5 Pre-production

Introduction

Before you start shooting video or recording audio, it is important to determine what your documentary media project will be like. Specifically, you will need to determine whether you want your documentary to be audio- or video-based, and you will also need to plan out roughly what the structure and content of the documentary will be, as well as what questions you will use in your interviews (if any).

Format

Audio or video

One aspect to consider is whether your documentary will be audio-based or video-based. Each format has advantages and disadvantages.

Audio: pros and cons

There are a number of advantages to choosing to create an audio documentary rather than a video documentary:

  • You will not need video-related recording equipment such as cameras or tripods
  • The file sizes of your recordings will be much smaller
  • Audio files take much less time to render compared to video files

However, one disadvantage of creating an audio-only documentary is that there is no possibility of showing images that are related to the research topic and might provide information or make the documentary more meaningful, such as graphs, diagrams, or images of the community involved in the research or of objects that are important to the community.

Video: pros and cons

As with audio, using video involves both advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages

Visuals

One of the most salient advantages is that video allows you to use visuals to illustrate or provide information, or to show images that can help to make the information in the documentary more meaningful. For example, a video-based documentary could include graphs or diagrams, or shots of research participants or community members.

Multimodal versatility

Another advantage is that video-based documentaries, depending on how they are structured, can be effective whether they are consumed in video or audio format, and so can be more versatile than audio-based documentaries. That is, the audio track of a documentary could be an effective standalone documentary in its own right if the audio provides functionally the same information as that in the video track. For example, if the video track of the documentary has a lower third that shows the name and title of a speaker, a way of replicating this in the audio would be to have the speaker introduce themselves by saying their name and title.

This versatility has a number of benefits.

First, the documentary can be uploaded to both video-based and audio-based multimedia platforms (for example, video sharing and podcast platforms). Second, the documentary can be consumed by the target audience in multiple ways: either by sitting down and watching it as a video, or by listening to it in podcast format while doing other things (such as commuting or doing things around the house).

By contrast, while converting a video documentary to an audio documentary can involve minimal to no effort, converting an audio documentary into a video documentary can be significantly more difficult.

Disadvantages

While the possibilities for conveying information or engaging the audience are greater with video, video-based documentaries also come with a number of potential trade-offs.

If you create a video-based documentary, you may need to use more types of equipment in addition to microphones, such as tripods or cameras. However, video equipment does not need to be prohibitively expensive or hard to acquire; you can use smartphones or webcams to record footage if you decide to go down the route of creating a video documentary. For example, the following documentary short about stuttering (which is called “Getting the Words Out”) uses footage recorded remotely from webcams:

Software-wise, footage that includes both a video track and an audio track tends to have a larger file size, and it can take a long time for editing software to render your documentary if it is very long or if the computer you are using is not very powerful. However, these may not be issues for you if you have adequate space on your hard drive, if you have access to a computer powerful enough to do video editing, or if your documentary media is short enough that it does not take much time to render.

Final thoughts

Whether you choose to create an audio-based or video-based documentary depends on your particular situation.

For example, while visuals can be a useful part of any documentary, to the extent to which the inclusion of visuals matters may depend on the topic you are discussing. For research on a topic that is mainly sound-based, such as phonetics or music, video may not be as important. On the other hand, for a topic in which physical objects play a more prominent role, such as archaeology, then video may be preferable, as it would allow you to display the objects in question.

Additionally, the choice of what type of documentary to create can depend on what resources are available to you and what constraints you are under. If you are looking to create a documentary that has fewer requirements in terms of equipment and software, then you might consider creating an audio-based documentary. If convenience or resource-related constraints are less of an issue, then you might consider creating a video-based documentary because of its versatility and its increased potential for engaging and informing your audience.

Audio Video
Can include visual information related to the research (e.g. graphs, diagrams) No Yes
Can be converted to the other format relatively easily No Possibly
No need for video equipment Yes Yes
Smaller file sizes Yes No
Shorter rendering times Yes No

Format: Single-part vs multi-part

Another aspect to consider is how the documentary will be released:

  • Will it be an ongoing project (such as a continually updated podcast) or a one-off project?
  • Will the documentary have one part, or will it be released in multiple parts?

Single-part documentaries

A single-part documentary may be useful if you want the knowledge you are planning on disseminating to be consumed in a single sitting. For example, if the research involved consists of a single psychological study, then covering the main aspects of it may not require much of footage, and creating a multi-part series may not be necessary.

If you create a single-part documentary, you can always produce follow-up documentaries later if you need to. If you have created a documentary about research you did with a community and later conduct different research with the same community, you can create a second documentary about this other research. An example of a “sequel” documentary is The Not So Secret Life of the Manic Depressive: 10 Years On, which follows up on, and was released 10 years after, the 2006 documentary Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, which is about bipolar disorder.

Multi-part documentaries

A multi-part documentary with a set number of parts may be useful if your topic has multiple subparts, each of which could have a separate full-length documentary devoted to it. These subparts may be different aspects of the same research, or different studies about the same topic. Choosing to create a multi-part documentary could be useful if there is too much material to fit into a single documentary.

An example of a multi-part documentary is the documentary series The Story of English, which has nine parts, each devoted to a different aspect of the English language.

Participants in the documentary

Before you start shooting footage of the people who will be in the documentary, you first need to decide who will appear in the documentary. Some possibilities include:

  • Community members (if your research involves a specific community)
  • Research participants
  • People who have been impacted by the research or might be in the future
  • Researchers

Depending on the subject of your documentary, an individual may belong to more than one of these categories. For example, a community member may also have participated in the research, and they may also be someone who has been affected or will be affected by the results of the research.

Community members, research participants, and people who may be affected by the research may be able to talk about:

  • What interested them about the research
  • Why they decided to participate (if they did)
  • How they think the research might be relevant for them personally or for people they know

The community members you choose to include in your documentary could be research participants, but you may find it beneficial to include other community members as well. For example, Wolfram (2016) notes that including “respected community leaders and personalities” can be a way of being “to be respectful of social hierarchies within the community” (Wolfram, 2016, p. 797).

The documentary could also include clips of researchers. These researchers could be your co-authors (if any), but they could also be external researchers who have done work on a similar or related topic. Researchers could provide context by talking about how your research is related to similar research that has been done in the field. For example, a documentary about the archaeology of Roman artefacts in the UK could include clips of researchers talking about the relation between British Roman artefacts and Roman artefacts from elsewhere in Europe.

Who you are able to include in the documentary may depend on your academic status. If you are a student who is creating a documentary media essay as part of a class, what sorts of guests you would be allowed to include in your documentary depends on what sort of collaboration your instructor has indicated is permissible. Additionally, if you are a student, the research your documentary will be based on may consist of primary and secondary sources rather than original research, meaning that there would not be any research participants as such you could interview. Both these factors would limit who you can include in your documentary, or even if you can include any interviewees.

Beyond the question of whether you are a student or a researcher, who you are able to include in the documentary can also depend on your resources and contacts. For example, you may be unable to record new footage of certain individuals due to factors such as geographical distance, lack of internet connectivity, or conflicting schedules.

However, even if these restrictions apply to you, there are still ways to include individuals from the categories above in your documentary.

For example, if you wanted to include clips of a researcher in your documentary but you cannot film or record them, they may have given a talk (such as a TED Talk) or lecture about a topic related to your documentary. In this case, you may be able to use clips of that talk in your documentary.

Similarly, you may be able to find freely licensed videos of research participants or community members talking about the topic which you may be able to incorporate into your documentary. For example, if you are creating a documentary about ADHD, you may be able to find freely licensed videos of people with ADHD discussing their experiences with the condition (such as by using the Creative Commons filters on YouTube or Vimeo).

For sections where you do not have or can’t find footage of community members or research participants, you may be able to include quotes by community members or research participants taken from primary and secondary sources you have used in your research. For example, a study looking at the perceptions of people who stutter about stuttering might contain many quotes from study participants that you could use in your documentary by reading them as a voiceover.

You can also get participants’ thoughts on the research during or just after the research process by asking the participant whether they would be comfortable agreeing to an interview or providing written responses about the research. This question could be incorporated into your consent form or survey (if your research consists of a survey), and if any participants agree to it, you could then either interview them (in which case you would have footage of the participant) or provide them with a survey containing questions related to the topic of the research (in which case you would receive written responses).

Another possibility, if you want to include an individual’s thoughts in the documentary but are unable to record them in-person or on a live call, is to ask the individual questions via email and either (a) ask them to record themselves reading the answer, or (b) record yourself reading their responses.

Structure

You will need to determine how the content in your documentary media project will be structured.

One possible way of structuring a documentary is to have a three-part structure that goes as follows:

Intro:

  • Provide background (or have a participant or community member do so) as to what the research is about and what the purpose of the research is

Body:

  • Show how the research took place and what it entailed
  • If the documentary involves research participants or community members: Show participants or community members talking about their views about the research (e.g. why they got involved, why they find it interesting or important, and how it is relevant to them)

Conclusion:

  • Reiterate the significance of the research (or have a participant or community member do so)
  • Describe what research might be done on the topic in the future, or how the research you have just described could be implemented to affect change

On the other hand, if you are planning on disseminating knowledge through something like a podcast episode, the structure may be slightly different. The episode would likely still have three parts, but it would differ in that the intro could start with theme music, and the main body of the episode could consist of an entire interview with different people rather than fragments of multiple interviews. The structure of such a podcast episode could look like this:

Intro:

  • Start with theme music
  • Introduce yourself, the name of the documentary (or series, if it is a multi-part series), and what the documentary is about

Main content:

  • Introduce the interviewee and ask them questions about their views about the research (e.g. why they got involved, what the research entailed, why they find it interesting or important, and how it is relevant to them)
  • Thank the interviewee for their time

Conclusion:

  • Reiterate the significance of the research (or have the interviewee do so)
  • Describe what research might be done on the topic in the future, or how the research you have just described could be implemented to affect change

Take the following example. A study by Mackenzie et al. (2015) looked at differences in /l/ velarization in Newfoundland English (that is, it looked at how the back of the tongue is raised towards the velum (hence, “velarized”) by different speakers of Newfoundland English.) A documentary short about this research could feature both the researcher and the research participants and have a structure like the following:

  • Intro:
    • A clip plays of a research participant speaking.
    • The audio of the clip is lowered in volume and a voiceover starts in which a researcher describes the topic of the research (and explains what /l/ velarization is) and talks about how the participants for the study were selected.
  • Main content:
    • The researcher then explains how for some speakers, /l/ can be both velarized and non-velarized, while for other speakers, /l/ is pronounced in a non-velarized way in all contexts. The researcher gives some examples of words where this difference can be heard.
    • The researcher’s voiceover ends, and a clip plays involving a participant saying a passage containing words in which there are both velarized and non-velarized /l/s.
    • The researcher explains how the presence of variation of the /l/ is related to whether the particular dialect is an Irish English variety or not. The researcher explains how the pattern of velarization in Newfoundland English differs from that in most other North American varieties.
    • A research participant talks about (for example) the Irishness of their background or the community they grew up in
  • Conclusion:
    • The researcher summarizes the findings of the study (it reveals variation in the pronunciation of /l/ within Newfoundland)
    • A research participant talks about how their pronunciation of /l/, as a component of their speech, is a part of their identity

There is another possible way of structuring a documentary short about the study that does not involve any narration or contextualization on the part of the researcher:

  • Intro:
    • A clip plays of a research participant speaking
    • The audio of the clip fades out and transitions to a clip of the participant speaking about why they decided to participate in the research and what the research entailed
  • Main content:
    • A clip plays of a participant (the same one or a different one) talking about what they learned about their own speech, and whether they find it is relevant to their identity in any way (such as how it distinguishes them from other North American English speakers)
    • A clip plays of a participant talking about any experiences in their life where they noticed people in different regions pronouncing /l/s differently
  • Conclusion:
    • A clip plays of a participant talking about why they find the research interesting or relevant

Using a narrative-based structure like this one allows the documentary media essay to cover much, if not all, of the same topics as the non-narrative structure while allowing the speakers who are part of the study to speak about their own variety of English. In this way, information about the variety will be provided by the speakers of that variety themselves rather than by an external researcher.

Beyond recording footage of research participants or community members for your documentary project (as may be the case if you are a student), there are other ways to incorporate views of research participants, community members, or other relevant individuals. As mentioned in the previous section, sources of material can include:

  • Freely licensed videos (such as TED Talks) involving individuals (such as community members or researchers) talking about the topic
  • Studies containing written quotes by participants on the topic of the study
  • Individuals’ written responses in email exchanges (for example, you could email a researcher and ask them to provide an answer to a question to include in your documentary)
  • Written responses within a survey administered during or after the research process

Though a documentary is not a written document, you can still incorporate written responses or written quotes within your documentary by showing them on the screen while reading them as a voiceover. For example, if it is necessary for the documentary short to only involve footage of the researcher, without any of the participants (this might be the case if none of the participants are available for an interview), but the particiapnts can provide responses via email, the short could still include the participants’ thoughts. The structure for the short might look something like this:

  • Intro:
    • A voiceover starts in which a researcher describes the topic of the research (and explains what /l/ velarization is) and talks about how the participants for the study were selected.
  • Main content
    • The researcher then explains how for some speakers, /l/ can be both velarized and non-velarized, while for other speakers, /l/ is pronounced in a non-velarized way in all contexts. The researcher gives some examples of words where this difference can be heard.
    • The researcher explains how the presence of variation of the /l/ is related to whether the particular dialect is an Irish English variety or not. The researcher explains how the pattern of velarization in Newfoundland English differs from that in most other North American varieties.
    • The researcher reads a written response by a research participant in which they describe (for example) the Irishness of their background or the community they grew up in
  • Conclusion
    • The researcher summarizes the findings of the study (it reveals variation in the pronunciation of /l/ within Newfoundland)
    • The researcher reads a written response by a research participant in which they describe how their pronunciation of /l/, as a component of their speech, is a part of their identity

Each of the narrative structures above involves clips with different types of people:

  • The researcher and one or more research participants
  • One or more research participants
  • The researcher alone, plus written responses from research participants

Which of these structures you decide to choose depends on the specifics of your situation. You might even decide to tweak these structures or use a different structure altogether: for example, if your topic is not one that involves community collaboration or human participants, you might create a narrative documentary that consists entirely of a voiceover involving you, without any research participants.

The script

This section contains steps to creating your “script” (though I hesitate to use that word because we often think of documentaries as not being scripted). What you create here contains everything that a director would need to begin making your story into an audio-visual experience.

Steps #1 and #2 should be pretty easy. #3 and #4 will take some creativity. Keep in mind that these steps do not have to be followed sequentially. It is better to treat them iteratively – meaning you will go back and forth between them as many times as you wish. Once you get going, you’ll figure out when to move to another step (i.e. maybe you hit a wall, maybe you’ve said all of you can say for now).  Practice moving back and forth and revising what you have written at each step as necessary.

Remember: everything that goes into a doc video is intentional! The video is a construction of the maker. Nothing should be accidental or unplanned.

1. Your Research Community of Practice

Who is in your Community of Practice that helps set the context for understanding the meaning of your research? Try to list significant members, locations, activities that define this “community.”

2. Synopsis

Along with your supervisor, determine which key ideas of your research are most important in communicating. For each one, write 1 sentence telling us why you included it.

Create a list of these key ideas. How do they relate back to the community of practice components you identified in #1?

3. Your Storyboard

Create a short storyboard. Again, aim for making a connection to the community of practice components.

(For background information: this article describes what a storyboard is and how to create one.)

4. Your Shot List

Create a short shot-list. By now, you should be putting things together – thinking of concrete visuals and sounds that connect to your community of practice and the key ideas you wish to communicate.

(For background information: this article describes what a shot list is and how to create one.)

Other things to consider

How are you going to explain more theoretical or abstract ideas clearly? Remember that you’re making a documentary video, not a PowerPoint presentation, so your old friend, bulleted text, is not available. You need a different toolset that fits into the language of documentary media. For example, the YouTube channel Benedict uses a clever and very satisfying method to explain statistics visually: cardboard cutouts.

Also, are you going to use a narrator’s voice? Ideally, you would not, since this could be problematic when it comes to authenticity, depicting the source of the knowledge, and goals such as engaging your audience and making the content meaningful. That is to say, you should avoid using a disembodied voice of a researcher or of someone who is not involved in the story.

Interview questions

Since a documentary involving community collaboration will involve getting the thoughts of community members or research participants, a significant part (or even the entirety) of the final content of the documentary may consist of responses to interview questions rather than pre-scripted material. As a result, it is important to think about what sorts of questions you will be asking the people you are interviewing.

The questions will need to elicit responses that (1) are relevant to the topic of your documentary, and (2) consist of full sentences that can stand on their own even without the context of the questions they are a response to.

Questions that might be useful for obtaining responses for the intro of your documentary include:

  • How did you find out about the research?
  • What made you decide to participate in the research?
  • What was the research about?

Questions that might be relevant for the main body of the documentary include:

  • When you were taking part in the research, what did that involve, and what sorts of things did you have to do?
  • What do you find interesting or important about the research?
  • What did you learn as a result of taking part in the research?
  • How is the research relevant to you?

Questions that might be relevant for the conclusion of the documentary include:

  • Do you know anyone who might be affected by the results of the research, and if so, who?
  • Is there any way the findings of the research could be implemented in your community, and if so, how?

Sources cited

Larsson, R. (2017). My Story or Your Story? Producing Professional Digital Stories on Behalf of Researchers. In G. Jamissen, P. Hardy, Y. Nordkvelle, & H. Pleasants (Eds.), Digital Storytelling in Higher Education (pp. 167–184). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51058-3_12

Mackenzie, S., De Decker, P., & Pierson, R. (2015). /l/-darkness in Newfoundland English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137(4), 2414. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4920801

Further resources

Structure

The following video is a presentation on creating narrative films based on research:

The following are written resources that discuss how to use narrative structure when creating a documentary:

Interview questions

The following are videos which delve into the process of interviewing people for a documentary and give tips on how to ask interview questions:

 

License

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Digital Media Essays for Research and Communication Copyright © 2022 by Paul De Decker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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