Think your doc production is dead in the water? If so, you’re not thinking hard enough
Documentary production doesn’t have to stop because of social isolation. The new restrictions on travel and working in teams have made filming actuality all but impossible, but that is no reason to freeze your production or commission. Instead, it’s time to evolve the language of documentary away from actuality and develop further means of telling a credible, verifiable story. It is time to find out just how creative your Creatives can be. If you think that Covid-19 is creating a crisis of logistics you’re missing the point, it’s a challenge to the imagination.
Utility production - that’s what we can develop, with a nod to the Utility Clothing and Utility Furniture that came out of 10 years of rationing in the last century. We have already already seen a sea-change in the language of documentary production, towards a cinematic narrative arc adapted to factual work. Take that new language further and work with the media you can access to tell the story - it could be found footage/archive, animation, CAD, stop-frame, user-generated film, or whatever else fits the subject and aim of the film. Don’t shelve half-filmed projects, re-make them with the missing parts told by other means. Frankly, the TV production world needs to do this, and the commissioners need to have the courage to embrace it.
And it has been done many times over, there’s nothing really new here - look at Adam Curtis’ use of disconnected archive and authored voice-over, or Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning combination of audio interview over relevant footage. Thirty-three years ago, Todd Haynes filmed barbie and ken dolls as his main protagonists for The Karen Carpenter Story. A favourite of mine is Ben Lewis’ 2012 BBC polemic Poor Us: An Animated History of Poverty. It could just as well have been made under the social isolation conditions of this new Utility production method. Now we have directors and editors with their own fully equipped home studios, strong broadband connections, and the ability to talk in detail in real time with their remote colleagues. You know that half of your workforce works remotely much of the time as it is, so it’s time for TV production to formally join the zoom.us generation.
The post-production facilities are already thinking up clever work-arounds for remote editing and processing. My friends at Clear Cut have set up their offline editors to key directly into their Avid suites while based elsewhere, and they are designing remote sign-off systems. Grading from outside the building remains a challenge but this is all about a new approach to work-flows, not an impenetrable wall.
If you think that you don’t know who will make those films, then please ask the question. When you know the story that you want to tell, there is always a way to make it work. There are fantastic film-makers on my Stern & Wild agency who excel at this, and you must know many more. Think of the critically-wounded productions that you have brought skilled story editors and executive producers on board to fix in the past - don’t you think they could breath new life into a half-filmed project that has been stalled by Corona virus? Of course they can, but you don’t know yet what that finished film will look like. Time to be brave and find out what you can make with latter-day Utility production.
Moray Coulter