Writing a historical documentary script
ByA documentary is a story based on real life. From the screenwriters view it is one of the challenging projects, as a lot of research goes into the making of a script. When the genre of the documentary becomes an historical event, it gets tougher as there is an added pressure to get the facts perfect. Such documentaries are generally an hour long and may extend to more than one episodes if need be. This report will discuss the steps of writing a historical documentary script.
1.Choosing a topic and researching: History is a vast and complex subject. Hence choosing a particular subject for the documentary can be difficult. A quick tip would to be to choose a topic that is easy to research on, or at least, the resources to research upon can be easily identified. Then the actual research begins. It should be as detailed as possible, with the correct and verified facts forming core of the information gathered. As the researching progresses, the topic would narrow down and focus on a particular portion. Then all the major events related to the portion are to be researched and that would decide the main characters of the documentary.
2.Creating an outline and writing a treatment: A brief outline of the complete documentary can be sketched. Certain scenes can be imagined and organized in order and scenes can be grouped into acts. A general idea about movement of the story from scene to scene and act to act must be thought of. The whole though process must be brought down into writing as a treatment. A complete narration of each and every scene must be there in the documentary along with complete setting and actions. It must be assessed whether the viewer can comprehend what message is sent across to them, or whether all the storyline emerges properly of the documentary at a proper pace.
3.Collecting resources and writing the script: The script with complete scene-by-scene enactments with the characters must be produced now. The director would be referring to this script, which is known as the shooting script. The narration of the facts should also be proved, and hence footage of related objects must be shown in the documentary. Hence, adequate permissions must be taken in time.
4.The final part is to write the editing script, which is modified after viewing footage of the shooting script. Most often, the primary editing script is rewritten to match the existing footage.
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Depending on when an historical-event occurred, an excellent source of information (besides a library, an encyclopedia, and a dictionary) is people. Everyone knows someone who has lived through an historical event, and everyone knows someone who knows someone who has lived through an historical event. So, this form of research can be very easy. Having a person discuss the event on-camera adds the living human-perspective to a documentary, so that the documentary is not just a video-textbook of facts and figures.
My associate, John Hulme, produced a large portion of his documentary, “Unknown Soldier: Searching For A Father,” by personally interviewing people who knew his father and/or served in the Vietnam War. Documentaries that are made thus benefit from warmth, passion, and sympathy that cannot be produced without reports from people who were there.