Filmmaking / Directing : Short film making by Charles Baldwin

Karen Ross, Stage 32, has asked me to write about how I make a short documentary.

I took classes to learn about making video content. I have been making and working with film and video since I was a kid.

For me, and you might have your own thoughts about how to do this, I've watched a lot of documentary videos, from PBS videos to Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer, to Ken Burns various presentations. He has a great series on Masterclass dot com. He is worth studying, he's made making documentary video his life. There is a well known camera move called the Ken Burns move, named for him. Basically you take a still photo and move the view around, across, focus on a particular spot and pull away or some similar camera movement so the still photo has some movement as part of its presentation instead of sitting there as a still photo.

For me the hard part of a documentary is finding the story. There are plenty out there. You can't do all of them, so what is one that makes sense to do? Next, does it interest me? If it does and I really want to make the story as a documentary I basically start by gathering material. This involves getting people on camera to talk about their knowledge of the story. You are answering the journalistic questions of who, what, when, where and why. And I try to find plenty of anecdotes, the little stories that are part of the big main storyline.

There is a webinar on here about how to find the money to make the video. I haven't watched it as of this writing. My college professor once said you're a true artist if you make the video and you do it with your own money. Ideally you want to be paid for your time and effort. I have made a LOT of video that I never got paid for. Mostly to keep my abilities fresh, but it's cost me a lot over time, I haven't made any of that back.

I like to go to the main location and get into a comfort zone with the location, and whomever is going to be the main person talking, anyone on camera has to be comfortable talking with you, so you have to establish rapport, get to know them at least a little, let them get to know you. If for some reason someone isn't comfortable on camera, you may be able to use some still photos, and have them do a voice over.

I like to have several cameras running at once. You can get the story and do a nice job of telling it, but I believe it is important to keep the eye visually interested. Having many cameras and still photos makes it easier to control the audio and video you've recorded, gives you B footage cutaway opportunities, filler material when you get to a "well what do I do now" moment with your creation.

After gathering the material I have to figure out what the main story is, the story can change. I did one interview with a scientist, the focus was to be his sports car, a vintage classic car. Along the way though he told anecdotes about how his car lead him to some adventures with his partner, his wife, and so the story grew into something else. It became the story of him, his sports car, being hired at the company he worked several decades for and how he met his wife, and their love story.

Once I have the material then I go through the clips and take a piece of paper and start listing each shot, describe what it is, and give it a number of importance. And, when possible, group the camera clips of that same part of the story together. Grouping them together helps you find them in the same place. And then when you want to vary the view in front of the viewer you have that same moment all gathered together and this gives you choices. As you load footage you can set them into various bins and metatag them, this can make searching for any given piece of footage easier.

I also like to gather plenty of B roll. For the scientist and his sports car piece, we went driving to his favorite local places with his sports car. I took a camera along, shot still photos and video. Once I had that, I had established rapport, and gotten into a comfort zone and scheduled a follow up meeting to basically interview him. I had emailed him a set of questions beforehand, so he could have his laptop open in front of him, and as we finished the answer to one question he could have the next question right there. We had four meetings, one was a drive around to favorite spots, a preliminary meeting to discuss the project, the interview day, and I'd been talking with him prior to that as I found his stories interesting.

As I was the only shooter and the interviewer for this shoot, I had to be free to keep an eye on the cameras, and talk at the same time. So the laptop with questions made that possible. DSLR cameras, when shooting video, get hot, the sensor needs to take a break every so often to cool down. And every so often you get interrupted, your subject might need to take a phone call or something similar.

I used the various cameras as the audio recorders, this was okay audio, not great audio. At the time I didn't have any audio recording gear and since I was spending my own money I kept everything simple.

You need to have good audio, and with plenty of camera footage, and stills, and B roll, you can then go to the edit room. Make the list I mentioned above, this means reviewing all your footage, you're going to get to know your footage pretty well on any given project.

Drop it into a video editor timeline for a rough cut of the story. Then build the beginning, middle, and end, the audio, and then I like to let it sit for a week or two, come back to it, and ask myself what do I like or not like about the video. I did a Christmas video recently and all through the editing I kept telling myself it would be better with this, or that. Great cameras make for great video, a great digital audio recorder makes for great audio. But it also has to be a story people want to watch. The Christmas video had been tough because color matching among the various cameras, and the lighting, made that part of the process time consuming. The location only had very low light and incandescent lighting, the video that was output was very grainy. The cameras could have been better. Rent good equipment if you have the money to do so.

Now having said that, viewers are predisposed to watching the story. Once they've decided to watch, you have enveloped them in what is called the diegesis. This is the suspension of the real world, and you've brought them into the world of the story you are telling. it is nice to have good and great equipment to tell the story, many people believe the BEST and most expensive equipment makes for the best video, and will give the best results in terms of audience and size of audience. This really isn't true. If we sit down to watch the story, we want to be there, and as viewers we will watch the story. If the video becomes annoying to watch, then we will probably turn it off.

And now having said that, however, if you get to major motion picture making, the executive producers are going to have baseline requirements that you likely will have to fulfill. This is collaboration. The idea is that many minds will result in the awesome billion dollar film. This no doubt is true, but there are films that get made, call them sleepers, that aren't made on big budgets, don't have big collaborative teams, and do quite well.

With the scientist, I wanted to keep myself active making video to keep my abilities fresh. I gave the end product to him and his wife. They went on a second honeymoon because of it. That was pretty satisfying for me. It actually hasn't gotten many views, and I suppose it's because the audience, the people interested in seeing it is small.

After assembling all the footage, color correcting, making sure the story is told from beginning to end, fixing audio, getting the questions answered and graphics made, and choose the music to use, I will do an export to an MP4 file and watch it again.

I will keep a notepad and make notes as to anything I'd like to change or if something doesn't seem right, then let it sit again for maybe another week. Then do a final edit and output.

I had made arrangements with the local sports car center, they have a library, and they have a small viewing room, and the sports car club meets there occasionally. It would have been the appropriate setting for a small public viewing. That didn't happen though, I simply gave the video to my friend.

Karen specifically mentioned the NASA video. That video is only four and a half minutes long. NASA made footage available, the two still photos, one of my Dad, Mom and grandmother, I inherited, the other of the phone sitting on the countertop I took. The rest was NASA footage. The story was simply the story as I remembered it. I did some fact checking along the way, I was very young at the time of the story taking place. I did the narrative voice over, the only "scripted" part of the clip, the music came from Jingle Punks. I used Illustrator for the titles and credits. 'Placed all of it in the editing timeline and output it. The venue for that particular piece was the Houston Film Art Society and a theater they had for the viewing. I had to output an MXF file type, that is a cinema movie theater level file type. This was a fairly quick piece and I made it in less than a month.