These are the essential elements of documentary storytelling:
- Engage the audience with a present time story before revealing the back-story.
- The present time story engages the audience through the beginning, middle and end of the film.
- Define the Palette of Tones: How deep; how dark; how real; how close (POV).
- Define the dilemma for the audience (Dilemma is the choice between two things with positive values).
- Don’t punish the audience with your research: only include essential information.
- Narratives function through core triangles of characters: the audience in documentaries function as one of the characters in the core triangle.
- Relationships reveal vulnerability and raise the stakes for the audience; the relationship arcs are catalyzed in Act 2, and correspond to the Descent Stage of the Hero’s Journey.
- Documentary filmmakers are on a Journey to find the story beneath the story that wants to be told
- Judgment (of characters, events, and situations) freezes the creative flow of the story.
- Documentaries can present a wide range of emotional experiences for the audience. For the main character in your film, ask what is the angriest, saddest, most proud, ashamed, I love you, joyful, luckiest moments in their life?
- First clarify the archetypal function and design of the narrative then identify the genre(s) and understand the rules of the genre(s).
- Structure is based on the order in which the audience learns and feels things
- The documentary story continues after the film ends with participation by the audience in the “things that matter.”
- Solution-based storytelling is more engaging for the audience than problem-based storytelling. If issues are presented without potential solutions or positive directions, the audience is often left with a feeling of impotent rage.
- Establish the Location and allow it to reflect the emotional states of the audience while watching the film.
- Talking Heads: Main characters telling stories about their life is more interesting than when they make abstract, theoretical or conceptual comments. Let your characters “act out” their stories while they tell them.
