Introduction: The introduction should captivate your audience and make them want to watch more. Here is a great opportunity to tell your audience what your documentary film is about and what you will be including in the main section. Most documentaries have a short introduction at the start to introduce the topic, the characters, and subjects.
Your documentary could include a short introduction with a voiceover to introduce the audience to the making of the film. The introduction will also include clips from interviews from the main section to introduce the cast and crew from the film. This gives the audience a little taste of what is to come and what to expect.
The body or main section: This is where you tell your story with your interviews, voiceovers, and video clips. It’s an opportunity to explore your topic and to pick out the interesting information or the moments you would like to present to your audience. It’s also a chance to get to know the characters and understand why they’re involved in your info film.
In one crew’s documentary, the main section will include interviews from the cast and crew of the film, video clips to go with the interviews, and facts and information about how the film was made and what inspired the story. The aim here is to present information that the audience may not know and to promote the film.
Conclusion: Ending your film with a conclusion can help the audience members make up their minds about the information you’ve presented. Your conclusion summarizes the main points covered in your film and brings the story to a natural end, leaving your audience feeling informed. This may include the answer to a question asked in the introduction, or the end of a journey started in the introduction.
You may wish to include information about the subject at the end of your info film with a call to action, which is a way the audience can respond to what they have just watched. Calls to action are often used with charity or promotional films that leave information at the end. The conclusion for one crew’s documentary includes some final quotes from the film crew and cast about how they felt about making the film and what they enjoyed most.
Always aim for the audience to…
- Pay attention from the very beginning.
- Engage in the narrative to the very end.
- Ask a question of the work.
- Turn that question onto themselves.
- Feel changed after experiencing the narrative – in some way.
The length of a mini documentary might be anywhere from 2-25 minutes. A mini-documentary might also be referred to as a short film or mini-doc.
Mini-documentaries are a fantastic way to get a message or story across in a limited amount of time. A common way that mini documentaries are used is to share the story/mission of a non-profit organization or business.
A technique that can be successful within the time constraints imposed by the micro-documentary format is to make a strong personal connection or statement up front or present a powerful set of images connected to a single theme with your focus on a single character, story, event, place, or process. Then, from there, there are several editorial frameworks you can use depending on your approach:
- If you are doing an issue-oriented micro-doc, expose the issue and what you’ve learned is necessary to address the issue, then, use a specific person or organization’s work as examples of that solution, all tied together by a single theme, or
- If you’re doing a personal profile, I suggest showing the person working and the process they go through to accomplish their work, followed by the person’s (and possibly a third party’s) reflections on what the work means to them or what they learned from it, all tied together by a single theme, or
- If you are having someone tell a specific story about something they did or made, show the person talking and use cutaways to illustrate the story they are telling, have the person tell the story in a concise manner and use your questions to evoke alternative sound bites to make your editing easier. Make sure you get some reflections on the part of the storyteller which will help you achieve closure, a good short story is one or more anecdotes, each followed by a moment of reflection, all connected in some manner, or
- If you want to convey an impression rather than tell a story or convey a message in a conventional manner, you can take the viewer on an audiovisual journey crafted with a sequence and/or collage of images based your observation of a single place, a specific event, or a particular process, without a central character to drive the story, yet tied together by a unified theme.
Each of these frameworks can be effective in helping you structure a compelling micro-documentary. There are other possible variations, you can mix and match as needed, however, the key challenge to keep in mind you have accomplish your goals in a short amount of time, so your video must be tightly structured in terms of the ideas, events, or issues covered and the number of characters driving the story. There is little or no time available for subplots, secondary characters, and backstory.
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