Hey I'm Stuart C. Paul and this is a writer's guide to shooting a documentary. This is going to be me taking you through
what I learned while shooting my own documentary the thing is when you
are making your own movie you do have to be your own boss and that means you're
the one making decisions you need to look at yourself not just as an artist
but as a manager of your own time you have a certain rhythm to your life as a
writer and that's gonna go away it's the same with a narrative film but
especially if you are a one man or a one-woman show and you're shooting this
and you're running sound and you're producing that means that every night
you are charging your batteries you are offloading footage from your SD card you
are formatting your cards your life will be thrown into a certain amount of chaos
so the first point I want to make is that your skills as a writer are your
most valuable asset it's your ability to observe the world around you
to imagine and the tools you have with structure your understanding of
character and conflict these are the things that not only make a good
screenplay they are also crucial to making a good
documentary I saw the story of project unfolding in front of my eyes I go to
the yoga studio where one of the documentary subjects runs her movement
therapy classes and so I saw when there was a drunk driver that crashed into her
building I saw them rebuilding and her struggles
trying to put her her world back together and I was there the morning
that she found this piece of street art on her building and fell in love with it
and heard as she struggled to get in touch with the artist and heard the
story when they finally met and connected and had this amazing creative
collaboration that led to their idea to make street art together and so that
triggered the writer in me I saw the scene in front of me you know of this 70
year old woman and this 20 year old artist going out into the streets of Los
Angeles together and you know that image that contains the story was what drove
me to say hey I think there's a story here I think there's a documentary can I
shoot it they didn't know how they were going to
meld their art forms her movement in history art to make something new and I
knew that that process was going to be a large part of the structure and so I
basically after our first meeting went home and I mapped out the three-act
structure I knew that we would have the status quo of each of their worlds the
inciting incident the act one of them coming together and their goal being how
do we combine our art forms to make street art in addition I knew that ink
SEP was going to be going back to Vietnam for the first time since he was
10 years old that's something that we didn't know what was going to happen
there but I expected that whatever it was would be probably a turning point
for the story so when he went to Vietnam I had him shoot footage so that whatever
inspired him on that journey could become part of the documentary when he
came back the end of Act two I always expect it to be the kind of final night
before they go out into the streets and the climax of the movie being them
putting up their art for the first time together and you know seeing this
journey fulfilled it turned out though that was only the middle of the movie
the story kept going generally speaking you know for writing a screenplay you
know where it's going to end sometimes the characters and the story surprises
you but with a documentary you hope that the documentary then takes on its own
life and the story begins going to new places and that you are just trying to
catch up when the movie took on a life of its own
that's when things got interesting Linda an ink SAP story it began to spread out
from the streets they garnered the attention of the LA Times there is a big
mural that they are in talks to put up they've even been accepted to this
exhibition in Budapest accepts parents were unaware that he was a street artist
and so a lot of what he does in his art is tell his family's story because they
are refugees from Vietnam and yet he sort of has this separation from his
culture that he's working through in his art and him coming out to his family as
his true authentic self became part of the movie so there are
discoveries that happen along the way and as it gets bigger you see new
conflicts and again that's where your writer brain kicks in
when you're writing you always want your characters to be authentic you don't
want the hand of the writer telling them what to do you want the truth of their
voices and your actions to just flow through you and for them to tell you
what happens the same thing happens with a documentary sometimes you need to
reshoot things or you want things shot a certain way and that's fine and it's
part of the process but your key should always be to try and capture something
authentic authenticity is why we watch documentaries it's what we're looking
for there's times when it seems like there's
nothing happening and you want to turn off the camera and sometimes that's fine
if you need to you know save your SD card if you're saving battery life but a
lot of times the most authentic moments aren't the ones that you're planning for
or they just happen like when Linda and ink SEP were driving around looking for
places to put up their street art and they were driving past the Beverly
Center and Linda looks out the window and she says there used to be a kitty
park there you could you could ride ponies there
and that was just to me that was just a beautiful authentic moment that came
from this woman who has been alive for so many years who has seen the city
change and is relating that part of her story to inks app into the audience
one of those crucial parts of directing a documentary is working with your
documentary subjects communication is the absolute key as our boundaries you
need to be clear about what those boundaries are with your subjects what
they're comfortable with what they're not you may not know it first but you
will find out it's important to know when to turn off the camera and when to
fight to leave it on sometimes your documentary subjects will ask you to
turn off the camera and most of the time that's the right thing to do you should
respect their wishes and do so sometimes you may want to say are you sure that's
necessary are you okay with me actually continuing to film this I think it's
important because sometimes their instinct will be to avoid showing
conflict on film and if it's conflict that doesn't need to be there for the
movie that isn't important that shouldn't be filmed and then respect
that but if it is part of the story and it's part of what is changing in their
world then you should voice that and let them
know I think this is important I think it's worth filming
I'm gonna get into a few technical tips I picked up along the way first off if
you're shooting something you know know your lenses understand photography I
highly recommend taking photography class and even if there's something that
doesn't seem like it would be applicable like outdoor portraits or fashion
lighting you will definitely learn something that will be useful as long as
you can read your histogram know your ISO you know know your f-stops how fast
your lens is you'll be in good shape hold your shot when I went back and
looked at the footage from the first thing that I shot on the dock I was
astounded at just how often I was just moving the camera around once you find
your composition stick with it go there count to 10 in your head and let the
action play another thing to keep in mind is practicality you want to be able
to keep your rig light and mobile and have only what you need at the beginning
of the shoot like I was rigged that was like I had my Shogun recorder I had my
zoom recorder I had my shotgun mic I had my LED light and I could barely hold
this thing steady it's not going to be good footage if you're shooting 10-bit
but the footage is shaking all over the place
strip it down to the bare essentials and just get what you need I like to run
sound through an XLR adapter on top of my camera that way I can get sound from
a shotgun mic and a body Michael Ave that way I have two options for sound
when Linda and Inkscape were out on the streets I would have them both miked up
and so I would run their labs to a zoom recorder that I just kept recording at
all times and put in a pouch around my waist and then I had my camera running
with a boom on top for camera sound and then you can sync them up later in post
so many cameras today are so powerful and capable of getting good footage
unless your shoot has a specific need to upgrade
I would start with the camera that you have
especially when you know if something is coming up that is important or that
feels like it's out of your comfort zone it's important to find someone to help
you and you may have a bigger Network than you know for instance there were a
number of shoot days where something big was going down and I knew I needed a
real DP to help me one was the first time that Linda and ink SAP met to
collaborate on movement and sketching to figure out the designs for the art I
knew I wanted to shoot it on a gimbal so that it would be super smooth and sort
of reflect the fluidity of Linda's movement in her world but I wasn't
comfortable using the gimbal so I called my friend Pavel who shot The Lord of
Catan my last movie and he shot red eteri last year he's an amazing
cinematographer and I gave him the gimbal and knew that in his hands the
thing would sing and all I had to worry about was following along and try trying
not to get the boom in the shot other friends also pitched in my friend John
ran b cam for me a number of times and you may feel weird reaching out to
people your friends and colleagues asking them to help for little or no
money but if you're passionate about your project and you can express that
passion to them they will want to help you
think ten steps ahead to the edit when you are shooting and you were just
trying to get focus and composition and good sound but it's important to
remember to get your coverage to get your wide shots to get your close-ups
and to stay focused on whatever the core of the scene is in the end you are going
to need all those pieces to make the final film there were times where I was
shooting except in his studio and I was focused on his process so a lot of the
shots were just of close-ups and inserts on the art but during this he was also
talking to me and so it's good that I got his audio and I could put b-roll
over it but it would have been better if I spent a little more time on his face
so that I could get that personal connection to the things he was saying
you are going to be dealing with way more footage than you have dealt with
before even if you shot a narrative film and so organizing your footage is super
important I had a friend run down for me his
procedure and it's works pretty well for me when you import your footage just go
in and change the file names and rename them with a prefix like a zero one for
that day's import a zero two for the next day's import B 0 1 for B cam etc if
you want to get really fancy add in the date but that will give you unique file
names and will keep things really organized and you will make your editor
very happy later your editor aren't you saying oh well I was gonna
edit this myself I thought maybe that's what I was going to do and then I sat
down and I looked at this 75 hours of footage I had and I was like no I need
someone who has done this before who has this kind of brain who has a fresh set
of eyes to help me tackle this marketing is one of the hardest things
at some point you're going to need to raise money for us we're running a
Kickstarter and timing is crucially important your network is important
planning is important communicating with all the other people on your team who
are going to be helping you spread the word is big there's social media that
hellscape when we were planning to launch the Kickstarter I knew that we
were going to have this LA Times article coming and for me I thought okay we will
launch our Kickstarter at such a time that the LA Times article drops in the
middle of the campaign and we'll get a big surge and that's how we're gonna
make our goal and then the LA Times article dropped earlier than I expected
I had set in my mind this narrative this sequence of events and then when the LA
Times article dropped early that changed and my adaptation was okay let's launch
faster let's use that momentum let's just keep going
essentially it was the same plan whereas perhaps what I should have done is say
let's step back let's reassess the new playing field but here I am beating the
drum you know doing everything I can to get the word out to tell people about
this story and that's why I'm here on film courage telling you about what I've
learned probably the biggest advice I have is
just to trust your gut and trust your instincts the only times that I feel
like I really made a mistake where when I didn't follow my gut feeling so as
writers we get in our heads we get lost we overthink things and so if you're
feeling something pay attention to that because your body is trying to tell you
something and when you're shooting a documentary it's a more visceral
experience than just sitting and writing and so you need to be attuned to all of
your senses and your instincts are a huge part of that
remember to write just a little bit will go a long way but if that's what you're
best at in the world it'll help you when you're doing things that you're less
comfortable with and it'll just keep you grounded other than that I would say
have fun you are making it happen you're taking a risk you're picking up a camera
you're going out and making a movie you don't know what's gonna happen you don't
know how it's gonna turn out and it's exciting so that's something to be proud
of because it takes you know it takes some cojones to go do that
so enjoy yourself