Documentary Tips

SHOOTING ACTUALITY FOR DOCUMENTARY AND REALITY VIDEO

By Peter Biesterfeld

VISUAL STORYTELLING

If you’re thinking about making the transition from volunteer videographer to freelance documentary shooter, your marketability will go up steeply if you know how to capture actuality.

Actuality is unscripted footage, recorded reality where we see and hear real people, not actors, doing real things. Actuality is action and interaction unfolding before the camera, without rehearsal and without a script - TV news or documentary footage for example, of protestors marching on city hall in a political story, or video of a music teacher rehearsing a school band in a story about education.

You’ve probably already shot some actuality - at a family event, of your friends skateboarding, playing soccer, or at a birthday, maybe even a wedding. If you haven’t had much experience shooting reality-based video, your field tapes probably contain random shots, a lot of unmotivated zooms and pans, way too many wide shots and hardly any close-ups. It looks like reality alright, but where’s the story?

On a movie set, dialogue, action and camera setups are precisely planned, controlled and repeated until all the visual content of a scene fits perfectly into every frame. On the screen, the result is a variety of views of the action in the scene. Wide shots, medium shots and close-ups blend together perfectly to tell a visual story that unfolds logically.

Just like in the movies, actuality-based video is mostly accomplished with single camera shooting. The objectives are also the same: to give audiences a variety of views of an action and to shoot that action for storytelling.

Seasoned documentary and reality shooters know how to capture unscripted action with cinematic results, even when they have little or no control over the action. With practice you will be shooting unscripted action like the pros.

The key is knowing how to shoot for visual storytelling.

VISUAL STORYTELLING IS SEQUENCING

At the heart of visual storytelling in documentaries and reality-based video is sequencing.

A sequence is a series of connected images that, when edited together, makes a single visual story. The story should unfold logically or chronologically with a beginning, middle and end. For example, when shooting an artist at work, get a shot of her setting up and getting started. Also shoot a middle in which action appears to be advancing-visuals of the artwork progressing. And don’t forget to shoot an ending - footage of the artist finishing up and a shot of the completed artwork that says, “This sequence is over”.

To illustrate sequencing, let’s consider how to shoot an opening to that education item where we have the music teacher arriving at the school for a band practice.

The way not to shoot it is to try and cover it all in one shot and from one camera position. Inexperienced shooters might simply frame up a wide shot of the school parking lot, have the teacher drive up and get out of the car, zoom in to get closer and pan with her until she’s inside the school.

The proper way to shoot any unscripted action is to shoot for visual storytelling. That means shoot a sequence:

1. Wide Establishing Shot: (static; no camera move) Empty school parking lot, car enters frame and parks. Cut.
2. Medium Shot: (Don’t zoom! Move the camera to a new position.) Teacher gets out of the car, collects her briefcase and music books, locks the car and exits frame. Cut.
3. Medium Tracking Shot: (handheld and zoomed out) Teacher enters frame and the camera follows her briefcase or feet as she walks towards the school. She exits frame. Cut.
4. Medium Close Up: (head and shoulders) Teacher opens school door and enters. She exits frame. The door closes behind her. Cut.

Notice that in sequencing, whenever possible, we let the subject (or object) enter and exit the frame. This gives us flexibility in editing. For example, after a subject has left the frame, we can cut to almost anything without much worry about continuity. When we edit those four shots together the result on the screen will be seamless and will appear as one continuous action that unfolds logically.

(continued: Reality Shooters are Storytellers #2)

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Tags: documentary, factual television production, instructional, reality television, screen production, shooting actuality, television journalism, video editing, video journalism, video production, videography, visual storytelling

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Shooting, documentary, sequencing, videography, visual storytelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.