Creative Documentary

Creative Documentary

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Creative

Documentary

Theory and

Practice

Wilma de Jong

Erik Knudsen

Jerry Rothwell

Source: New Orleans star of ‘Age of stupid’, Al Duvernay, riding his motorbike with

Director Franny Armstrong filming. Copyright Spanner Films/Chris Graythen

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The rights of Wilma de Jong, Jerry Rothwell and Erik Knudsen to be identified as

authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book can be obtained from the Library of Congress

Set in 9/12pt Giovanni Book by 35

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First published 2012 by Pearson Education Limited

Published 2013 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2012, Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or

by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including

photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission

in writing from the publishers.

Notices

Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience

broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical

treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in

evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In

using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of

others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors,

assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products

liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products,

instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

ISBN: 978-1-4058-7422-9 (pbk)

Contents

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About the authors viii

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

Part 1 The creative documentary 7

1 What is creativity? Wilma de Jong 9

2 The creative documentary Wilma de Jong 18

3 The creative industries and documentary Wilma de Jong 29

4 Passionate business: entrepreneurship and the documentary

filmmaker Wilma de Jong 44

Part 2 Development strategies 55

5 Developing ideas Jerry Rothwell 57

6 From idea to pitch Jerry Rothwell 64

7 Budgets and schedules Jerry Rothwell 75

Part 3 Narrative strategies 87

8 The nature of stories and narratives Erik Knudsen 89

9 Life does not tell stories: structuring devices in documentary

filmmaking Wilma de Jong 97

10 The classic narrative Erik Knudsen 118

11 The transcendental narrative Erik Knudsen 131

12 Cinematic codes Erik Knudsen 143

13 New media, new documentary forms Mary Agnes Krell 161

Part 4 Production strategies 173

14 A good waltz or a nasty tango: individual qualities of the ‘total’

filmmaker and teamwork Wilma de Jong 175

15 Producing Jerry Rothwell 185

16 Directing Erik Knudsen 200

17 Camera and cinematography Erik Knudsen 215

18 Interview strategies Jerry Rothwell 239

19 The uses and abuses of archive footage Toby Haggith 252

CONTENTS

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20 Zen and the art of documentary editing Wilma de Jong 267

21 Being there: the creative use of location and post-production

sound in documentaries Jean Martin 287

Part 5 Distribution strategies 305

22 Online, portable and convergence environments Erik Knudsen 307

23 Delivery and compliance Jerry Rothwell 321

Bibliography 328

Useful websites 335

Appendix

Documentary filmmaking: a historical overview 339

Index 361

CONTENTS vii

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About the authors

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Wilma de Jong

Wilma is a part-time lecturer at the University of Sussex and an award-winning film producer/

filmmaker. She teaches Documentary Theory and Practice on the MA Digital Documentary

course and on subjects related to media and politics. She owned an independent film company

for 14 years, and produced and directed films for broadcasters, NGOs and corporate industry.

In 2008 she co-edited with Dr Thomas Austin Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New

Practices (Open University Press), and was recently involved in the Interactive Documentary

Project Against the Tide (www.tide.org.uk). Her research for this book has been made possible by

an AHRC grant.

Erik Knudsen

Erik is a filmmaker and Professor of Film Practice at the University of Salford, Manchester, UK.

Currently the Head of the School of Media, Music and Performance, earlier roles have included

programme-leading the MA in Fiction Film Production, the MA in Television Documentary

Production and the MA in Wildlife Documentary Production. He is also visiting professor, and

the former Head of the Editing Department, at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in

Cuba. Among a number of broader academic duties, he is an Arts and Humanities Research

Council Peer Review College member and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Media

Practice. He also runs his own film production company, One Day Films Limited, and his films

include: Heart of Gold (40 minutes, documentary, 2006), Sea of Madness (86 minutes, fiction,

2006), Brannigan’s March (99 minutes, fiction, 2004), Bed of Flowers (50 minutes, documentary,

2001), Signs of Life (70 minutes, fiction, 1999), Reunion (50 minutes, documentary, 1995) and

One Day Tafo (70 minutes, documentary, 1991). His recent work includes Veil (for Horse and

Bamboo Theatre Company’s touring show, 2008), Vanilla Chip (17 minutes, documentary, 2009)

and his latest feature film, The Silent Accomplice (84 minutes, fiction, 2010).

Jerry Rothwell

Jerry is a documentary filmmaker whose work includes the feature documentaries Heavy Load

(IFC/ITVS/BBC), about a group of people with learning disabilities who form a punk band,

Donor Unknown (More 4/Arte/VPRO) about a sperm donor and his offspring, and Deep Water

(Pathe/FilmFour/UK Film Council co-directed with Louise Osmond), about Donald Crowhurst’s

ill-fated voyage in the 1968 round-the-world yacht race. Another strand of Jerry’s work has been

participatory and community filmmaking, working with people to tell their own stories on film.

He played a lead role in developing Hi8us Projects’ improvised dramas with young people for

Channel 4, in establishing First Light, the UK Film Council’s scheme for young filmmakers, and

in setting up digital storytelling exchanges between marginalised communities across Europe. He

also teaches documentary at the Met Film School. He is currently working on Town of Runners, a

documentary about young athletes in Ethiopia.

Toby Haggith

Toby is a historian and works in the Film and Video Archive of the Imperial War Museum, where

he is in charge of non-commercial access and devises the cinema programme. He has a PhD in

Social History from the University of Warwick and has written essays on various aspects of

history and film. He is, with Joanna Newman, the co-editor of Holocaust and the Moving Image:

representations in film and television since 1933 (Wallflower Press, 2005). He also conceived and is

ABOUT THE AUTHORS ix

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the organiser for the Museum’s annual Film Festival for student and amateur filmmakers (now

in its tenth year) and the associated Student Documentary Master Class.

Mary Agnes Krell

Mary is a digital artist and educator based in the UK. She is the Head of Media Practice and a

Senior Lecturer at Sussex University, where she conducts practice-based research across film,

performance and digital media. Mary’s work in theatre and digital media has been widely

exhibited and she has been creating interactive projects for the web, CD-ROM and installations

in the UK and internationally since the early 1990s.

Jean Martin

Jean is Senior Lecturer in Digital Music and Sound Arts at the University of Brighton. He has

studied in Zurich and Berlin and is a freelance composer and writer. He has created music for

numerous TV documentaries broadcast on BBC 1 and 2, Channel 4 and Discovery. He moved to

London in 1993, and during the 1990s also worked as a radio producer for German public radio,

reporting on British contemporary art music; see www.soundbasis.net.

x ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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Acknowledgements

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Authors’ acknowledgements

To Tony and Romany and those I have ever worked with in the last 25 years. You documentary

filmmakers are a passionate, intelligent and creative bunch and our world would be different

without your relentless ambition to highlight visible and invisible, but always complex social

worlds. Keep on banging on those closed doors!

Wilma de Jong

To Janet, Tara, Noah and Rasmus, who have encouraged and inspired me all the way, and to my

graduates and students, who have taught me filmmaking.

Erik Knudsen

To my family & to colleagues at Met FIlm, Hi8us and APT Films who, over many years, have

shaped my ideas about what documentary is and enabled me to try to put those ideas into

practice.

Jerry Rothwell

Publisher’s acknowledgements

The publishers would like to thank the panel of academic reviewers, whose constructive com￾ments have helped shape the development of this project throughout. We would also like to thank

the authors for the dedication, skill and hard work they put into making this project a reality.

xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Introduction

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Introduction

This book sets out to explore the field of documentary production and documentary theory

in ways relevant to contemporary hybrid documentary filmmaking. In doing so, we draw on

the body of knowledge and experience that has been built up by academics and documentary

filmmakers over the last 100 years. We also strive to be different from other books about docu￾mentary production and to capture the ways in which documentary is currently being trans￾formed, in its content, audience, production, financing and distribution.

Creative Documentary: Theory and Practice has been edited by three authors, each with different

experiences and perspectives on the documentary form. Wilma de Jong teaches documentary

theory and practice in higher education and, prior to this, owned her own independent pro￾duction company for 14 years. Erik Knudsen is a filmmaker and teacher in higher education,

working across fiction and documentary, who also runs his own company. Jerry Rothwell is

a documentary director who has worked within television, interactive production and cinema,

whose work also draws on his experience of participatory and community arts practices. Together,

we try to build a portrait of the ways in which documentary is changing and propose approaches

to filmmaking which combine both theory and practice. We hope that, by bringing together

these different perspectives in a single book, we manage to capture the diverse, often fragmented

and sometimes opposing practices that comprise contemporary documentary production.

The book is intended for students and filmmakers in the early stages of their careers. We intend

to equip readers with the ideas, methods and information that will support critical documentary

making, an approach that both understands the contemporary institutional, practical and finan￾cial contexts for documentary production, and which encourage innovation and originality.

This is not a book about production technology, about particular equipment or software.

Digital technologies are developing so quickly that such information quickly loses its relevance.

However, one of our core aims is to address the impact of digital technologies on the production

process, on the documentary film text and on distribution.

Our era has been described as an ‘age of narrative chaos’. The internet and digitisation have

not only transformed film consumption patterns and production methods, but have also

demanded new, non-linear and interactive storytelling techniques. In the age of YouTube

and web streaming, many people’s experience of documentary material is in the form of short

clips, snapshots of events or opinions, and an audience’s journey through a documentary

text may no longer have a set chronological path. Documentary makers have also embraced

these new platforms, so whilst we address classic realist narratives, we also explore emerging

narrative forms.

Digitisation has also had an impact on more traditional documentary forms, for example on

archival films, by making many archives more readily available and resulting in a resurgence of

historical documentary that uses footage from the past.

The accessibility of digital technologies is also dissolving and reconfiguring the boundary

between subject and filmmaker. Today’s documentaries draw more frequently on self-shot mater￾ial by subjects, perhaps also favouring personal and autobiographical films by those who are

part of the events they are filming. Documentaries that deploy this more subjective approach

can be seen as a challenge to the disembodied knowledge and facts that classic documentary

discourse claimed to present. Instead, these films emphasise more uncertain, incomplete and

complex, unstable patterns of knowledge in our world.

These developments may also explain the increased emphasis on the ‘voice’ of a documentary

and the prevalence of strongly authored films. Documentary as a mediated representation of the

‘real’ always indicates a point of view on the world but in classic mainstream documentaries it

has tended to be hidden or denied – particularly in observational and expository documentaries.

2 INTRODUCTION

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