As a young film-maker, you won't have the budget that David Attenborough gets from the BBC - you know, the one that allows him to film penguins from a polar bear's bum for eight months.
This advice will help keep your documentary achievable and interesting at the same time.
This advice will help keep your documentary achievable and interesting at the same time.
- Always look for a local link.
- Choose a topic that is possible and accessible – and not dangerous.
- Documentaries need characters – who does the student know who has an interesting story to tell – it could be granddad.
- Go for a traditional format – a life in a day of ….. a local band, my park, my Saturday job, my dog/hamster or my garden, or be imaginative – my mobile phone.
- Holidays are the ideal times to shoot footage for a documentary even if the student is not quite sure of how the finished film will end up. But few students do even if they have access to a family video camera – nobody can make a bad documentary that has footage of surfing, or sailing or looking for blennies in rock pools, or camping or just visiting a foreign city.
- Pay particular attention to the sound and use an external microphone where you can.
- Remember that you need good interviews with interesting people and lots and lots of relevant pictures to do with what the interviews are about – in other words you need lots of cutaways, many more than you think you do at the time.
- Choose locations that are visually interesting.
- Make sure you tell a story with a beginning, middle and end – a life in a day begins in the morning and ends in the evening.
No comments:
Post a Comment