Documentary Cookbook

Here are some tips from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism's Documentary Cookbook. They are shooting for making a broadcast documentary for 100,000 an hour -- still its interesting.


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BASIC APPROACH
"Make films, not proposals:"

If you have lots of money, don't do this.

1. As expected, most of the lessons learned so far are bone head obvious, and boil down to very disciplined, simple "preventive production." To really be serious about finding projects on which you can lower cost without lowering quality, here's what you need to do, in order of cost efficiency:

2. Choose the right story. Find stories that naturally lend themselves to low cost, not stories which will be compromised with short funding. Thin Blue Line, Gimme Shelter, , Mark Twain, The Cockettes, and Long Night's Journey Into Day will always cost at least a half million dollars.

3. Back into it. Reverse the idea/funding process. Find stories and techniques that can be done with the money readily available, not with money which might someday be available.

4. Exercise Discipline. Be extremely careful and consistent at every stage of planning and production. Make the project all muscle, no fat. Obviously, this favors pre-conceptualized projects and handicaps discovery.

5. Use small format digital video. Use DV/DVCam as starting point to reduce cost from ground up. Small format digital video is to us as 16mm was to cinema verite or 4-track recorders were to rock and roll.

6. Exercise consistent technical protocol. Get video and audio close to right in the field, and do not plan to fix anything in the mix or on-line. Small format video demands more technical care than large format.

6. Pay professionals their going rates. Control personnel costs by adjusting time, not rates. Reconfigure what you do, not how much you pay for it.

7. Use experienced craftspeople at all levels, especially in audio and assistant editing.

8. Avoid air travel. Is there no good film to be made within 100 miles of home? .

9. Make the film quickly. Production and editorial schedules that minimize person-days are big levers for cost reduction. Set rough cut and lock picture deadlines, and meet them no matter what. This favors experienced filmmakers working with strong fallback narrative structures.

10. Maintain a clear decision flow. The producer/director is in charge. The production unit must be a community, but not a democracy. Fine-tune the filtering of ideas to flow from community to director to editor in orderly fashion. Delays in executive signoff (if there is an executive) can be catastrophic.

11. "FIDO" "Fuck it and drive on." Choose a story in which a few missing pieces or clunky moments will go unnoticed, so that you can always maintain forward motion. Never bog down, and never miss a deadline, no matter what.

12. Avoid on-line assembly, out of house, by working on an editing system which directly outputs high-resolution video. Do not color correct the show yourself.

13. Use high-end facilities for sound finishing and color correction after extremely careful field origination and editorial prep.

14. Do not use outside archive material, only home movies, personal photos, documents for which you own all rights in perpetuity, and fair use material for which you can make a clearly and obviously defensible case for fair use.

15. Do not use outside music, only music internally produced, for which you own rights in perpetuity; music rights may be non-exclusive.

16. Avoid hidden administrative cost, of music, archive footage, and stills. The admin time, paperwork, research, provenance search, and E&O costs can match license fees.

17. Avoid live performance under trade union jurisdiction [sic*], where fees and hidden administrative costs may be excessive. [* Here we might wonder if this contradicts 6 and 7- DM]

Avoid fundraising, beyond the bare minimum necessary to get the project done. The fundraising process itself mounts its own enormous costs---sample reels, office expense, producer time, spun budgets, spun proposals.

These suggested methods clearly apply only to a small number of documentaries and a small number of filmmakers. And finally:

Make a high quality film, and then sell it to the highest bidder. "HBO is not going to broadcast a show simply because it cost $100,000. Nobility is not part of the mix," says Pete Nicks


Visit the DOCUMENTARY COOKBOOK for more about their project.