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Story Structure
Lessons For Making A Personal Documentary
July 17, 2019
Personal documentaries can be powerful, and especially meaningful to the filmmakers themselves. But there are often four big hurdles to overcome. The first challenge directors face is gaining perspective because the material is, understandably, close to home. If that’s you, it helps to refer to yourself in the third person when conceiving the film. When talking with colleagues, you might even use the terms “Filmmaker John (fill in your name)” vs. “Character John” to help keep perspective. Second, directors frequently have trouble seeing their own story arc. This is different than the material being too close to home. I’ve learned…
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Film Conversations To Reveal Character
July 11, 2019
Recently I taught graduate students at Doc Nomads (an innovative European film program). The assignment was to make a short doc focusing on a connection. Filming one person is easy, but filming two people engaging with one another, while requiring more set-up, is an excellent way to reveal character and advance the plot. For example, one student was making a film about a shy man who was also blind. He wanted to learn to scuba dive. I recommended the filmmaker focus on the connection between the protagonist and his scuba coach. This turned out to be more fruitful than filming…
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Documentary Seminar Sale
July 5, 2019
Happy Independence Day to our American readers! To celebrate, I’m offering 50-70% off on our documentary seminars for the next 24 hours. Learn how to structure character-driven and other types of documentary films with dramatic devices that keep viewers engaged!
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Finding The Story’s Micro-Manifestation
March 15, 2019
I recently did a pre-production story consultation with Katie Teague, an award-winning director with whom I’ve worked before. She came up with a brilliant new term that many directors will find helpful when confronting the most important question about a narrative arc: “What does the protagonist want?” For some documentaries the answer is obvious. In Free Solo, Alex Honnold wants to be the first person to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes or safety gear. In Man on Wire, Philippe Petit wants to walk a high-wire between the Twin Towers. And in HBO’s Fifty Children, a film we helped structure,…
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Editor Available + Tips on Personal Documentaries
February 12, 2019
First a little business news, then some tips! We’re currently working on four documentaries, and one will wrap in two weeks. Email me if you need an experienced editor soon! Of the four, three films came to us at Assembly or Rough Cut stage, requiring 4-9 weeks of editing rather than our usual 10-week Accelerated Post schedule. I mention this because it’s one way for directors to save money. And now…since some of the films are personal docs, I’m passing on two important tips for directors who bravely put themselves in front of the camera. First, show your face as…
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Documentaries Are Not Encyclopedias
January 6, 2019
If you haven’t yet seen the recently released Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, check it out! Directed by my former graduate student Alexis Bloom, this biography of the founder of Fox News exemplifies a powerful storytelling principle. Bloom and her producer Alex Gibney had to decide which events in Ailes’s life were important to include and which juicy stories could be cut. Check out the Build series interview in which Bloom and Gibney discuss making the film. At 29:20, a member of the audience asks, “How did you choose specifically which moments to specifically focus on?” Bloom…
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The Kid’s Quest in Biographical Documentaries
May 15, 2018
What’s the best way to tell the story of a famous person? Sometimes, it’s through the kids. Offspring not only have great access to letters and memories, they are often driven to understand the identity of an illustrious, absent parent. If you make the conceit of your documentary a grown child’s investigation into the famous parent they never knew, you have a time-tested, legitimate arc. But this quest must be subsumed to the life arc of the famous parent. This approach worked well for the son of Louis Kahn in My Architect, the son of cinematographer Haskell Wexler in Tell…
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What Makes a Film Scene Bathetic?
May 10, 2018
Two days ago I sent out a newsletter about crying scenes with this misquote: “It really can just tip over into completely pathetic material.” But “pathetic” was a misspelling of “bathetic”. My apologies to Director Marcus Lindeen, whom I quoted from Filmmaker Magazine. And thanks to filmmaker Ben Flanigan, who prompted this distinction. He says that these days, “pathetic” usually means “so miserable as to be ridiculous.” By contrast, the dictionary defines “bathetic” as “producing an unintentional effect of anticlimax”. And it’s not only crying scenes that can lead to an unintended lapse in mood. Bathos can result when a…
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Tips for Editing A Documentary Trailer
May 1, 2018
Happy May! Two quick announcements before we get to editing trailers: First, Chicken and Egg Pictures’ Open Call for their 2019 Accelerator Lab is May 3rd. Second, we have two talented editors coming available mid-May. One cut an award-winning film for PBS, and the other edited a documentary that won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Back to trailer tips! Let’s start by looking at an entertaining example. We recently cut a crowdfunding trailer for filmmaker Anne Taiz about the No Kill Movement. Check out the shot placement, pacing, cute animals, and use of music and sound bursts to create…
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