Guide to Documentary Filmmaking Pt.6: Production

Filming Discipleship Explored in Madaba, Jordan.

Now, it’s time to start filming. I will not be covering any instructions or details about cinematography techniques or the nitty gritty of filming. Perhaps these will be things I will cover in more detail another time.

Here are a couple of tips to keep in mind during this step.

Review and back up footage

A great discipline to teach yourself early on is to review your footage daily and back everything up. Get into the habit of reviewing the raw footage you shot that day when you are back in the hotel/Airbnb. I try to dump my footage onto my external drive after every location; I have a computer running in the vehicle as we travel from location to location. At the end of the day, I’ll review the clips and make sure we got everything we needed.

Once I’m satisfied, I’ll back up the backup from that day! This is the all-important double-backup. I know, it sounds redundant. But, that’s the point. All it takes is one corrupt drive or accidental deletion, and you’ve lost an entire day’s worth of work, and sometimes it’s impossible to capture it again.

Roll with the punches

You can make the best plans, but inevitably things will go array. The picture above is an example of this. We had a bunch of local kids start following us around as we were filming in Madaba (a city just outside of Amman, Jordan). It wasn’t an issue that they were following us but it was an issue that they were being loud and distracting the team. Our video was fine but the audio was full of their chatter and commotion. There was a language barrier but we were able to mention a couple football teams (Barcelona and Real Madrid) to make them smile and then we gestured to them to see if they could help take turns holding the bounce.

Expect the unexpected

You need to be flexible when the weather is bad and you’re filming outside, when your location falls through, or when your drone crashes into Ancient Philippi and you need to drive to Thessaloniki to buy a new one. The drone crash cost us 4 flights! However, in God’s kindness, it ended up working out even better—some new friends drove us from the coast of Greece all the way to our next stop in Belgrade, Serbia.

When you are doing documentary filmmaking in other countries you always need to have a plan B and you always need to expect the unexpected. I’ve had my camera equipment taken more than once upon entering a country. What’s your plan B in that case? Do you have a good phone that can achieve what you need? Do you have a contact in the country that can provide you equipment or can you find a rental?

In part 7 we will be discussing the post-production stage. If you have a question or found this helpful please leave a comment below or send me an email.

Stay watchful.