Essential Elements of Documentary Filmmaking page 1 of 12

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF
DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING
by Clifton Raphael, Jenks High School film teacher
Planning
 Choose a subject with visual variety and the opportunity to obtain a large amount
of b-roll (supplemental footage) and different kinds of b-roll shots.

 Make sure that the main story of your piece is unique in some way. Also ask
yourself, “Why would a viewer want to watch this piece? What will make the
viewer care about what’s going on in this piece?”

 Make sure that the main people you will be interviewing in your piece are
articulate, personable, and enthusiastic about being featured in your film.

 Look at the pieces appearing on jpscinema.com, especially the ones at the top of
the “Cinema Plus” playlist. Ask yourself if the piece you’re considering will be
similar in quality and interest-level to the pieces appearing on our web site or on
the OETA program “Behind the Lens with Oklahoma’s Future Filmmakers.”

Interviewing
 Avoid yes-or-no questions. Ask open-ended questions instead. For instance,
instead of asking “Do you like sports?” ask “What sports do you like and why?”

 Ask follow-up questions. A follow-up question is a question based on the answer

that your interview subject gave to your last question. Example: Interviewer:
“What do you do for fun after school?” Interview subject: “I play piano.”
Possible interviewer follow-up questions: “Why do you like playing piano?”
“How long have you played piano?” “Why is piano more fun for you than, say,
playing video games or surfing the Internet?”

 Ask questions that focus on these three things: the reasons why people do things,
the implications of the things people do (example: “How has your involvement
in sports affected your friendships?”), and how their lives have been changed by a
particular activity or experience.

 Focus on what makes the person profiled in your piece unique. What sets this
person apart from other people?

 Always ask yourself the question “Why should anyone care about this piece?
What can I shoot in this piece and what interview questions can I ask that will
make people care about this piece?”
 Essential Elements of Documentary Filmmaking page 2 of 12

Production values and shot composition

 How you frame or “compose” your shot (position your interview subjects and the
important people and objects in your scenes) is a “production value.”
 Other production values include lighting, focus, choice of shots, shot angles (for
instance, low-angle or high-angle), and shot steadiness.
 Strong production values encourage viewers to feel that they’re in the hands of a
professional filmmaker.

Headroom
The amount of space between
the top of a person’s head and
the top of the video frame is
called “headroom.” The
amount here is nearly ideal
(there’s just a smidgen too
much). Don’t include much
more than this—
it’s the mark of an amateur!

 It’s important to include only the minimal amount of headroom in an interview

shot. The tighter a shot of a person is, the less headroom you need.

 In close-up shots (and extreme close-ups), the shot usually looks better with no
headroom at all. In a close-up, you generally cut off the top of the shot at or near
the top of the person’s forehead and the bottom of the shot at or near the person’s
chin. That way, the viewer can concentrate on the interview subject’s expression
and emotions—since the shot is highlighting the person’s eyes and mouth.

Close-up
(film term)
or
Tight shot
(TV term)

When framing a shot this

tight, it’s preferable to
completely lose the
headroom.

Note: All photo illustrations are direct frame captures from Jenks High School student
documentary films.
© 2015 Jenks Public Schools
 Essential Elements of Documentary Filmmaking page 3 of 12

 When shooting an interview, tighten or widen your shot from one question to
another. That way, when you’re editing interview shots into your piece, you’ll
have visual variety from one shot to another.

For example, start with:

Then, while the person conducting the interview is asking the next
question, the camera operator re-frames tighter (or vice-versa—
start tight, then go wider):

Lead (pronounced LEED) room

 Lead room is the space to the side of the interviewee’s face.
 If a person is looking to the left (from the viewer or camera perspective), then
there should be more space on the left of the screen than there is on the right.
 If the person being interviewed is looking to the right (from the viewer’s
perspective), then there should be more space on the right side of the screen than
on the left.
 Essential Elements of Documentary Filmmaking page 4 of 12

Lead room
In this example (from a short
documentary featuring the
deadCenter Film Festival’s
Lance McDaniel), since he’s
facing right, the camera
operator has correctly
included more room on the
right side of the frame
(though it’s just a tiny bit too
much).

Eye level and eye direction

 The interview subject should be looking slightly to the side of the camera.
 The interview subject’s eyes should be at the same level as the camera lens.
 In order to make sure that eye level and direction are correct, the member of your
team conducting the interview should stand approximately one foot to the side of
the camera; this interviewer should crouch or sit so that his or her eyes are exactly
at the level of the camera’s lens.

Eye level &

eye direction
Good eye direction and eye level
in this interview shot of
deadCenter’s Kim Haywood,
but…there’s too much headroom
and not enough lead room.
 Essential Elements of Documentary Filmmaking page 5 of 12

Interview backgrounds
 Try to make your interview background interesting, without distracting too much
from the person being interviewed. One way to accomplish this is to position the
interview subject’s chair at a distance from the background, so that the
background will be a little bit out-of-focus. You can have activity going on
behind the person being interviewed—just make sure that it relates in some way
to what they’re being interviewed about. For instance, if you’re interviewing the
quarterback of the football team, you wouldn’t want to see soccer players on a
field in the background.
 Avoid placing your interview subject against a dull or ugly background.

So…
Good background (from a piece about girls’ volleyball):

And…
Bad—no, make that terrible!—background:

To add insult to injury, there’s also too much headroom here, not enough lead room (he’s too
centered; there should be more room on the left side of the frame), and he’s looking too far
away from the camera.
 Essential Elements of Documentary Filmmaking page 6 of 12

Another example of a good background—and it’s relevant to the

subject, a short documentary about water levels in the Arkansas
River. The headroom, lead room, eye direction and eye level are
all pretty good here too:

Focus
 Focus is used to direct the viewer’s attention to a particular person or thing in
your shot.
 Editing programs will often allow you to fix, or at least lessen, problems with
your shot. For example, if you didn’t light your shot properly or use your
camera’s iris correctly, your shot may be too dark. The higher-end programs—
such as Avid, Final Cut, or Adobe Premiere—have video effects (usually
contained within a filter or filter set called “Color Correction”) that will help
brighten the shot. However, especially when shooting high-definition (HD)
video, it’s tougher to fix focus problems in post (short for post production, which
essentially means the work that’s done after all of the shooting—often referred to
as “principal photography”—for a film has been completed).
 It’s especially important to make sure that your interview subject is in focus when
filming your interview shots.

Manual focus on interviews

Some cameras you may have used—
such as DSLRs or smart-phone
cameras—have the ability to find the
face in a shot and automatically focus
on it.
Many high-end video cameras, such
as the Panasonic AG-AC90
and Sony EX-1, do not. For cameras
such as these, be sure to switch to
manual focus, then zoom in as far as
you can on your subject’s face, being
sure to include the person’s eye
(since that’s usually the part of the
face of greatest visual interest).
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Racking focus
After switching to manual focus
and zooming in as far as you can
on the person’s face, grab the
focus ring (usually the largest ring
located closest to the lens itself)
and move the ring to the left until
the image is out of focus then to
the right through the point where
the image is in focus until it’s out
of focus again to the right. This
process of changing focus is called
“racking focus.”

Achieving sharp focus

Continue moving the ring left and
right in smaller increments until
you find the “sweet spot” in the
middle where the image is
perfectly in focus.
(Turning on a camera feature
called “peaking” or “focus assist”
can be helpful. This feature will
highlight in color the edges of
what’s in focus.)

Then pull out to frame your shot properly:

But be careful! Don’t switch back to automatic focus. If you do, then the video camera’s
focus sensor may refocus on the background—since for cameras without “floating”
sensors, this sensor is often located in the center of the frame. The result can be a shot
where the background is in focus instead:
 Essential Elements of Documentary Filmmaking page 8 of 12
B-roll
 B-roll is the supporting footage that’s not your a-roll (a-roll consists of your
interview shots).
 Generally, it’s more visually interesting for a viewer to watch b-roll than to watch
an a-roll shot (sometimes called a “head shot”) of an interview subject talking.
Exceptions to this “rule” include when the interview subject shows emotion—
which can include sadness, excitement, joy, or even just passion for what he or
she is talking about.
 Generally (there are some interesting professionally produced exceptions to this),
b-roll should contain a mix of wide (a.k.a. “long”) shots, medium shots, tight
shots (a.k.a. “close-ups”) and OTS (over-the-shoulder) shots.

A close-up
Instead of using a
medium shot of the
makeup artist’s face,
the filmmaker chose
the close-up to force
our attention on the
“burn wound” she’s
creating.

Another close-up
By positioning the elf at a
distance from its background,
and the video camera at a
distance from the elf—then
zooming in to obtain the tight
shot—the filmmaker here has
also produced a nice soft-focus
background, an effect known as
“shallow depth of field.”

An interior establishing shot

The shot “establishes” where we
are—a school hallway.
 Essential Elements of Documentary Filmmaking page 9 of 12

An exterior establishing shot

The “glance-object” pair

 Whenever you show a person looking at someone or something—the “glance”
shot—be sure to either precede it or follow it with the “object” shot, which shows
what the person is looking at.
 The “glance” can be tight, medium, or (rarely) wide—as long as the viewer’s
attention is clearly drawn to the fact that the main person in the shot is looking at
something or someone.
 The “object” shot can be tight, medium, or wide—and if medium or wide, can
include the person whose tight glance we saw in the glance shot of the pair of shots.

The glance
We clearly see that
he’s looking at
something, but we
want—and need—
to know what.

The object
In this case, the “object”
shot of the pair includes
the boy again. But the
object shot can also be
(and often is) just a
close-up of the object
itself.
 Essential Elements of Documentary Filmmaking page 10 of 12

The “rack focus” shot

 In the section on focusing an interview shot, we discussed “racking focus” by
moving the focus ring manually (by hand).
 A filmmaker can deliberately include a rack focus in the edited piece to draw the
viewer’s attention from one important person or object in a b-roll shot to another.

Here the filmmaker racks focus to draw our attention from the young man in the
foreground…

…to the young woman in the background.

Steady shots
 Whenever possible, use a tripod when filming b-roll to make your shots steadier.
 If filming on tripod just isn’t feasible—for instance, when you need to move from
place to place or change angles quickly—be sure to observe proper handheld
technique.

Proper technique
Close the LCD monitor
and use the viewfinder
instead. Then become a
“human tripod” by
cradling the camera in
your hands while bracing
your elbows against your
chest or stomach.

Wrong technique
This is how your grandmother
filmed your school play, by
looking through the LCD
monitor rather than the
viewfinder. And how many
Emmys or Oscars did she win?
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REVIEW
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the shot composition
for the three interview shots below? (answers on the next page):
 Essential Elements of Documentary Filmmaking page 12 of 12

Good headroom.
Good lead room.
Good background (the
vintage film camera,
relevant to the subject).
Good eye level, but he’s
looking too far away from
the camera, so the
interviewer should have
positioned himself closer to
the side of the camera lens.

Pretty much ideal:

Good headroom.
Good lead room.
Excellent background (for
a profile piece on an
elementary school teacher).
Good eye level and eye
direction.

Too much headroom.

Not quite enough lead room.
A pretty drab background—the
plant helps break it up, though
be careful to frame background
objects so that they don’t look
like they’re either sticking out
of or growing from the back of
the interview subject’s head.
Fortunately, that’s not really
the case here.
Regarding eye direction and
eye level, the filmmaker has the
senator looking a little too far
from the camera, and a little
too low.