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TRANSCRIPT

A Micro-Documentary is a short video that can amplify or bring awareness to an issue or voice, raise money for a particular cause, or preserve a specific period of time.

When planning out your microdoc, think about what you want your mission statement to be, or what you want your audience to be inspired to do after watching it.   

Let’s say you are doing a mini documentary on soccer, more specifically how soccer helps young kids feel a part of a team.

You will want to make sure you have interviewed a few key people, asking them all similar questions to support your narrative. All of these talking points will end up being called your A-Roll.

The other part of the mini documentary is shooting b-roll.

B-roll is secondary or supplemental video footage that will be shown over your A-Roll audio., , It can be used to compliment or provide context to the story being told since only seeing a talking head in a documentary can be pretty boring for viewers to watch.

Here are some ideas on how to get great b-roll for your mini documentary.

As you’re doing each interview think about the answers they’re giving you and start coming up  with an initial list of B-Roll shots that would help support their answers visually.

Oftentimes getting shots of the interviewee interacting, and engaging in their environment or the environment they’re discussing can be very helpful. Get footage of your subject walking in and out, and doing any of the activities that they talk about during their interview.

Get b-roll based on the conversation with the subject after the interview. You may need to set up a time up for a shot where you can get action footage of the topic and subject to reinforce the narrative.

Think cinematically. Go out to relevant locations, shoot atmospheric establishing shots with movement, stage objects in a space and video them from a variety of different camera angles. Use panning, tilting and movement on stationary objects to create more engaging shots.

Record each shot for at least 10-15 seconds, to give you a variety of styles to choose from when editing.

Sometimes you may not be able to get all the b-roll you need, especially when your micro documentary has a historical overtone. Consider checking out some of the stock footage and archival sites to use when needing to fill in your b-roll story gaps. Be mindful that some stock footage sites will charge you to use their footage.

Some shots, particularly action shots may be longer than 10-15 seconds, you can split up the footage later in post by first showing the action shot, switching to the person talking about the action or subject and then back to the b-roll.

These are the fundamentals of making a micro-documentary. Be aware of what your goal for this short doc will be, get the narration and interviews you need to tell your story. And record a whole bunch of b-roll in different, creative cinematic ways to reinforce your narrative.

In the next video we will talk about how you put all of this footage together to create your own micro-documentary.