Developing Story Ideas in Documentary

COLLECTING of RAW MATERIALS

The seeker is the person committed to searching for meaning among the many baffling clues, hints, and details in life. When you examine your collection diligently, you will actually see the outlines of the collector, the shadowy Self that is implacably assembling what it needs to represent its own preoccupations, and nowhere more so than in a journal.

JOURNAL

Keep a journal and note anything that strikes you, no matter what its nature. This means always carrying a notebook and being willing to use it publicly and often. Rereading your journal becomes a journey through your most intense ideas and associations. The more you note what catches your eye, the nearer you move to your current themes and underlying preoccupations.

NEWSPAPERS & MAGAZINES

Newspapers are a cornucopia of the human condition at every level, from the trivial to the global. Local papers are particularly useful because the landscape and characters are accessible and reflect local economy, local conditions, and local idiosyncrasies. With every source, you have possible characters, situations, plots, and meanings to be found.

HISTORY

History doesn’t happen, it gets written. Look at why someone makes a record or why someone writes a historical overview, and you see not objective truth but someone’s interpretation and wish to mark or persuade. History is all about point of view that’s why they say that historians find what they look for.

MYTHS & LEGENDS

Legend is inauthentic history. By taking a real figure and examining the actuality of that person in relation to the legend, you can discover what humankind fashions out of the figures that catch public imagination.

FAMILY STORIES

All families have favorite stories that define special members. How a family explains and accommodates such eccentricities is a tale in itself. Family tales can be heroic or they can be very dark, but being oral history they are often vivid.

CHILDHOOD STORIES

Everyone emerges from childhood as from a war zone. If you did the creative identity exercise in the previous chapter, you surely wrote down several traumatic things that happened when you were a child and which have become thematic keys to your subsequent life.

SOCIAL SCIENCE & SOCIAL HISTORY

Social science and social history are excellent resources for documentarians. If one of your themes happens to be the way the poor are exploited, you would find excellent studies of farm, factory, domestic, and other workers. With each will be a bibliography to tell you what other studies have been done. The more modern your source, the bigger the bibliography. Many books now contain filmographies too.

FICTION

Don’t separate and discard fiction because you are working with actuality. Works of fiction are often very well observed and can give inspiring guidance in a very concentrated form.

For more information about it, you can read Directing The Documentary book that written by Michael Rabiger. It is a recommended book for the filmmakers.

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