Researching and Developing A Documentary Project

It’s not difficult to come up with an idea for a documentary project. There are non-fiction stories around us all the time. Taking that idea and deciding how or if you want to tell the story takes some effort. There are a number of questions to ask yourself. For example is this a story worth telling, will anyone be interested in the subject? This doesn’t preclude working on a project to inform others of an issue or topic that needs to looked at. We’re talking about how broad the subject or idea is and what the best way to document it might be.

The best way to focus your idea and find the story is to come up with a Concept. After you have a Concept you can work on a Treatment.  A Concept is a sentence or two that focuses your  idea. For example we came up with a Concept for The Baldwin Park Story, that reads:

CONCEPT:

Explore the community of Baldwin Park in Orlando Florida from its birth, beginning with the closing of the Naval Training Center (the site on which the development is built) to what it has become today.

Once we knew what the Concept was we could start developing how we wanted to tell this story; this is done by writing a Treatment which is a narrative description of how you envision telling the story and the who, what, when, where, and why of it.  This process requires researching your idea and concept, which may lead to a number of discoveries.  In the case of The Baldwin Park Story it led us to a number of issues concerning Planned and Green Communities, New Urbanism and other Social realities.

JRMartin

Excerpted from Create Documentary Films, Videos and Multimedia by JRMartin —

Available from Amazon.com  — Create Documentary Films, Video…