Documentary
Stuff You Need to Know
How Mockumentary Highlights Documentary Tropes
You could argue that the first films ever made were documentaries.
As early as the late 1800’s, motion picture pioneers tinkered with continuously-running photographic...
How to find your storytelling voice
“The sign of a great director is when a film’s voice comes not from the script or the protagonists, but from the filmmaker.” — Antonia Thompson, Huffington Post.
How to Respond when Your Documentary Veers Off-course
The documentary storytelling process falls broadly into two very different ways of going about it.
Shooting With Discretion
The camera captures it all with a documentary rawness, but from a distance, on a long lens and according to the director’s commentary, from...
How To Not Screw Up Your First Documentary
Producer, director and screenwriter Spike Jonze reminds the aspiring documentarian: “Doing a documentary is about discovering, being open, learning, and following curiosity.”
How to develop an idea into a finished documentary
Have you ever heard of Robert J. Flaherty? He’s known as the “father” of documentary filmmaking (“Nanook of the North,” 1922). However, documentaries didn’t...
A Profile of John Grierson, Godfather of DocCinema
The orbit of John Grierson’s legacy touches almost everything we know about documentary. The five-foot something Scotsman with an orator’s voice single-handedly birthed the...
Fair Use Limitations – Best Practices for Shooting Video
Years ago, I was on a team of shooters on a wedding reality series produced for a regional lifestyle network.
How to Choose the Right Doc Format for Your Subject
We read a lot about the proliferation of documentary styles and forms—the many different ways a director can approach the telling of a nonfiction...
What’s Your Story: Developing the Story in Documentary
Writer and filmmaker Sheila Curran’s explanation is bang on: Without a story you don’t have a doc.
In fiction films and movies, the story is...
Video Courses
Documentary Production: The Shoot
Capturing the best video and audio for your project is an important part of any documentary. It's where all your hard work pays off....
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What's New
Docuseries vs documentary: what is a docuseries?
Docuseries differs from the typical documentary. While similar, there are some distinct differences. We’ll cover what those differences are.
How to market a documentary
How do you market a documentary? It seems like a simple question to answer. You might try to build a strong social media campaign and apply to as many film festivals as possible. However, this misguided strategy is not enough to get your film...
How to make a documentary: everything you need to know
So you want to be a documentary filmmaker? Do you think you know how to make a documentary? My first tip would be to tell you don’t do it unless you have a lot of patience and drive.
Documentary filmmaking is truly a labor of...
Here’s how to conduct research for a documentary
All good documentaries need to have a solid foundation created through proper research. In this article, we will help you research for your next documentary film.
What is documentary? The genre defined
What is documentary? What qualifies as a documentary film? Let's dig deeper.
What it’s like to make a feature-length documentary
On this episode of The Videomaker Podcast we react to the new Rode VideoMic NTG, have a conversation with documentary filmmaker Brandon Vedder, and we talk about some of the leaked camera features coming to Samsung phones.
Taking video to the 70 poorest countries on earth
On this episode of the Videomaker Podcast we react to the new 16-inch MacBook Pro; have a conversation with OMPT Development Manager Andy Shoemaker; and speculate about Canon’s plans for the mirrorless market.
Cocaine Cowboys Producer Alfred Spellman talks storytelling and trust in doc...
With an explosive doc catalog that includes titles like Cocaine Cowboys, Raw Deal and Screwball, Alfred Spellman is no stranger to high stakes filmmaking.
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Cinéma Vérité Documentary
documentaries can be broken up into three types; Docudrama, Observational Documentation and Cinéma Vérité.
Russian Woodpecker director Chad Gracia talks Sundance, Chernobyl and Sex in...
"The Russian Woodpecker" (2015) would become a global cautionary tale of what happens when people lose trust in their government.
Public domain – what’s theirs is sometimes yours
When does a Copyright enter the Public Domain? We get this question all the time. We'd love to say, If published after this date...
Robert Flaherty: Defining the “Flaherty Way”
When Robert Flaherty (1884-1951) released his first and most famous film "Nanook of the North" in 1922, the term ‘documentary’ had not yet been minted.
How to win a grant: An inside look at the Gucci...
As an indie doc filmmaker, getting to the final stages of completing your film can be grueling. Ordinarily, you've spent months or years on...
Unscripted storytelling: Finding the story in documentary
Much of documentary storytelling is about capturing footage of unfolding actuality — unscripted situations, events and natural interactions.
