Who Forgot the Camera?

Staging, Style, Location - FIVE THINGS TO DO

1.     Establish an interview style and stick to it. Nothing wrecks a documentary quicker than interviews done in lots of different styles.

2.     Check for background elements that will look weird or wrong in the shot. Re-position and re-frame. The most famous example is this kangaroo in a TV news report.

3.     In cramped space, use practical lights. Only use film lights if you have to.

4.     Walk-and-talk interviews. Makes sure the DoP wears a belt. What else would yo hold onto whilst guiding her/him backwards?

5.     Remind interviewees to avoid wearing checks and stripes in clothing. Curse you, Burberry.

When it comes to film-making, the Movie Medic and the Documentary Doc are always right. Maybe. Sometimes.

The Art of the Interview-  FIVE THINGS NOT TO DO

1. Do not chat to your interviewees beforehand about how nervous or inexperienced you are. They will lose confidence in you.

2. It’s not an interrogation or a monologue. It’s a conversation.

3. Never break eye contact.

4. Do not over-manage the interview. Listen to your interviewee.

5. Do not talk over the interviewee.

The Movie Medic on Unintended Documentary Hairdos

When it comes to film-making, the Movie Medic and the Documentary Doc are always right. Maybe. Sometimes.

Planning a documentary Interview 1.  Be polite. At all times. 2.  But be skeptical. Sometimes a story is too good to be true. 3.  Keep notes. Add date, time, location. Also physical description, age and gender. 4.  Power supply and outlets. Make a note of what’s available. 5.  Be persistent but accommodating. Never give up.

Where Not To Shoot A Documentary Interview #1

When it comes to film-making, the Movie Medic and the Documentary Doc are always right. Maybe. Sometimes.

Like Wile E. Coyote you’re just fine running in mid-air until you look down. It’s a long fall to the bottom of the canyon.  Believe me, I know.  I’ve witnessed it many times and done it myself many times.

Here’s a good one.

Once upon a time, my employer booked us into a fancy hotel in Manhattan.  Cool, we, the film crew, said.  And it was.  Cool and favoured by film crews, recording artists and so on.  We arrived, walked through the revolving doors, and immediately spotted another crew, from the same network as ourselves, sitting in the foyer’s comfy armchairs but looking very glum.

Turns out, they had arrived thirty minutes earlier and, like us, had their gear with them, the most valuable piece of which is, of course, the camera.  Now you don’t just keep the camera in sight at all times, someone, usually the AC (Assistant Cameraman), keeps a hold of it at all times.  Even on a flight, the camera goes no further than the overhead storage; it never goes in the hold.  Anyway, they arrived, walked up to the busy hotel reception desk and started to fill out their registration forms.  In order to write, the AC placed the camera between his feet.  Thirty seconds later, form completed, he reached down for it.  And reached.  And reached....  It was gone. 

In all the activity, no one noticed the thief slip the camera out from between the AC’s legs.  And, in a hotel where film crews come and go all the time, the doorman thought nothing of someone walking out onto the street carrying £30,000 plus of camera. 

The AC raced outside in pursuit, but too late.  The thief was gone.  Poor lad.  It could happen to any of us.

On Monday 16th April, The Guardian ran a double-page interview with Sergey Brin, billionaire co-founder of Google.  In the article, Brin attacked fellow Internet giants Facebook and Apple for restricting the flow of information into his search engine and criticised the online censorship imposed by nation states like China.

Whilst reading the piece, I began to feel a little uneasy about its sanctimonious tone and the uncritical nature of Ian Katz’s interview.  Why?  Because, back in January, whist researching stories about con artists, I stumbled across a newspaper article about the sentencing of a convicted conman who had assisted the FBI in an undercover sting operation.  The target of their sting was Google's involvement in promoting online pharmacies and their illegal trade in prescription drugs.  It is one hell of a good story.  The Feds claim Brin’s partner, Larry Page, was caught advising the con artist on how to circumvent the rules Google put in place to block illegal online pharmacies.  Last summer, Google paid a $500 million fine in an out-of-court settlement to make impending criminal charges go away.  It is one of the largest fines in history.

Now I couldn’t immediately recall all this detail, so thought I’d refresh my memory.  I went online – to The Guardian – and did a search to see what it, the most new media obsessed newspaper in the UK, had written about this. 

How many stories did I find? 

None. 

You can see for yourself.

Online searching is not a precise science, so I tried as many variations on the keywords as I could come up.  Still nothing.  Here's another one:

I switched to Google.  I got a few hits on the main web search, but on their specialist news search engine?  Nothing.  Nor with any variation of the search string.  

A few completely unrelated news stories did occasionally pop up. Here's one example:

This was starting to smell of self-censorship, the very thing Brin was criticising his rivals about.  To test that suspicion, I moved onto archrival Microsoft’s Bing search engine.  And Bing!  I got hits, lots of them.  And that was whilst using the very same search criteria that The Guardian and Google failed with. Compare this screenshot with those above:

Is Google News censoring searches that might embarrass its founders?  It's starting to look like it. 

If so, it stinks.

That’s bad enough but there’s another angle to this.  When the story broke last summer, lots of US newspapers ran the wire service copy.  In addition, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) did an excellent job of reporting the story.  They are international titles, journalistic big hitters.  So why didn’t other giants follow their example and print this story? Why didn’t the self-righteous defender of Internet freedom, The Guardian, report all this sleazy online dealing?  Just look at the searches I’ve used online in the last couple of days, all using keywords extracted from Forbes and the WSJ.  Any one of them would fire up my moribund journalistic instincts, so why not working journalists?

Keyword string:

+ Black market  (Always good copy) + Larry Page  (Billionaire with a brain the size of planet, irresistible) + Illegal pharmaceuticals  (Every news editor loves a Viagra and steroid story) + Conman (By this stage, sirens should be whooping inside a journo’s head) + FBI undercover sting (now the flashing lights start as well) + Google  (The highest profile corporation in the world.  Hold the front page!) + Half a billion dollars  (Even for Google, that’s more than loose change) + Out-of-court settlement (Shades of sleazy dealing.  Defcon Five for any self-respecting journalist) + Do No Evil  (Google’s vaunted public stance. Actually, it is a little different but it's still close enough that it doesn’t matter.  It's a journalistic open goal waiting for someone to tap the ball in). 

With such slimy hypocrisy on display, the press should have been storming Google’s barricades en masse.  Did anyone hold the front page?  Hardly.  You can see for yourselves what my online searches turned up.  However, still sceptical that there was anything to this, I decided to crosscheck the story on the BBC News website.  Surely the largest newsgathering organisation in the world would have done this story to death?  After all, led by Rory Cellan-Jones, they have more new technology reporters than an Internet café has hackers. 

What did I find?

Nothing. 

I won't bore you with all the permutations, here's one example:

It’s not as if they ignore Google.  A search using ‘Google’ on their news website turned up 2,036 hits on Tuesday.  That same day, the BBC reported extensively the $25,000 fine handed down to Google for obstructing an investigation of their Street View setup.  The Guardian did the same.  Yes, Google fined $25,000 gets lots of coverage, but $500,000,000, a sum twenty thousand times greater, does not.  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I don't want to single out the BBC and Guardian alone. Last summer, this story received a decent amount of regional coverage in the States plus in Forbes and the WSJ. Where was everyone else? They even had a second chance to report it this January when the conman was sentenced. None did so.

Let me put it another way.  Is there a journalist in the world who would not understand the newsworthiness of this story?  I don’t think so.  So the question is, why, save the already mentioned exceptions, was the story ignored?  I’m sure some journalists tried.  I would have.  But why spike such a juicy story?  Is it laziness?  Is it an unconscious desire to give Google the Internet equivalent of an Emperor’s new clothes parade?  I have no idea.  There was certainly no major news story running on either of the dates that could have justified not reporting this. 

It baffles me but it doesn't surprise me. Sometimes it is amazing what never gets reported. 

Flailing around whilst trying to get to grips with the economics of documentaries at the box office I noticed in the data that the some productions reported film budgets.  Here the figures are problematic.  Both IMDb and BOMO report budget totals, but only for about a third of the films.  Also, there is no straightforward way of checking the figures are accurate.  And there are way too many suspiciously round figures.  With that in mind, here they are (a higher res pdf is here):

You can see for yourself the crazy spread of budget totals. Super Size Me at $65K surely only reflects above the line costs.  Preparing the deliverables alone would have cost at least $100K.  At the other end of the scale, Capitalism: A Love Story comes in at what looks to me like a wildly over-priced $20million.  I do believe the total for Winged Migration.  It is a remarkable film and a technical triumph, but also an eyewateringly expensive film to make. 

What can we make of all this?  Not a great deal when it comes to ROI, although what is interesting is the spread of chart positions.  If nothing else, it hints that size of profit does not necessarily equal size of box office.

Some words of warning.  If you are trying to raise finance for your documentary, using this article as evidence will probably not impress reliable sales agents or sales companies.   They openly admit they do not understand the genre and will only take you on if you have finished the film.  There may be exceptions to this but I haven’t met one.   I can understand their position.  They too have to make subjective decisions but ones that affect their livelihoods.  Why take a risk?  Another way of looking at it was put to me by a film financier when I discussed this research with him.  “Say I have $20 million a year to invest, what am I going to do?” he said.  “Invest in twenty $1 million documentaries over which I will not be able to keep control, or one film costing the entire amount into which I can put all my energy to make sure it delivers a return?  The answer is obvious.”

What then are we left with?   I take many things from this research.  It shows a broad range of sub-genres attracted, and continues to attract, large audiences.  At the top there is no dilution effect. Decade-by-decade, the number of successful documentaries is expanding and box office takings have kept pace.  Big budgets are not a guarantee of success, either in audience or return on investment.   And it is good to know that not only the big names make money.  If you have a film that appeals to moviegoers worldwide, you can do very well.  As ever, it comes down to the strength of your story.

Setting a documentary feature film production into motion, I had one of those Wile E. Coyote moments.  I ran off the cliff.  The trick is not to look down.  I did.  This is Part III of what I saw.   Further revelations came when I broke down the Top 100 down by sub-genre.  Again, this is very subjective.  For example, one person’s war documentary is another’s political film, is another’s social issue and so on.  It is confusing.  So, apart from the most clear-cut exceptions, I rounded up most of the political, environmental and campaigning films and corralled them into a current affairs category (it’s a long-time BBC designation that serves very well as a catch-all).  Here’s the Top 100 broken down by sub-genre and then by those genre’s share of box office:

           Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock have to take a lot of the credit for the huge chunk of box office swallowed up by the current affairs sub-genre, but its success is not because of their films alone.  There are fourteen movies in there, the same number as in the music sub-genre   I expected sport documentaries would do well, but this category is the big underachiever; possibly because US sports film do not travel well and soccer films have limited appeal in the US.  There are plenty of them in the top 100 but they tend be low-ranking.  The over-achieving categories are natural history and mysteries.  The former is no real surprise.  Wildlife films have a global reach and easily overcome language barriers.  The latter reflects the Seventies enthusiasm for Eric von Daniken, Noah’s Ark, and the mysteries of Ancient Egypt. I am sure some of you are dying to know what’s in the fake genre.  It is Catfish from 2010, which many think is a beautifully constructed romance disguised as a documentary.  When I saw it I liked this film, but almost from the first minute was questioning how it could have been filmed without staging the whole story.  Yet there is no advantage whatsoever in pretending it is a documentary.  Should I have dumped it early on along with Jackass I, II and III?  Maybe, but it is a lovely little film and the jury is still out on its authenticity.  For the time being it stays. Natural history aside, most of these films could be made for less $2 million including delivering multi-format prints to distributors etc.  Spend the same money on a low budget indie-drama and would you get box office like this?  It would be interesting to find out.  Maybe that’s for another post, but as I’m talking about income again, in Part IV – Who Are They Kidding? -  I’ll have a look at return on investment (ROI) which is a film’s box office divided by how much it cost to make.  

Here's a link to a pdf of the Top 100.  Here's the Top 100 by sub-genre and by decade of production.

Lightworks, the original NLE, is back from the dead.  And it's free.

http://news.creativecow.net/story/868546

Living proof that if you stick around in this industry long enough, what goes around, comes around. 

I just hope that they're going to supply it with that really cool Steenbeck style controller.  It hugely reduced the risk of RSI.

When I realized how woefully ignorant I was about the documentary feature film market, I decided to do some research into it.  Now, remember that conventional wisdom says this genre, with a few exceptions, does not deliver at the box office, never has done, and was not worth the investment.  Once I had stripped out the IMAX and live performance films which skew the IMDb's listings, I was left with a meagre selection.  A mere fifty-five seemed too small a sample to do all this analysis, so I dug further down into the IMDb rankings until I had a Top 100 that matched my criteria.  I decided to break this list down by decade of production, by sub-genre (social issue, music, natural history etc.) and by return on investment. 

It is always a good idea to compare your information against another source, so I crosschecked the IMDb list against Box Office Mojo’s chart.  IMDb bought BOMO a few years ago, but, luckily for me, BOMO’s definition of documentary matches mine much more closely.  Only one IMAX film (Born to Be Wild and one performance film (Martin Scorcese’s Shine A Light) snuck in their Top 100, the rest are standard documentaries.  Here’s how BOMOs doc’s match up against the IMDb.

Conventional Wisdom

Recently, more than a few Wile E. Coyote in mid-air moments happened to me when, after twenty years of making documentaries for TV, I decided to find out how to produce a feature length documentary movie.   Coming from the sheltered world of TV production, learning how films are financed has been a steep learning curve, one I've yet to reach the top of.