Preface to the Second Edition

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“Barry, I read your book. Then I made a documentary. And I just sold it to HBO.”

Let me tell you, that’s about as good as it gets for an author. The occasion was a reception for filmmakers at Silverdocs, the documentary festival created by the American Film Institute and Discovery Channel. The person talking to me was Victoria Bruce, a journalist and author who had never made a film until she and Karin Hayes made the award-winning documentary The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt.

Today, a lot of people who don’t know anything about video or film technology, and whose only knowledge of how to create a documentary has come from watching television, have begun making documentary films and videos.

You may be one of them.

As I write this, I’m working with a producer/director who went halfway around the world to shoot a film of a unique event, that he hoped would be the pilot for a TV documentary series. It was only after he returned home and sat down with the footage he had shot that he realized he didn’t quite know how to turn what he had into a finished program.

I regularly get e-mails from readers who say they are about to start their first documentary. Some are already working in video or are experienced as photographers. The others just have a piece of truth they want to explore and are determined to proceed with their project, learning as they go.

Two changes in the world of documentary have made this possible:

  1. Relatively inexpensive digital video cameras and truly inexpensive desktop editing systems have removed all economic barriers to making a documentary. Not long ago making a documentary required access to about $100,000 worth of film or video equipment. Today it can be done — with the same, or better, technical quality — using a $4,000 camera and a $200 desktop editing system.

  2. The market for documentaries has expanded on television and through DVD distribution. Cable channels have an insatiable appetite for documentary films, and DVD distributors welcome independent documentaries.

But even those who have knowledge and experience with video and film technology — for example, from producing sales or training videos or TV commercials — can find themselves lost when they turn to documentary. Unfortunately, many people think that because they are making a film about actual events, the truth will jump inside their cameras and will automatically reveal itself on the screen to their audience.

This never happens.

Making a documentary film is not as difficult as making a night landing on an aircraft carrier – I’ve done both – but it does require thought, knowledge, and planning, as well as talent and luck. This book can help you with the first three. And if you get those under control, you’ll have a good chance of finding success with the other two.

The major change in this edition is a new emphasis on truth and credibility in making a documentary. The factual style of the documentary form has often been used by government agencies to make propaganda films. And now some independent filmmakers have appropriated the form to make single-issue, one-sided, partisan attack films that not only don’t tell the whole truth, but sometimes don’t tell the truth at all.

As I was finishing the manuscript for this book, a journalist doing a story on documentary ethics asked me if I thought there should be a code of ethics for documentaries. I told him I thought kindergarten rules would do just fine:

Don’t lie.

Don’t hurt people.

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