I’ve taken a long break from tweeting/posting new entries in my “Dear Documentary Filmmakers” series, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been idle. Over the past several months, I’ve been busy watching a lot of documentaries, for various purposes, and a fair amount of these films have inspired a new cycle of DDFs which I’ll be expanding upon here. I should note once again that I never identify what films inspire my DDFs, nor for which entity I was considering them. I take pains to make them general because, more often than not, the issues I have with one doc show up in other films as well, so I’m not interested in singling out the shortcomings of a specific film or filmmaker.
As I’ve explained in the past, while there’s bound to be a certain amount of snark in these tips on occasion, ultimately, they’re meant to be instructive or at least to provide a much-needed reality check.
That brings us to today’s:
Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Your collection of random YouTube videos is not a doc. At least not a good one. Stop it.
I mean, really, this almost says it all, but let me briefly expand. In its five years of existence, YouTube has emerged primarily as a place for short form content. Some users have been successful at building followers by posting series – confessional or diary-like vlogs and the like. Yes, it’s in the realm of possibility that some talented filmmaker out there might be able to craft an intelligible documentary out of a series of shorter pieces originally posted to YouTube or a site like it. However, that’s not what I’ve been seeing – instead, neophyte (at least I hope so) filmmakers have simply burned a series of unconnected or loosely connected pieces together with absolutely no rhyme or reason (or maybe the reasoning is that if it’s feature length, it must be a feature?) on a DVD and submitted it as a “feature.” Doing something like this neither results in a feature, nor in a documentary, that is well-crafted or is likely to be seen outside the confines of YouTube. It betrays a lack of filmmaking skill and a lack of understanding of the kinds of projects that are typically considered by festivals or broadcasters. Plus, while it might be mildly amusing to watch Charlie biting my finger on YouTube for a minute, it would become incredibly tedious once expanded to feature length…
what (not) to doc 