How to plan a documentary shoot- A step by step guide to pre-production

How to plan a documentary shoot- Before you touch your camera know that the battle of making a great Documentary is won and lost in pre-production. Having a good pre-production process could be the difference in you creating an average film or a great film. Planning your shots with a shot list and a storyboard will save you a ton of time on set and help you efficiently produce great content.

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My Documentary Lut pack
https://www.alexzarfati.com/luts

Contents of this video

00:00-Intro

00:35- Software I use

02:17- Mood Board

04:29- Storyboard

06:04- Shot list

07:15- Shoot Schedule

08:58- Interview questions











So this is my project board, this is where everything lives for this project. Now I was hired to produce this project by a client so this was a great tool to show her what we were working on and sharing everything with her keeping us all on the same page with her and my crew.

So to start with we have the mood board, Episode storyboards, Shot schedule Shot list, Interview questions, gear needed and cost breakdown.

Lets jump into the moldboard, the goal of the mood board is to create an overall sense of style for the project. So I wanted to show the different Interview looks we could go for, here you have a wide and closeup of of this kind of look and then I wanted to also show different angles that would express different emotions.

I also know from experience that not every interview is going to be able to be like a formal sit down so in the event that we want to do something quick on the fly outside I though that this would be good look.
Now moving to the cinematography my goal is to shoot early in the morning and at sunset so we get that golden hour look and we use the sun to backlight our subject.

These are the kinds of establishing shots that we would need to get, so you have these nice wide shots showing the property and you also have drone shots.
Next we have episode storyboards, and just a bit of background on the project, this project is about a woman who sold her business to buy a farm and run a high end bed and breakfast that focuses on the strength of the vegetarian cuisine that they will offer and she is the chef and ceo so this project is about her and her journey during this project.

So that being said, cooking and showing this journey was the main focus of the series. So I thought it would be a really cool Idea to start the series with cinematic shots of a dish thats realy important to her and have her Dialogue from an interview play over that B-roll.
Now this is a good point to talk about the format of the series and what is a format? A format is basically how each episode is structured, and the format that we created was basically you always have some sort of cinematic intro with dialogue or VO and then we move into the shows title sequence.
Then from there we jump into whatever were doing that day, sometimes it will be gardening or building something but in this case its going right into showing you this crapes recipe,
Then after that we got into the plan of this whole place talking about what this farm is and what its about and then Mary is her name she shows us around. From there she finishes making the crapes, the family eats breakfast and then we end with an interview of Mary talking about herself, her family.
But pretty much what i’ll do is create a storyboard for every episode so me and the client have a good idea for what the edit is going to look like.
And of course things might change in the edit or even while were on set but I dont have to guess while im on set and this gives me a really good idea of what I need to be able to accomplish an 8 episode docuseries.
Moving into the shotlist, basically the shotlist is a really detailed version of the storyboard and I treat it as a checklist of shots I need to make sure I get so I can put together the edit.
So as you can see I broke this out into sections, slow mot intro so I can get all my slow mo shots out of the way and then Breaking down the recipe section to the plan into the Mary shows us around section into the Family eats section.
Now the important information that I have down here is a description of the shot, the focal length of the lens and the frame rate.
And I make sure that I get that down for each shot so while im on set again its just about execution not about trying to think or figure out what to do, all the creativity is done before i even touch a camera.

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
The last thing that I do is right out all of the interview questions that I have for every person that I’m going to interview and I break out the questions by category, now if you want to see how I create my interview questions check out this link right here.

Now our goal was to shoot 8 episodes in 9 production days with the last day of production to be the interview day.