WASHINGTON — Midway through the quarter, I set out to complete a short documentary about the Wounded Warrior Amputee Softball Team. I intended the piece to be a behind-the-scenes, in-depth look at a team of Army and Marine veterans who lost limbs while fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. It was my chance to stretch my videography legs and create a piece that exposed viewers to more emotion than a standard 1:30 news package.
I spent four days with the team when they traveled to Washington, Pennsylvania, a small town outside of Pittsburgh, to play against a group of correctional officers from a maximum-security prison. Afterward, I spent approximately two weeks in “post-production,” first transcribing all my interviews and then editing the footage. The following are things I would recommend, based on my experience, to prepare for and complete production on a long-form video narrative:
1. Make all the necessary phone calls in advance. Before I left on the trip, I had compiled a detailed itinerary of where the team would be at all times so that I could plan my shoots accordingly. Find out who is willing to speak with you and try to arrange interviews ahead of time.
2. Get the OK to hit record before you leave the newsroom. Make sure you have explicit permission in advance to shoot at all the venues at which your subjects will be present . Some places may not let you shoot or they may have special restrictions that could alter your video plans.
3. Batteries. Memory Cards. Have them. Bring extra batteries and make sure you have memory cards with enough space for HD footage (which is a lot bigger than standard). Each of my interviews took about 4GB of space. I had almost 30 GB on flash cards along with the 90 GB available on the camera’s hard drive.
4. Do research and write your questions in advance. There’s one thing subjects/interviewees hate, and that is when you ask something they think you should already know. Make sure to do all your background research before shooting your interviews so that you know what to ask and have an idea of what angle to take and how to build your story.
5. Listen. If you do the research and write great questions (see above), new questions will materialize on the spot in response to their answers. Don’t be so rigid in your planning that a subject’s answers can’t veer the story in a direction you didn’t anticipate. Sometimes this can present an angle that is even more compelling.
6. Be alert for “sound bites.” I got a great tip from a fellow reporter about identifying sound bites as you hear them in the interview. When you hear something that you think would be good to use in your final piece, wait for the answer to finish, then place your hand directly over the lens so that the shot is completely blacked out for three seconds. When you’re scrubbing through video later, you’ll easily be able to identify the portions of the interview you thought should be included in your story. This helped me transcribe more efficiently, since I knew which portions of the video to focus on and which to ignore.
7. Watch the time. My interviews were so interesting that they lasted, well, much longer than I anticipated. It’s not fun to transcribe 30 minutes of a single interview so try to watch the time and be methodical in your questions. Don’t run longer than 30 minutes, it will annoy your interviewee and give you a headache when it’s time to log footage.
8. Get enough B-roll. This is self-explanatory. Get a lot of rich b-roll to cover your interviews. Wide-shots, medium-shots, tight-shots. Get. Them. All.
9. Music can set the mood. I knew from my media law class that I would not be able to use copyrighted music in the piece, but I wanted a soundtrack to help move the story. So I decided to see if any of my friends on Facebook composed music as a hobby and would be willing to produce some pieces for credit only. Thanks to just one Facebook status, I got a friend to write three pieces of music, each with a different tone to fit three different segments of my story. And I didn’t have to shell out a dime.
10. When in doubt, just edit. Don’t waste time trying to create the perfect editing plan in advance. It’s much more difficult and time-consuming to edit a cohesive longer narrative without a narration as opposed to a standard news package where you just find a few good sound bites and can write track to fill in the gaps of the story to move it along. When you feel like you’re not sure where to begin, just start with something. Start putting clips down on the timeline and the story will piece itself together as you develop an idea of the story arch in your mind. The piece will never edit itself, but if you have good interviews and enough b-roll, it will feel like it is.
11. Step away from the computer. Sometimes I would spend so many consecutive hours editing, that I lost track of the story altogether. Take some time, step away from the editing program and relax or do something else. Your mind will be much clearer and more focused the next time you return to tackling it.
12. Thank you goes a long way. Making a documentary or any long-form narrative video story doesn’t happen without the help or at least cooperation of several people. Thank them. Thank people who allowed you to take their time and to let you in on their lives.
Here’s a look at my first long-form video narrative about the Wounded Warriors: