d know what I was doing! But after editing my personal doc for several months in an isolation tank, I’d lost perspective. I couldn’t see a clear storyline for even one of my seven characters! I needed expert guidance; an outside assessment that I could trust. So I sought out the most talented story consultant I knew. Deborah Hoffmann (now retired) had edited the Oscar-winning “The Times of Harvey Milk”. Together we crafted a riveting film in…

May 11, 2021

My friend is a tracker and a naturalist. So she caught wind early on of a sleeper doc that went on to win the 2021 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. When we watched My Octopus Teacher last fall, I was riveted. A sliver of my cerebral cortex registered how seamlessly the film crafted character transformation over three acts. But my mammalian brain was immersed in a thrilling love affair. Afterward, I felt closer to the natural world. In December, I even planned to blog about “My Favorite Documentary Teacher of 2020”. But I chickened out. Some industry voices had…

I asked my nephew and junior editor Chris, who is becoming a masterful storyteller, to analyze the three-act structure of My Octopus Teacher, which won the 2021 Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. I’ve added a few story notes in italics to this excellent case study of the classic three act composition. Otherwise it’s all Chris! KE Story Note: The Inciting Incident is the event that gives rise to the protagonist’s goal. Chris’s Analysis:  Protagonist Craig Foster’s inciting incident was the burnout he felt after two hellish years that left him unable to work or even emotionally connect with others,…

March 4, 2021

Today in Part 2 of my story structure series, I focus on crafting the essay-style documentary. You can also download the entire Storytelling Exercise worksheet here, which I developed during my teaching days at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Film Society. Helpful in creating a film outline, these storytelling questions are as relevant as ever! Disclaimer: the exercises below are not the only way to structure an idea-driven film. But popular examples include “Food, Inc.” and “An Inconvenient Truth”. One simple way to structure an essay-style documentary is in three “parts” (which are different from “acts”). There’s the Beginning…

February 23, 2021

Today I’m sharing a few powerful story-focusing exercises developed during my teaching years at UC Berkeley’s #1-ranked documentary program. Today’s exercises (Part 1) are geared toward character-driven documentaries. Part 2 will focus on essay-style documentaries! Download the entire Story Focusing Exercise Worksheet here. Exercise 1: Key questions to focus the story. Who is the protagonist and what do they want? (The more specific and difficult the goal, the better). What is the inciting incident that kicks off the story? Is it captured in your footage, or will you recreate it? If so, how? What is the film’s central question? It’s…

January 26, 2021

Many of the rough cuts I see suffer from a slow ending, and I’ve pinpointed criteria for picking up the pace. This 27-minute video reveals the keys to editing a thrilling third act climax. It’s part 3 of a 6-module seminar, “Editing the Character-Driven Documentary”. Originally sold for $197, this San Francisco Film Society seminar was filmed in 2010.  It contains case studies from award-winning documentaries that are still relevant to storytelling today. Seminar modules are delivered as digital files that you can download for free here. This class received a number of glowing testimonials. Find three below: “This class…

November 3, 2020

We’re editing an historical documentary “We Said No! No!” that initially featured fifteen characters. At first, none of them struck me as particularly memorable. I couldn’t remember who was who. I felt kinda dumb and confused. I told director Brian Maeda that the consensus among experienced directors is that viewers cannot follow the story arcs of more than four distinct protagonists. He was open-minded, so here’s how we’re solving this problem! My editor and I identified four characters with the strongest story arcs, and relegated the rest to the B-Cast (meaning they will take up much less screen time). Next,…