Documentary Filmmaking 101 - Finding a Story

Photo by @jakobowens1 on Unsplash

I recently had an opportunity to talk to three separate groups of high school students about documentary filmmaking. I started each session by asking the same question: What is it that you struggle with the most? Two answers popped up again and again:

1. Developing ideas into compelling stories.

2. Shooting better and more interesting b-roll.

With those two answers in hand, I walked the students through discussions and hands-on exercises pertaining to these two topics. In this post, I want to cover the first point: Developing ideas into compelling stories. In my next post we’ll look at how you can shoot more interesting b-roll.

What follows are a few points that we went over during our sessions. Hopefully they will be helpful to you as you seek to improve your documentary skills.

How do you develop ideas into compelling documentary stories?

To help answer this question, I asked the students to give me examples of projects they were currently producing. One pair of students mentioned that they were editing a story about the opening of a new, locally-owned hardware store.

For a documentary to work, you need to find the story beneath the story. The opening of a hardware store is simply an event, so what’s the story behind the event? This will require you to do some research on the front end:

• Will this particular store solve some kind of problem in the community?

• Is there a David v. Goliath angle? Is this store up against major competition from a big retailer? Viewers love a good underdog story.

• Did the owners encounter particular difficulties in trying to get the store off the ground? Money problems? Zoning issues? Setbacks?

• Were there any internal conflicts going on behind the scenes?

• Did the opening of the store intersect with any larger societal issues, like gentrification?

• Are the owners of the store unique in some way? Do they have interesting back stories?

• Is there some long-standing family history among the store owners within the community?

• Does the site itself have some kind of historical significance?

Always be asking yourself these questions:

• What’s the hook?

• Where’s the conflict?

• What makes this story unique?

• Why would anyone want to watch this?

And try not to answer that last question the way George Costanza did on Seinfeld when pitching a TV pilot to NBC executives:

Have any other advice on how to develop story ideas for a short or feature-length documentary? Leave them in the Comments.