Structure, story filmmakers

For filmmakers, this book focuses primarily on longer-form work, but the principles of documentary storytelling can and do apply in a range of forms and formats. I have applied the story and structure tools contained in this book to six-minute historical documentaries, eight-minute natural history films, and even 90-second audio presentations. Brett Culp, interviewed in Chapter 18, applies these tools as an event filmmaker, crafting stories from key moments in his clients lives. 

Story does not have to mean three-act drama, and it definitely does not mean artificial tension that is imposed from without. Story comes organically from within the material and the ways in which you, the filmmaker, structure it. 

In some cases, filmmakers will shoot a story that offers a basic narrative arc but wait until they re editing to specifically consider structure. This usually means a considerably longer editing period. For example, Susan Froemke describes working with editor Deborah Dickson on the Academy Award-nominated Lalee s Kin The Legacy of Cotton,... 

You can t play with structure until you ve really got a grip on the story that you re telling. That s true with a narrative film as well. I think some of it came, for me, from making Wisconsin Death Trip. What I d liked in the book [is that] it had no given structure—it was completely formless and chaotic But a film has to have some kind of structure, even if the structure is terrible—and there are films that have terrible structures and usually they re terrible films. That was such a struggle to make that film work, if it works, to flow and to feel like an experience that you could watch and lose yourself in. It was that film, by its very formlessness, that made me really conscious of structure and how important it was to good filmmaking. 

Feature films can be very helpful, if you watch, as I do, feature films all the time and you enjoy the structure. I just watched Citizen Kane again. It has an amazingly good structure, that. It s been imitated endlessly, but it s a brilliant, formal piece of filmmaking, so beautifully structured. I admire that more than anything else in a film a well-structured piece of storytelling. It s about telling a story the best way that you can. 

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