You’ve finished all your prep and planning for your documentary.
Now it’s time to shoot!

This is the most fun part of the process, but it’s also the most demanding. Don’t let all your hard work go to pieces when you pick up a camera. Videomaker is here to help you through every step of the process with Documentary Production: The Shoot, your essential guide to the practical nuts-and-bolts of shooting out in the field. From setting up your microphone to conducting an interview, there are plenty of considerations to keep in mind as you’re shooting your video. This DVD will help you master them all.

Learn about:

• Getting Location Access – A documentary is more than just talking heads; you need to shoot some on-location footage to really bring your audience into the story. But be prepared for trouble if you accidentally find yourself trespassing on private property during your shoot! We’ll teach you exactly how to avoid sticky situations by convincing the right people to give you the right permission ahead of time. Learn the different kinds of location access and what you’ll need to do to deal with each. Understanding these key differences and getting property owners on board with your shoot is a great way to get your documentary off on the right foot.
• Preparing for Interviews – Interviews are the lifeblood of a good documentary, but getting a good interview response starts long before your interviewee even enters the room. Learn how to prepare the interview room so that it looks great on video and helps to communicate the same themes you want to capture from your interviewee’s words. Find out what legal forms you need to have prepared in advance so that you can make the full use of your interviewee’s candid words. Don’t start interviewing before you watch this segment!
• Directing Interviews – Seasoned reporters always seem to get such great quotes and so can you. Getting good interview footage is all about asking the right questions. One misstep could set the wrong tone for the whole interview or, worse, get your subject to clam up and refuse to talk openly. We’ll show you how to lead an interview so that your subject feels so at-ease that he’ll want to talk for hours. Get interviewees to share all the intimate thoughts and shocking revelations that make for a riveting documentary!
• Capturing B-Roll – Interviews fill your documentary with facts and stories, but where’s the action? Your audience is going to demand a break from the parade of talking heads to keep them interested, and that’s where B-Roll comes in. We’ll show you how to create attention-grabbing action footage that compliments your documentary’s theme and keeps your audience hooked. Find out how you can catch great footage of live events to add spice and interest to your movie.
• Common Lighting Setups – A lot of fledgling documentarians take their commitment to complete authenticity too far, thinking that it should extend even to the lighting. Using only ambient light sources, they think, adds to the cinema verite feel; that’s the way it really happened! But poor lighting has more potential to ruin a documentary than improve it. Keep your documentary looking good with these easy-to-understand lighting arrangements preferred by the professionals. We’ll show you a few good lighting tricks that will make your doc rock.
• Field Sound Recording – It’s every documentarian’s worst nightmare: To finish a great interview only to discover that the sound’s unusable due to mic problems. Sound problems can turn any documentary shoot into an absolute grind, but we’ll show you easy ways to avoid these snarly snags. You’ll learn the proper way to use microphones, how to monitor sound and how to use field mixers.

Bonus Material
We want you to have the absolute best video knowledge, so we weren’t satisfied with just the video segments. That’s why we also include, as a SPECIAL BONUS FEATURE, 5 of our best-selling eDocs, each designed with the budding documentarian in mind. These files are jam-packed with extra information that we couldn’t fit into the videos, but we still want you to have.

• The Divine Proportion – What’s the best way to frame your subject? Believe it or not, mankind has asked this question since the beginning. The answer is closer than you think…
• Fix it in Post – Sometimes something goes wrong in shooting, but you don’t notice until it’s too late. Luckily, you can always fix it in post. We’ll show you some post fixes so slick that your audience will never suspect there was a problem to begin with.
• Moving Performances – Your star may be a great speaker but that’s only half of the equation. Video is a visual medium and your audience craves movement. We’ll show you how to direct talent to keep them moving smoothly and naturally.
• Time Control – How can you indicate to your audience that a year has passed in your video while only a minute of real time has passed? We’ll show you some tricks to bend time to your will.
• Videography Essentials – Don’t get caught unprepared in the field! This handy Videography Tip Sheet is just the thing to have in your pocket when you’re working on your latest video project and need a quick reference!

It’s easy to plan out every aspect of your video shoot in advance but still get tripped up by some little detail when it comes time to really go through with it.

Documentary Production: The Shoot is your one-stop guide to all the challenges faced by the conscientious videographer on every shooting expedition. Use this DVD to help keep yourself on track, to make sure that you don’t lose all your hard work because of some little last minute misstep that you could easily have avoided. You’ll feel a lot more secure in your abilities when you have a firm grasp on how to handle yourself at the time of the actual shoot. Buy Documentary Production: The Shoot today!