10 Rules for a Documentary

10 Rules for a Documentary 

1. Just like my previous project the first rule of documentaries is: Don't make a documentary make a movie. We have chosen to create a documentary not to talk and bore people but to tell a story! 
2. Don't tell the audience things they already know! When filming a documentary you do not need to tell the audience something they already know for example, do not tell me global warming is bad they know it's bad. When filming our documentary we tried out best to make sure that we did not include things that people know already. We might have slipped up once or twice where we said that young drivers are dangerous but the audience already know that.
3. A modern documentary sadly has been made into what looks like a college lecture, a lecture that is telling a story. This has to be done in a different way, you do not want to make a documentary boring because if it is boring who will watch it? We already know that people do not like to sit in lectures and be told things they already know so we need to make sure that the documentary is not the same. 
4. Too many documentaries feel old, people don't like to watch documentaries that look and feel like they have been filmed hundreds of years ago! Keep it fresh and in this century, which is what out documentary has done exactly. 
5. Stop being so serious, documentaries either are depressing or serious! No-one wants to be put down while watching something interesting. We have been told by Zoe that our documentary drags a lot and we should speed up the pace since our audience is young people and we do not want to bore them. 
6. Why don't we go after villains more often? Since we were focusing on young drivers being villains Zoe suggested that we would turn Alex's grandparents to villains because we expect them to be innocent but how where they driving when they were young or how do they drive now? That really turns heads and makes people think oh wow i would have never thought they would do that. 
7. It is important to make your films personal, while focusing on young drivers we wanted to make the documentary personal with Alex presenting it really touched on some key points of how Alex finds it very expensive to drive and how it is personal to him.
8. Pointing your cameras at the cameras, we want to show people why the mainstream media isn't telling them what is actually going on. We want to make sure the audience believes us.
9. Always include statistics. We do not want to bore our audience with statistics but just a little will go a long way. If you have no statistics in a documentary how can you prove the facts? 
10. Less is more! Edit. Cut. make it short and sweet! Zoe has also mentioned this to us, to cut our interviews and shots down to where its short and sweet because if we are talking for too long it starts to bore the audience once again. In the final edit we hope to make sure that this is done.

These were all inspired by Michael Moore