Making a documentary - Part II

In last month's documentary filmmaking workshop, we looked at how to plan your documentary project. This month, we're going to look at shooting factual programmes on location. If you've ever come back from a day's filming and discovered your footage was difficult to edit in a way that made sense, take a look at these tips.

Events

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If you're documenting something that is actually happening in front of you, whether it's a scheduled, planned event or a spontaneous one, you'll never going to know quite what's going to happen next.. This means you need to plan. You need to know as much as you can about what you expect to happen, and how you're going to film it deciding ahead of time where you'll place yourself and your camera, and listing the shots and cutaways you need to get.

This is all the more important when things change suddenly and you need to rethink on your feet because if you know what you absolutely need to get, you can react much more quickly when unexpected events unfold.

Always try to get a mixture of wide shots which take in the whole scene and close up details. Keep camera movement to a minimum and, if you can, shoot for 10 seconds or more before and after each camera movement to give yourself more options in the edit. Finally, make each shot last for at least 10 seconds. A 2 second cut-away is rarely of any use.

Interviews

In an interview, you have some control over your shooting environment, so use it. Try to get the lighting right, the shot lined up, and any outside noise (especially music) excluded. However you frame the shot, place the subject's eyes, around a third of the way from the top of the screen, and get them to focus on the interviewer, rather the camera. Ask open questions that they can't answer with a simple yes or no, and always keep a note of a couple of different ways you can ask each important question so you've got a couple of differently phrased answers on tape.

Cut aways

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Whatever you're filming, you'll obviously want to focus on the main action. However, ensure that you also pick up as many cutaway shots as you possibly can. Cutaways are invaluable during the edit to put the rest of your action in context and to allow you to cut it in the way you want to. For example, a scene at a sporting event will be far easier to edit if you have a few shots of the crowd to cut in. Likewise, a few shots of an interviewee's hand gestures, or even the room they're sitting in will make your interview much easier to cut.

Sound

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If there's one thing that makes professional video productions stand out from amateur ones, it's the quality of the sound. If you can't hear what an interviewee is saying then it doesn't matter how interesting they are or what they've got to say. On the other hand, if the sound quality is clear and sharp, you can get away with shaky camerawork, lack of focus, or badly framed shots.

Sound tends to be the last thing on your mind when you're recording, but in reality, it should be right at the forefront at all times. Even if you've got a fairly good quality camera, its microphone is likely to be an all-purpose one designed to pick up sound from all around it. When you want to focus on one particular sound - for example, an interviewee's voice -this isn't good.

For interviews, you can solve the sound problem quickly and cheaply. A tie clip (or lapel) microphone, costs about £20 and plugs straight into the microphone socket of your camcorder. This picks up noise from only about a foot around it, so you can record by a busy road, and only pick up minimal traffic noise.

For a good all-purpose microphone, try a long thin "shot gun" microphone attached to the shoe connector on top of your camcorder. These are more expensive, but are designed to record sound only from directly in front of them.

Always film, wearing a set of headphones plugged into your camcorder, so that you can monitor the sound and don't be afraid to reshoot if it doesn't come out right.

Next month

Next month, we'll be cutting together our footage to tell a compelling factual story.