The type of research you need to do depends on your topic. For a historical documentary, expect to spend a lot of time in libraries or historical society archives. As for a film about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, you can learn a lot online and over the phone, but eventually you’ll have to pack your bags (and bug spray) and go talk to people on the ground.

Gather archival materials
During your research, you can find relevant archival materials. You can also ask interviewees to show any old photos or videos they may have that they are willing to let you use.

Summarize the story
Although documentaries are not scripted like fictional narratives, you will create an outline or even a storyboard to think about the shots needed and the possible directions the story might take. Sometimes I write a storyline to help introduce myself to the story or to help stakeholders understand the type of story I’m going to create.

Imagine what a film should look like
The truthfulness of documentaries doesn’t mean they can’t have style. You can create an inspiration board and compile visual references that help you present the film. You can even think about the types of shooting plans you want to use. You learn and change throughout this process, but if you approach it from a certain point of view, in many cases you will stay true to it.

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Finally, it should be noted that filmmakers are becoming less and less hesitant to shoot a character who is still alive, or even in his recent news ( Invictus on Nelson Mandela , La Conquête sur Nicolas Sarkozy , W .: The Incredible President on George W. Bush or once again Welcome to New York on Dominique Strauss-Kahn ).

A biographical film is a film about a particular person, focusing on the most important events in his life, as well as his personal and public achievements. There are a huge number of films about famous and famous people in the archives of the world film and video industry.

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Objectives of Documentaries

Teaching tool (in other words, “educational films”)
Research (geographic, zoological, historical, ethnographic, etc.)
Propaganda (science, goods, technology, religion, etc.)
Chronicle (long-term observation of an event, reportage, etc.)
Publicity

What unites them (all of the above) is the common goal of all documentary film: “to tell us about the world we live in” (Hugh Badley).

Documentary filmmaking is a complex genre that takes a long time to prepare and work on: life and documentary material is selected, on the basis of which the script is created. The structure of a documentary varies: it uses both staged and reportage shooting, field and interior shooting, archival video- and photographs. You can observe the benefits of documentaries on television. The most actual, bright and extraordinary of them invariably enjoy wide popularity among viewers of absolutely different age and social categories.

However, it should be noted that the term “documentary film” is questioned by many modern film scholars and film critics. The fact is that according to many directors, any person at the sight of the camera to some extent begins to play, perform a certain role, behave unnaturally – and as a result the film becomes to some extent staged. That is why many experts deny the existence of documentary film at all, considering it only a subgenre of fiction cinema. And these experts consider only films shot with a hidden camera from beginning to end to be real documentaries. They call such cinema filmed with a hidden camera a true documentary.

Another category of films classified as documentaries are educational (educational) films. Films designed to be shown in schools and other educational institutions. Studies show that educational material presented in the form of a film is absorbed much better than the same material retold by the teacher. It seems to be a matter of clarity and polished presentation of the material (not surprisingly, because in the cinema there are probably a lot of takes).

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Cinematographers have always been attracted by exoticism, ethnography, fires, natural disasters, acts of war, the life of royalty, technical novelties like flying airplanes and dirigibles, car racing – anything sensational, “attraction,” anything that can attract the public to the halls of cinematographs. Operators traveled around the world in search of fascinating subjects, sometimes exposing themselves to mortal risk. Film history has preserved the legend of the operator, who turned the handle of the camera until a lion jumped on him and did not begin to crush to death.

The main boundary between fiction and non-fiction cinema, or otherwise between fiction and documentary, would not be realized until much later. At first, neither the creators nor the audience thought about it. In 1902, one of the pioneers of cinema George Méliès (1861-1938) on the eve of the coronation of King Edward VII of England in Westminster Abbey shoots its staged version in his studio pavilion in Montreux with the participation of extras dressed in more or less suitable costumes. His film even outstrips the release of truly chronicled footage of the event, the audience watches the story with complete confidence, and even Edward VII himself (that’s the magic of cinema!) “recognizes himself” in Meles’s opus. It took time for feature film to develop its own language (zooming in, shooting from different angles, movement, editing techniques, lighting principles, etc.) and to declare itself as an art so that the documentary film gradually began to recognize its own distinctiveness, its special, its only inherent place among the screen arts. It owes this debt most to two filmmakers: Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov.

Robert Flaherty (1884-1951) began as a mining engineer. In the 1910s he explored the Canadian polar region in search of oil, kept a diary, and on one of his expeditions he took a camera and shot a lot of scenes of Eskimos’ life. Collecting material on the editing table, Flaherty carelessly set fire to the film with a cigarette, and the entire negative perished. He would later call that moment a lucky finger of fate.

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