Breaking into Documentary Filmmaking
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| William Gazecki |
Documentary films are a very attractive alternative to feature films. The stakes are not as high because the money is not as large, so the opportunities are actually easier to come by, and the risk is not so great. Thus, when you really get down to making films, getting them funded, and produced, you're not dealing with twenty to one hundred million dollars, you're dealing with one thousand to half a million dollars. Getting into documentaries can be viable and attractive for a variety of reasons. The nice thing about it is that it's still filmmaking. It's still that craft. It doesn't carry with it all of the extreme challenges that feature filmmaking brings.
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I used to see people getting into documentaries because they thought it was a stepping stone to feature films. I personally don't like that because I think the documentary genre deserves people that are there for the right reasons. They're there because they appreciate reality; they appreciate the real things in life that are interesting and fascinating. They want to share that; they want to create vehicles to disseminate these facets of life in a film genre, in the film medium.
You have to educate yourself in the craft, but the craft is very diverse. I chose to take a highly technical hands-on approach, but you don't have to do that. You can be more of a financier-producer type. Once you decide that documentary filmmaking is for you, for whatever reasons, you have to educate yourself in the elements of the industry. And a lot of that is just vocabulary to begin with. You have to know the terms: What is a producer, a director, a distributor, a financier, an editor, a cameraman, or a grip? You need to learn the technical terms and the avocations; you need to educate yourself in what the job descriptions are for each position and how they work together. From there you can make a more intelligent choice as to what kind of role you want to play.
The story is the bottom line. Once you've made your choices and once you've decided on what you want to do and where you're going, telling the story is number one. You don't want to put your own personality too far in front or too prominently in the mix. How you begin is extremely important because the first moment is a thread to the next moment and so on. You set a tone and you create a moment. Films are about a string of moments.
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