Chapter 4: Pre-Production

Planning what you need, protecting the people who give it to you, and preparing to be surprised by both.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

Translate a narrative arc into a concrete visual and audio plan.
Identify the three basic footage types and plan how to obtain each one ethically.
Choose formal techniques deliberately, understanding the documentary modes they tend to create.
Plan camera, sound, and lighting choices that serve, and respect, the people on screen.
Draft a location plan and a participant agreement grounded in the Co-Creation Ethic.

4.1 Where Values Become Logistics

Pre-production is where your documentary stops being an idea and starts becoming a plan. It is also where your values stop being statements and become decisions. When will you film, and whose schedule does that serve? Where will you film, and who chose the place? Who is on your team? Whose perspectives are in the room when you decide what to shoot? Does anyone helping to shape the film share your participants’ experience, and are they in a position to influence it?

This is also the phase to look beyond the people at the center of your story. Who else should help shape the film: someone who shares your participant’s experience, a community partner, a collaborator whose perspective you lack? For a solo two-to-five-minute documentary, your team may be just you. That makes these questions more important, not less, because no one else is there to catch your blind spots. The planning documents in this chapter are structures for catching yourself:

The visual and audio plan keeps you accountable to the story.
The location plan keeps you accountable to your participant’s safety and comfort.
The participant agreement keeps you accountable to the values you named in Chapters 1 through 3.

Pre-production is also where you practice holding a plan loosely. Good documentary filmmakers plan rigorously and then follow what actually happens. Your shot list is a hypothesis about what footage will tell your story. Your location plan is a hypothesis about where that footage exists. Both will change in the field, and that is not failure. It is documentary filmmaking.

4.2 The Three Footage Types

Nearly every documentary is built from three basic kinds of footage. Knowing which you need, and when, keeps your shooting focused and your editing flexible.

The Three Footage Types
Type	What it is	Ethical weight
Interview	Your participant speaking directly: to camera, to you off camera, or in natural conversation. The main vehicle for testimony, reflection, and story.	The weight of your preparation is most concentrated here. Chapter 6 is devoted to it.
Observational / vérité	Your participant going about their life: working, moving, interacting. The camera witnesses rather than directs.	Requires the deepest relationship and the clearest consent, because it films the unguarded self.
B-roll / cutaways	Supporting footage that illustrates, gives context, or lets the edit breathe: places, objects, hands, textures.	Should reflect your participant’s actual world, not a generic or stereotyped picture of it.

Most short documentaries are built mainly from interview footage, supported by observational moments and b-roll. That last row deserves a second look. Generic b-roll is where stereotypes slip in most easily: the stock shot of a prison fence, the anonymous hands counting cash, the “bad neighborhood” seen through a car window. Ask your participant what images belong to their world. They will often name things you would never have thought to film.

4.3 Form Is a Choice: Techniques and Modes

Bill Nichols’s documentary modes describe the kinds of relationships a film builds among filmmaker, participants, and audience. The six modes, in brief:

Expository: makes an argument, often with narration, interviews, and illustrative footage.
Observational: watches events unfold with minimal intervention.
Participatory: makes the filmmaker’s encounter with participants visible.
Reflexive: draws attention to how the film itself was made.
Performative: foregrounds subjective, emotional, often first-person experience.
Poetic: organizes images and sound by rhythm, association, and mood rather than argument.

Modes are tendencies, not rules. Most documentaries mix several, and almost any technique can serve more than one mode depending on how it is used. The interview is the clearest example: cut to support a narrator’s argument, it reads as expository; with your questions and presence left in, the same footage reads as participatory.

Choose at least three or four techniques for your film deliberately, drawing from more than one category below. A film built only from talking heads and b-roll is making a narrower set of choices than one that combines, say, observational long takes, an associational montage, and a moment that acknowledges your presence as the maker.

A Short Menu of Techniques (after Nichols)
Category	Techniques, with the modes they most often serve
Voice and sound	Authoritative narration (expository) · first-person voiceover (performative, poetic) · audible interviewer questions (participatory) · synchronous location sound (observational) · ambient sound design (poetic) · strategic silence (poetic, performative)
Camera	Handheld, responsive camera (observational, participatory) · long takes (observational) · static, composed framing (expository, poetic) · direct address to the lens (participatory, reflexive) · filmmaker on camera (participatory, performative) · slow motion or time-lapse (poetic)
Editing and structure	Evidentiary montage that builds a claim (expository) · associational, rhythmic montage (poetic) · chronological or build-to-an-event structure (observational) · thematic structure (poetic, expository) · visible jump cuts (reflexive)
Visual materials	Archival or found footage (expository; reflexive when foregrounded) · photographs and stills (expository) · title cards (expository, reflexive) · reenactment (expository, performative) · animation (poetic, performative, reflexive)
Authorial presence	Showing the camera and crew (reflexive) · acknowledging the camera’s effect (reflexive, participatory) · the filmmaker–participant relationship on screen (participatory, performative) · filming the same people over a long period (participatory, observational)

Notice the last row. Choices about form are also choices about power. Leaving your questions audible, letting a participant address the camera directly, or showing the act of filming all make the relationship between maker and participant visible, which is one way the Co-Creation Ethic shows up in the film itself rather than only in your intentions.

Case Study: Prison and Time

Prison and Time, a seven-minute New York Times Op-Doc, is fully animated and has no interview footage at all. Formerly incarcerated writer Marvin Wade narrates his own words about how he used time itself to heal during a twenty-five-year sentence, while animator Evan Bode builds hand-drawn images around that testimony. The collaboration was organized by Project Mend.

The film blends nearly every mode at once: performative in Wade’s first-person voice, poetic in its drawn metaphors, reflexive in its deliberately rough, twelve-frames-per-second animation, which Bode has said mirrors the film’s theme of change happening incrementally. It is participatory, too, but not in Nichols’s classic sense: the collaboration between two artists from very different backgrounds is the Co-Creation Ethic operating across positionality.

The film also makes a quiet source decision. It refuses the usual visual archive of incarceration: no surveillance images, no stock shots of cells. Every image grows out of Wade’s testimony rather than the prison system’s own pictures of itself. The lesson: documentary ethics do not live only in the interview. They are form-agnostic, and they apply to every image you choose to use or refuse.

4.4 Camera, Sound, and the Phone in Your Pocket

This book is designed so you can make your film with consumer equipment, including a smartphone. A phone camera does not limit your documentary; it shapes your approach. Phones tend to create intimacy rather than distance. They are less intimidating to participants. They are always with you, which matters when the most important moment happens without warning. Simple equipment often produces better observational footage than an elaborate setup, because it changes the room less.

Sound comes first

Audiences will forgive imperfect images long before they forgive bad sound. If you can make one equipment investment, make it an inexpensive external microphone (a clip-on lavalier is ideal for interviews). Record in the quietest space available, turn off fans and air conditioning when you can, and keep the microphone close. Always test by recording a short clip and listening back before you begin.

Camera choices carry meaning

Where you place the camera tells the audience how to feel about the person in front of it:

Eye level suggests equality. It is the default for most documentary interviews, and for good reason.
A high angle, looking down, can make a person seem small or vulnerable.
A low angle, looking up, can make them seem powerful.
Wide shots place people in their environment; close-ups bring the audience into intimate contact with a face, a hand, a gesture.
A long telephoto lens from a distance compresses space and can feel like surveillance. Ask yourself whether the person knows they are being filmed.

None of these is right or wrong in itself. The point is to choose, and to ask whether your participant would recognize themselves, with dignity, in the frame you have chosen.

4.5 Lighting People Well

Lighting is never only technical. For most of the twentieth century, color film stocks and the reference cards used to calibrate them were designed around white skin. Communication scholar Lorna Roth’s research on these “Shirley cards,” named for the white women whose photos were the industry standard, shows how a technical norm made darker skin harder to photograph well for generations. Digital cameras inherited some of those assumptions. Lighting every participant with care is part of respecting their dignity on screen.

For darker skin tones in particular:

Use soft, diffused light. Large, soft sources (a window through a sheer curtain, a bounce off a white wall) create broad, flattering highlights instead of harsh hot spots.
Warm the image. Warm light, or a slightly warmer white balance, brings out color and avoids a gray or bluish cast.
Add fill. A second light or a reflector, especially a soft-silver one, lifts shadows and controls contrast.
Manage shine, not texture. A little moisturizer can bring out skin detail; blotting powder or a polarizing filter can control glare.
Watch the background and wardrobe. A bright window behind someone, or very white clothing, will push the camera to underexpose their face. Use a wall or diffusion to tame window light.
Expose for the face. On a phone, tap to set focus and exposure on your participant’s face and lock it.

4.6 Choosing Locations Together

Where you film matters visually, logistically, and ethically. A location shapes what your participant is willing to say, how comfortable they are on camera, and who might see or overhear what is being filmed. A kitchen table invites different stories than an office. A participant’s workplace may expose them to a supervisor’s attention. A community space may identify them to neighbors.

Decide where to film with your participant, not for them. Then think about everyone else who will appear in the frame. People in public spaces still have privacy interests, especially when your participant is identifiable and the community is small. As a general practice, film public spaces in ways that protect rather than expose, and use judgment about footage that could harm or identify people who have not agreed to be filmed.

From the Field: When the Camera Becomes Part of the Event

Barbara Kopple, making Harlan County, USA (1976) on a Kentucky miners’ picket line, has said she sometimes brought the camera even when she was out of film. Its presence alone did ethical and political work.

Clarissa’s Battle was built across seven years of organizing. The regular presence of my camera beside Clarissa Doutherd and the parent-led campaign drew media and public officials’ attention to work they might otherwise have ignored. The fact of being filmed shaped what became filmable. That is a power you should plan for: your camera will change the situations you film. Talk with your participants about whether, and how, they want it to.

4.7 The Participant Agreement

Standard industry release forms are written to protect filmmakers and distributors, not participants. A typical release asks a person to sign away rights to their image and words, permanently, in any medium. It says nothing about what the filmmaker owes in return.

A values-based participant agreement starts from a different place. It is a document of mutual accountability: it spells out what the participant is agreeing to, what the filmmaker is committing to, and what the participant has the right to change or withdraw. It is written in plain language the participant can actually read. And it is a living document: you draft it, review it together, invite changes, and revisit it as the film develops.

Two practical notes. First, if your film may be distributed or broadcast, you may also need a conventional release; the participant agreement does not replace legal advice, but it can sit alongside a release and shape how you use it. Second, think about money and care before you start. Will you cover a participant’s transportation or meals? Compensate their time? Documentary practitioners disagree about paying participants, because payment can blur consent or be seen as buying testimony, while not paying can mean asking people with the least to give the most for free. Whatever you decide, decide it openly and put it in the agreement.

4.8 Practice: Building Your Production Plan

These three activities become Section 5 of your Prospectus, the Production Plan, in Chapter 5. Your participant agreement also becomes part of the Ethical Toolkit you finalize in Chapter 8.

Activity 4.1 · Visual and Audio Plan

Work through your arc map from Activity 2.3 and name the specific footage each section requires. Be concrete: not “interview about childhood” but “interview about the day she decided to stay.” Vague plans produce scattered footage.

Visual and Audio Plan
Section	Footage type and specific content	Location or context	Ethical considerations
Beginning
Middle
End

Techniques: Name three or four techniques from Section 4.3 you will use deliberately, and the mode each pushes your film toward.

Equipment: List your equipment (phone model, microphone, stabilizer, any lighting), name one technical limitation, and explain how you will work with it rather than against it.

Activity 4.2 · Location and Logistics Plan

Complete this for your primary location, then briefly describe any others. Plan it in conversation with your participant.

Primary Filming Location
Location name and description
Why it works for your participant
Why it works for the film
Logistics: sound, light, access, timing
Who else might be filmed here, and how will you protect them?

Activity 4.3 · Participant Agreement Draft

Draft an agreement in plain language your participant can read. No legal jargon. This is a first draft you will refine together.

What this film is. What it is about, what you hope it will do, and where it might be shown, written as you would explain it in conversation.
What participation involves. How many filming sessions, what kinds of footage, roughly how much of their time, and any support or compensation you will provide.
What I commit to as your filmmaker. Your specific commitments, ethical as well as legal. What do you owe them? What will you do, and not do?
Your rights as a participant. What they can do at any point, including things that would complicate the film: pausing, declining a question, asking to see footage, asking for material to be removed, withdrawing. Hide nothing here.
Questions and next steps. A short closing that invites questions, gives them time to decide, and tells them how to reach you if anything changes. Write it as a genuine invitation.

Before this goes to your participant, ask a peer to read it as if they were being filmed: Do I understand what I am agreeing to? Do I trust this filmmaker, based on what they have committed to? What would I want changed before I signed? Then review it with your participant and invite them to modify it. The final version should reflect both of your understandings of the project.

4.9 Filmmaker’s Journal

Journal Prompt 4

Go somewhere connected to your documentary, a place you plan to film or a neighborhood where your participant lives or works, and spend at least thirty minutes there without a camera. Observe. Listen. Notice what you would film and what you would not. Notice who else is there. Then write: What surprised you? What did you see that you had not planned for? What does this place tell you about your participant’s world that your story idea did not account for? Did being there change your visual plan, or your sense of what this film is really about?

If you cannot visit, write about a time you entered an unfamiliar space or community. What made you feel you belonged, or did not, and what does that tell you about documentary filmmaking?

Key Terms

Interview, observational footage, b-roll: The three basic footage types: direct testimony; unguarded life as it unfolds; and supporting images of place, objects, and texture.
Documentary modes: Bill Nichols’s six tendencies (expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, performative, poetic) describing the relationships a film builds among maker, participants, and audience.
Form-agnostic ethics: The principle that documentary ethics apply to every formal choice, including animation, archival material, and sound, not only to interviews.
Shirley card: A color-calibration reference card, historically featuring white women, that set a photographic standard poorly suited to darker skin.
Release form: A legal document in which a participant grants rights to their image and words, typically written to protect the filmmaker and distributor.
Participant agreement: A plain-language document of mutual accountability stating what the participant agrees to, what the filmmaker commits to, and what the participant may change or withdraw.

Review and Discussion

Why might observational footage require a deeper relationship and clearer consent than a sit-down interview?
Choose two techniques from Section 4.3 and explain how each could make the filmmaker–participant relationship more, or less, visible.
What does Prison and Time suggest about the ethics of refusing certain images?
How did technical standards like the Shirley card turn a social bias into a technical one? What does that mean for your own lighting choices?
Compare a standard release form with a values-based participant agreement. What does each protect, and whom?

Works Cited

Documentary Accountability Working Group. From Reflection to Release: A Framework for Accountable Nonfiction Filmmaking. 2023. CC BY-SA 4.0, docaccountability.org/framework.

Hall, Stuart. Representation & the Media. Media Education Foundation, 1997.

Kopple, Barbara, director. Harlan County, USA. Cabin Creek Films, 1976.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 3rd ed., Indiana UP, 2017.

Perkins, Tamara, director. Clarissa’s Battle. Apple of Discord Productions, 2022.

Roth, Lorna. “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity.” Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 34, no. 1, 2009, pp. 111–36.

Wade, Marvin, and Evan Bode. Prison and Time. Op-Docs, The New York Times.

About this chapter. Written by Tamara Perkins, drawing on twenty years of co-creative documentary practice and her lecture-essay “Whose Story Is This?” For a companion framework, see Phase 3, “Pre-Production Planning,” in the Documentary Accountability Working Group’s From Reflection to Release (2023), listed in Further Reading. The techniques-by-mode menu builds on Bill Nichols’s documentary modes.

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