Audience filmmakers

This book is primarily intended for film and video students or independent video- and filmmakers who are faced with the necessity of writing a short narrative script. For our purposes, we consider a short film to be one of 30 minutes or less, as films longer than that usually need a secondary, or minor, plot-line to sustain audience interest and, in addition, are much less likely to be eligible for festivals or suitable to be shown as "portfolio" work. 

Films are made to capture the imagination of the audience. Illusion is the essence of fiction film, and yet filmmakers mostly try hard to create plausible plots and representations, to render their products authentic in order to have impact on the public. Just a little more than a quarter of all chemistry movies are depicted as non-authentic, only about a fifth are comedies and satires. A look at The Nutty Professor shows that not even these are just funny. 

We re surrounded by subjects that offer potential for documentary storytelling. Current events may trigger ideas, or an afternoon spent browsing the shelves at a local library or bookstore. Some filmmakers find stories within their own families. Alan Berliner made Nobody s Business about his father, Oscar Deborah Hoffinan made Confessions of a Dutiful Daughter about her mother s battle with Alzheimer s. Even when you re very close to a subject, however, you ll need to take an impartial view as you determine whether or not it would make a film that audiences will want to see. This is also tme when you adapt documentaries from printed sources a story may read well on paper, but not play as well on screen. In making the series Cadillac Desert, drawn from Marc Reisner s book of the same name, producer Jon Else chose three of the roughly 40 stories in Reisner s book Else and his team then conducted their own research and determined the best way to tell those stories on film. 

Backstory is a form of exposition, but the two terms are not always synonymous. The backstory includes the events that happened before (sometimes long before) the main story being told it often includes material a filmmaker thinks is critical for the audiences to understand in order to "get" the story. 

At around 24 00, Bub and the filmmakers meet Bub s mother and other members of her family in Vietnam. Had this moment come earlier, the audience would not have been as prepared as they are, by this point in the film, to experience it. We are emotionally invested in the reunion because we ve gotten to know something about Bub and her mother, and we re curious about the growing number of questions that remain unanswered Where is Bub s adoptive mother Who was her father Are Bub s expectations realistic ... 

Compare the casts of this film and Eugene Jarecki s Why We Fight, which was on a comparable topic. Jarecki s cast is far more diverse in terms of points of view and organizational affiliation. The difference, I think, reflects each filmmaker s approach and intent. Both films are successful, but they speak in very different ways to different (if at times overlapping) audiences. 

As the film moves toward completion, footage is dropped and hard decisions must be made. Is the story working as filmed, or is new material needed Does the story that was set up at the film s beginning pay off at the end Is it being told for maximum audience involvement Is this the kind of film that people will talk about Will it keep an audience watching If the filmmaker hopes to convey important but difficult concepts, are those concepts being communicated accurately and well To get the film to a broadcast length, would it be better to delete an entire scene or subplot, or should time be shaved off a number of scenes ... 

Narration or voice-over, if done well, can be one of the best and most efficient ways to move your story along, not because it tells the story but because it draws the audience into and through it. Narration provides information that s not otherwise available but is essential if audiences are to fully experience your film. When documentary makers dive into fairly complicated historical policy or legal and legislative issues," notes filmmaker Jon Else, "narration is your friend. It may mean that you have only two or three lines of narration in a film, but something that might take 10 minutes of tortured interview or tortured verite footage can be often disposed of better in 15 seconds of a well-written line of narration."... 

Except in films where the filmmaker s investigation, at least in part, drives the film, narration is generally not the best way to contradict an interviewee. The subject says, "No one knew about those documents," and a disembodied voice interrupts, No one knew It seemed unlikely. So how do you contradict people on screen You find another interviewee to offer a rebuttal, or you film scenes that contain evidence contradicting the interviewee s statement. Let the individuals, facts, and story speak for themselves, and trust that audience members can decide the tmth for themselves. 

Discussed here are two of their feature documentaries. Troublesome Creek A Midwestern, about the Jordan family s struggle to save their Iowa farm, won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996 and was nominated for an Academy Award. So Much So Fast, which premiered at Sundance in 2006, is about the events set in motion when Stephen Heywood was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig s disease). I spoke with the filmmakers separately for this interview, conducted in 2003 and updated since. 

The illusion that film performs, when it s powerful, is it gets people to confuse the experience of the film with the experience of the past—to get audiences to almost unconsciously confuse the aesthetic experience the/re having as the film unfolds with their imagination of what it must have been like to be there in the past. In a way, I think that for historical documentary filmmakers, that s the way you animate the... 

That s exactly right. As a filmmaker. I m truly going in with no agenda. I am not coming in as a storyteller with my own voice. I am coming in to try to hear their voice, and then try to use my skill and experience and know-how to communicate their story in whatever way is most effective for them. Someone that really knows me and my work can probably identify a piece that I did versus a piece that some other event video producer did. However, what I want more than anything else is for the audience to hear the voice of the people. I want to be invisible. 

As soon as he said, "That s what I want to film," I could see the film. I could see why you would go around a Chinese factory in the company of these people looking into whether the Chinese factory conforms to European safety and health requirements, and whether that would be a comedy or not. And in fact the film was very funny, though a lot of people didn t get the humor. Somehow filmmakers manage to tell you, through an image or a description of the situation, that that s why they want to approach the story. And that tells me what the story s going to tell the audience. 

How do you see documentary changing, in terms of both filmmakers and audiences ... 

This ako means that you, as the filmmaker, are letting the contrasting narratives speak for themselves, and trusting audience members to make up their own minds. 

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