Planing an Unscripted Documentary

Today we read an article by Tony Levelle who talks about how to plan an unscripted documentary. I thought that this helped a lot and showed us how to go about creating our own doucmentaries, as they are essentially also unscripted.

Levelle talks about a well known filmaker Dorothy Fadiman, who has been making successful unscripted documentaries for 30 years. She gives him useful and helpful advice as to how she goes about creating a documentary thinking about what story she plans to capture in her documentary, how she gets started, where she would like to shoot, the situations and events she would like to unfold in the document and how she wants the story to essentially evolve as we watch.

By the end of the article there are a few key points to consider:

• You can produce a documentary without a script
• shooting without a script requires thoughtful planning
• unscripted documentaries may require extensive research and prep
• when you shoot an unscripted documentary, the story is built in two stages: 1) while shooting, and 2) in the editing room. It is not built on a word processor.

From reading this article, there are a lot of things I feel I can take away from it to apply to my own documentary. By planning effectively and cautiously it will make our documentary much more effective and allow us to create a story worth watching.