Low Budgets and High Hopes

For trivia buffs (and moving picture historians) the unofficial birthday of the motion picture is considered to be December 28, 1895. On that date, people paid to watch a movie for the first time. And what was the audience watching as they sat in the basement of a Paris café? They saw a series of images not much longer than a minute each that included a group of workers walking out of a factory, a train coming into a station, and a baby eating. They were watching documentaries.

Fast-forward 102 years and you'll find audiences just as eager to watch real life on a screen. Some television documentaries have become major events--witness The Civil War on PBS--and their producers have become household names. Although you may not aspire to national fame, every time you turn your camcorder on to record real events you're making a documentary. In this article, we'll explain how anyone who captures real life on videotapes can benefit by following the fundamentals of documentary videomaking.

Documentary videos come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. On one end of the spectrum you'll find the tightly scripted and controlled project in which practically every word of voice-over and every image is determined before shooting. We call this type of documentary Cinema Verite. In these cases, a producer has done extensive research and knows the material extremely well before shooting begins. The videographer can set out the various elements such as photographs and narration and get a strong sense of how the piece flows before he even turns the camera on. Ken Burns' work on the history of baseball falls into this category.

At the other extreme, you'll find projects where the videographer has taken a general concept or idea and then collected hours of footage which are whittled down to the final length in the editing process. This approach to documentaries is referred to as Direct Cinema.

One practitioner of this technique is Frederick Wiseman. He began his career in the '60s by focusing his interest on institutions ranging from high schools to meat packing plants. He sometimes spent nine months shooting in a particular place, then editing the footage to capture the feel of real life. Wiseman never used narration or any sort of outside commentary. He let the images speak for themselves. His latest film, Public Housing, takes place in a public housing development in Chicago.

No matter what style of project you choose, making documentaries on a low or non-existent budget brings forth a unique set of challenges. It's foolish to say money doesn't matter but there is much a videographer can do to compensate for the lack of big bucks. You don't need a large budget to develop a set of skills and tools involving pre-production planning, research and interviewing.

Anybody who's ever taken a creative writing class can understand the importance of starting off with an idea that's close to home. In other words, know your subject. It's money in the bank to a documentary videographer. If you choose a subject you're connected with, you'll have a much better chance of finding those magic moments that someone else might pass over.

I earned a commission to direct a documentary celebrating the 100^th anniversary of a synagogue in Seattle because I was familiar with the historic material and the photographic record of the period. Members of the synagogue wrote the first draft of the script. Although they did an excellent job--all the technical information was there in terms of dates and events--I felt the project was incomplete. I scheduled a series of interviews with long-time members of the congregation. As they talked about their childhood memories and their personal connection with the synagogue, the factual information no longer seemed so dry and the piece sprang to life. The stories they told gave the piece its own heart and personality. I knew where to find this integral component of the documentary because I was close to the subject matter.