How to Write a Documentary

Video Transcript

"Alright folks, in this clip we're going to talk about how to write a documentary. Writing a script for a documentary is not like writing a script for a feature film obviously. There isn't the same sort of narrative thread, the story line, character development. Instead what you have is the idea and the way that you want to present whatever it is that you are documenting, whether it be an individual or an event that happened at one particular point or another or an issue. So what you're going to need to do is, first of all outline how you want to do this, so sit down in front of your computer screen blank page, and hammer out exactly where you want that you're presentation to go, what you want to cover, how you want to cover it, and ultimately what message you want to leave with the audience, so do this first. Second of all most documentaries today have some degree of narration or someone that basically guides an audience through the presentation or a host, whatever the case may be, someone who's actually on camera guiding people through, and a lot of times it'll be both. So you're going to obviously have certain amount of scripted work for this person, so the next step would then be to write this portion of the documentary, and you write that the same way you would a script. You have- basically you write out each and every bit of narration, and the chunk of the movie that that part applies to, you just describing during this scene what would be happening, or during that chunk- what chunk of the movie, what's going on, and what it is you're presenting, whether it be graphics, old archive footage, footage that you shot yourself. Basically get it all written down and then write the narration as you see fit. A lot of times this part of the production would be done actually you've collected all of your footage. Most of the time when you're producing a documentary you've already gotten a bunch of footage shot, so as you're writing the narration you sort of have a better idea of the story that you're ultimately going to be presenting to your audience. So after you've compiled the footage and you've started to make a rough cut of the documentary, this can be when you go and write this portion, the narration, the stuff that's supposed to accompany the footage that you already have. So sort of knowing the cut that you have down already, write out basically what we will be seeing in that section of the movie, and then write out the corresponding narration. This is really the best way to write a documentary."