Category Archives: Dear Documentary Filmmakers

Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Picking the right subjects to follow is so important. The ones in the film I’m watching are the right ones.

Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Two films in a row about the same exact topic? Really? sigh.

Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Next time, please try to have a point before making your film. Filming your search for one is not new or fun.

These tweets are about filmmakers doing their homework, being prepared, and making smart editorial decisions – largely before getting too far along into their projects.

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Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Please use subtitles instead of dubbing foreign languages with fake accents and emphatic “acting.” Please…

Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Next time, hire a good sound person so that I won’t have to hear background noise or dead air in every scene.

I’m grouping these two tweets loosely under “clarity.” The first involves a choice made to make an interview subject more or less accessible to larger audiences, while the second is more about a filmmaker’s resources and experience, but both have an impact on how the audience can understand what’s being said in the film.

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Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Sprinkling a dozen still photos amidst three dozen talking head shots does not make for an interesting film.

Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Your incessant narration is driving me to drink. Shut up already and let the images tell the story.

Dear Documentary Filmmakers: Having ponderous voiceover narration = bad idea. Having it delivered by inarticulate children = worse idea.

All three of these tweets basically relate to the same general idea – how the filmmaker chooses to reveal to the audience information s/he finds pertinent. In other words, exposition.

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In thinking about launching this blog, I knew I wanted to revisit the article I wrote for indieWIRE last summer which stemmed from my first month on Twitter. This was the first public place, outside of Facebook comments, where I was able to move beyond Twitter’s character restrictions and discuss my “Dear Documentary Filmmakers” series in more depth.

As I start up that series again, I’ll be expanding on new tweets here, so I encourage filmmakers to read the iW article again (or for the first time if you missed it last year). In my next few posts, I’ll follow up with additional thoughts on the advice featured there.