Defining what I’m shooting while I’m shooting is always one of the key challenges of documentary-style filmmaking. It’s not that I don’t plan for my shoots, it’s just that the reality of a given situation generally presents itself as different from even the most educated guesses. At some point, the planning has to stop and the first few shots have to begin. It’s that point at which what needs to be done diverges from what was anticipated.

Out on location the last two days, I have been shooting a set of small group interviews. As with many of the projects I work on, I am bound by secrecy (and NDAs and lawyers) to not say too much… so I can’t always tell you everything about what I’m working on. But, I can tell you that over the years I have developed a few techniques for getting the most out of the first few shots of a project.

Look For Patterns

You need to go into your shoot with some idea of what you intend to capture, but it’s critical that you look for patterns in the answers that will help guide your eventual edit. Without some degree of consistency in the footage you capture you’ll never be able to tell a complete story. This doesn’t mean you should bombard your subjects with slanted questions that will lead to the answers you want, but rather you should look for patterns in the answers that might help guide the story you tell to more accurately reflect the stories they tell.

Ask Extra Questions

Once documentary subjects are gone, they are sometimes gone forever. It’s important to start with a list of questions that you will ask of each subject, but for the first few interviews you should try to add more questions and followups than you normally would. Since the patterns you notice during the first few interviews will help guide the questions you ask later on, it’s important to ask extra questions at the beginning in order to cover as much material as possible. In addition to helping you refine your story more quickly, it also covers you with lots of extra footage so that you’ll have a better chance of ending up with footage from those early interviews that will be relevant to your final edit.

Make Options, not Choices

Whenever I shoot scripted videos (especially talking heads for the internet) I try to shoot the first few bits twice; once at the beginning of the day, and again at the end after the actor has found their character and all the kinks have been worked out. For documentary pieces, though, this isn’t generally possible. Real-world subjects come and go and rarely stick around for second takes. The solution is to shoot lots of extra coverage at the beginning of the project.

Cost permitting, shoot interviews from multiple angles, with multiple cameras. Time permitting, stage the first few interviews twice in slightly different locations or with different screen directions. If I’m interviewing two or more people at once I’ll ask one-on-one questions followed by “group sessions” where I try to get the subjects to talk to each other rather than to me. The more variety you get, the more options you’ll have and the fewer hard choices you’ll have to make.

Anti-Coverage

Perhaps the most important tip for eventually staying on schedule is to figure out what not to shoot. As you discover content patterns you’ll also be able to create the coveted what-not-to-shoot-list. Learning what types of questions, shots and B-Roll to avoid will help you further refine your primary story. Coverage is important, but over-coverage can be time consuming and expensive, leading to more time spent shooting and much more time in editing.

These techniques certainly don’t constitute a complete documentary how-to, but they do help get me through those first few critical shots of a project, when concepts are still being solidified and reality is setting in. Remember that when it comes down to the actual process of shooting it’s often more useful to have a general concept than a concrete plan. You can’t usually recreate the first few shots of a project, and you also can’t afford to miss important content, especially if one of those early subjects turns out to be critical to the story.

– Mike