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Interview relevant people. Get live footage of relevant events. Film establishing shots. Film B-roll. Shoot dramatic recreations. Keep a diary.
Many documentaries devote much of their running time to one-on-one interviews with people who are knowledgeable about the subject of the documentary. Pick a selection of relevant people to interview and collect as much footage as you can from these interviews. You'll be able to splice this footage throughout your documentary to help prove your point or convey your message. Interviews can be "news style" - in other words, simply sticking a microphone in someone's face - but you'll probably want want to rely more on one-on-one sit-down interviews, as these give you a chance to control the lighting, staging, and sound quality of your footage while also allowing your subject to relax, take his or her time, tell stories, etc.   These people may be famous or important - well-known authors who have written about your subject, for instance, or professors who have studied it extensively. However, many of these people may not be famous or important. They may be ordinary people whose work has given them a familiarity of your subject or people who simply witnessed an important event firsthand. They can, in certain situations, even be completely ignorant of your subject - it can even be enlightening (and entertaining) for the audience to hear the difference between a knowledgeable person's opinion and an ignorant person's opinion. Let's say our car documentary is on classic car aficionados in Austin, Texas. Here are just a few ideas for people to interview: members of classic car clubs in and around Austin, wealthy car collectors, cranky old people who have complained to the city about the noise from these cars, first-time visitors to a classic car show, and mechanics who work on the cars. If you're stumped for interview questions, brainstorm questions based on the basic queries "who?" "what?" "why?" "when?" "where?" and "how?" Often, asking someone these basic questions about your subject will be enough to get him or her to relate an interesting story or some enlightening details. Remember––a good interview should be more like a conversation. As the interviewer, you must be prepared, having done your research and informed yourself to glean the most information from the interview subject. Grab B-roll whenever possible. Get shots of your interview subject after the formal interview. This allows you to cutaway from the talking head shot. One of the main advantages of documentary films (as opposed to dramatic films) is that they allow the director to show the audience real footage of actual real-life events. Provided you don't break any privacy laws, get as much real-world footage as you can. Film events that support your documentary's viewpoint, or, if the subject of your documentary happened in the past, get in touch with agencies or people who have historical footage to get permission to use it. For instance, if you're making a documentary on police brutality during the Occupy Wall Street protests, you may want to contact people who participated in the protests and collected hand-held footage.  In our car documentary, we'd obviously want lots of footage of classic car expos taking place in and around Austin. If we're creative, though, there are plenty of other things we might want to film: a town hall discussion on a proposed car show ban, for instance, might provide some thrilling dramatic tension. If you've watched a documentary before, you've surely noticed that the entire movie isn't just footage of interviews and of live events with nothing in between. For instance, there are often shots leading into interviews that establish a mood or show where the interview is taking place by showing the outside of the building, the city skyline, etc. These are called "establishing shots," and they're a small but important part of your documentary.   In our car documentary, we'd want to film establishing shots at the locations where our interviews took place: in this case, classic car museums, chop shops, etc. We might also want to get some footage of downtown Austin or of distinct Austin landmarks to give the audience a sense of the locale. Always collect audio from the shoot including room tone and sound effects unique to that location. In addition to establishing shots, you'll also want to get secondary footage called "B-roll" - this can be footage of important objects, interesting processes, or stock footage of historical events. B-roll is important for maintaining the visual fluidity of your documentary and ensuring a brisk pace, as it allows you to keep the film visually active even as the audio lingers on one person's speech.   In our documentary, we'd want to collect as much car-related B-roll as possible - glamorous close-ups of shiny car bodies, headlights, etc., as well as footage of the cars in motion. B-roll is especially important if your documentary will make use of extensive voiceover narration. Since you can't play the narration over interview footage without keeping the audience from hearing what your subject is saying, you'll usually lay the voiceover over short stretches of B-roll. You can also use B-roll to mask the flaws in interviews that didn't go perfectly. For instance, if your subject had a coughing fit in the middle of an otherwise great interview, during the editing process, you can cut the coughing fit out, then set the audio of the interview to B-roll footage, masking the cut. If there's no real-life footage of an event your documentary discusses, it's acceptable to use actors to re-create the event for your camera, provided the recreation is informed by real-world fact and it's perfectly clear to the audience that the footage is a recreation. Be reasonable with what you film as a dramatic recreation - make sure that whatever you commit to film is grounded in reality.   Sometimes, dramatic recreations will obscure the actors' faces. This is because it can be jarring for an audience to see an actor portray a real-world person in a film that also contains real footage of him or her. You may want to film or edit this footage in a way that gives it a visual style distinct from the rest of your film (for instance, by muting the color palette). This way, it's easy for your audience to tell which footage is "real" and which is a recreation. As you film your documentary, keep a diary of how the filming went each day. Include any mistakes you made as well as any unexpected surprises you encountered. Also consider writing a brief outline for the next day of shooting. If an interview subject said something that makes you want to pursue a new angle for your film, note this. By keeping track of each day's events, you have a better chance of keeping on track and on schedule.  Once finished, do a paper edit viewing footage and making notes of shots to keep and others to discard.