Guide to Documentary Filmmaking Pt.1: The Idea/Visual Treatments
Over the last 4-5 years, a number of emerging filmmakers have sought my advice on making documentary films. At first, I was hesitant to write my advice down. After-all, I feel I am still learning so much on each project. However, because the requests have been coming in more and more frequently, I decided to share some of my thoughts on taking a project from the initial idea to the screen. I hope that you find them helpful.
The Idea
It goes without saying in order to make any kind of film, you first need an idea. Inspiration can come from anywhere, and so you should always have a way to record ideas and be open to new material. As for me, I naturally gravitate to biographies and books on church history. Because of this, my first couple of projects were on figures from church history that I both learned from and wanted to learn more about.
Visual Treatments
When you are exploring ideas, it’s often helpful to put together a visual treatment of your potential project. A visual treatment is a lookbook that showcases your vision for the mood, tone, look, and feel of your film. It can be a bridge between your general thoughts about the story you want to tell and other people’s understanding of the project, and it helps you think about the team you’d like to involve and the overall feel of the production you’d like to have.
I design my visual treatments in Adobe Photoshop. They tend to follow this order:
Title page with logo rendering (this most likely will not be final, it never has been for me!)
Brief biography of the subject, if applicable (400 words or so)
Some pages with quotes or montages of images (this is to help others better understand your vision)
Synopsis of the film (400-800 words)
Explanation of style of the film (100-200 words)
Description of the intended audience (100 words)
Names of potential interviewees
Travel locations
Comparable films
Information production company
The team (feature some of the key people involved and give a brief biography of each)
Each visual treatment will look different, and not every visual treatment will require all of those bullet points. However, if you want to bring your project to investors/backers, the more detail you include, the better.
Here is a visual treatment/proposal I made for a project on D.L. Moody.
Click the above image to view the PDF version of the proposal. This was presented through Keynote originally but I have converted it to PDF for your viewing and have redacted the sensitive material in the proposal.
In part 2 we will be covering how we fund and budget for a project. If you have a question or found this helpful please leave a comment below or send me an email.
Stay watchful.