Documentary Tips

by Peter Biesterfeld

SHOOTING ACTUALITY

Research and logistical planning are critical in documentary/reality shooting, but once you arrive on location, actuality has a life of its own. Don’t just bring back random shots. Watch what’s going on for a while before you start shooting and visualize how shots can be cut together to make sequences out of the unscripted action unfolding in front of you. Don’t forget, actuality is as much about sound as it is images. Have your audio strategy figured out.

Let’s continue to shoot that education story featuring our music teacher. The school principal has given you permission to shoot during the teacher’s classroom time and you have forty precious minutes to tell a visual story. What do you do?

• Arrive early to talk to the teacher about what’s going to happen, when and where.
• Scribble it all down or make a mental shot list.
• Put a wireless microphone on the main character, the teacher.
• Beginning: Go handheld and shoot actuality of students arriving. Shoot details of students unpacking and assembling their instruments. Shoot student-teacher interactions. Be sure to get a sound bite of the teacher bringing the group to order. Be on a tripod to shoot her introductory remarks. Shoot an establishing shot of the classroom. This orients the audience and establishes the physical relationship between students and teacher. Shoot lots of close-ups.
• Middle: Shoot lots of close-ups of faces, instruments and sheet music. Shoot the teacher’s instructions (the more student-teacher interaction the better). Shoot listening shots of students. Shoot over the teacher’s shoulder towards the class. Shoot a reverse, a shot through the students’ shoulders towards the teacher. Shoot a variety of shot sizes (wide, medium, close). Shoot long takes to record complete musical passages.
• End: Be sure to shoot a sound-up of the teacher’s feedback and closing remarks. Shoot details of students packing up their instruments. Shoot student-teacher goodbyes. Shoot teacher packing up and leaving the room.
• You’ve already shot the teacher’s arrival at the school for an opening. Don’t forget to shoot other exteriors of the school before you wrap.

Professional reality shooters bring years of experience to shooting actuality. To them visual storytelling and sequencing conventions are second nature. Here’s a complimentary toolbox of reality shooting practices that you should take into the field next time you’re shooting actuality.

ACTUALITY TOOLBOX

Screen Direction
• Keep screen direction (the direction people are looking and moving) consistent from one shot to the next. For example, if you shoot the teacher exiting frame right in one shot, shoot her entering frame left in the next. Otherwise it will look like she’s bumping into herself when you cut the two shots together.
Camera Moves
• Inexperienced videographers are very fond of “playing the trombone.” That’s the way my college film teacher put it when he suffered through students’ actuality footage where the shooter insisted on zooming in and out. The camera never settled and the footage was random, often shot from only one camera position.
• Stay away from unmotivated zooms and pans. Camera moves for no reason take up a lot of screen time and they are difficult to edit out of.
• One good reason for zooming in is because you can’t get close to the action.
• Another good reason for a camera move is to reveal information. Panning across the artist’s table to reveal her tools is a motivated move; so is starting on a close up detail of the artwork, then zooming out to reveal the completed work.
• If you must use a camera move, plan it. Hold your shot at the beginning of a zoom or pan, make the move … not too fast, not too slow. Then, at the end of the move, hold the shot for at least five seconds before you cut.
Shot Length
• Optimally, hold all your shots at least ten seconds so the editor has enough material to work with.
• Shots shorter than five seconds go by too fast for the audience to make out what’s on the screen.
• Roll the camera until an action completes. For example, don’t stop shooting before the teacher enters the school. Hold the shot until she’s inside and the door has closed behind her.
• When you’re shooting, listen to what people are saying. Don’t stop shooting in the middle of a comment. Shoot until you’ve captured complete sound bites.
Camera Position
• If you have permission to move around at a Town Hall meeting or at a conference, there is no reason not to come back with a variety of solid, static footage. Shoot for a variety of shot sizes, from close-ups of faces listening and hands writing to establishing and medium two-shots (two people).
Audio
• Without sound you don’t have actuality. You just have lip flap. Pay attention to audio. Have audio figured out for everything you shoot. Spend decent money on sound.
• Wear headphones.
Tripod or Handheld?
• Use a tripod for shooting close-ups on a long lens (zoomed in).
• When shooting handheld, for a stable image shoot on a wide/short lens (zoomed out).
Shooting Events
• Shoot as unobtrusively as possible, but don’t stay rooted in one camera position.
• Shoot a variety of shot sizes.
• Shoot lots of close ups.
• Shoot plenty of cutaways. Cutaways are shots away from the main action. If the main action is a conversation, shoot listening shots and reaction shots of people who are not talking. Cutaways allow the editor to cut the conversation (or any action) to appropriate length.
• When shooting music performances, hold your shots for long takes to record entire passages of music. Then move in for cutaways and close ups of musicians, instruments and spectators.
Story Structure
• Take advantage of ready-made story structures and chronologies in events. For example, weekend workshops and conferences have built in beginnings, middles and ends.
• Use the repetitive nature of activities to your storytelling advantage. For example, when shooting a baseball game, a pool game or any industrial process, you know the action is going to come around again. You can shoot a ball player in his three at-bats with different shot sizes and from different camera angles every time he comes to bat. Cut the material together and it will look like one outing at the plate.
Think Storytelling
• Whether the action is restoring a heritage property, building a boat, or publishing a newspaper, think storytelling for everything you shoot.
• When recording the before and after of any process or project, shoot for storytelling.

HAPPY STORYTELLING

Reality stories and documentaries are carefully focused and planned. But no matter how detailed the planning, once unscripted action unfolds before the camera, reality shooters must rely on experience and visual storytelling instincts to capture it effectively.

With experience, you too will become a fluent visual storyteller who can shoot reality footage that you can cut together as seamlessly as any scripted material in a fiction film.

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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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