Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed.

/ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 1

Teaching Notes for Directing the Documentary, sixth edition

By Michael Rabiger

Addressed to the teacher or leader of a class or group, this set of 14 pages of notes
offers practical suggestions on using Directing the Documentary under varying
circumstances.

1. INTRODUCTION (p. 1) explains the book’s underlying approach and the

classroom and other organizational issues that the instructor is likely to confront.
2. TEACHING CONSIDERATIONS (p. 5) is organized as a series of questions to
ask yourself, beginning from the likelihood that whatever you teach will be
geared to your students, their level, and your institution. There is discussion of
the various issues.
3. OUTCOMES ASSESSMENT (p. 12) explains how the assessment forms can be
used and how helpful they can be to you and your students.
4. DEVELOPING YOUR SYLLABUS (p. 14) suggests places where you can look
at the contents of others’ courses.

1. INTRODUCTION
Directing the Documentary concentrates on what the beginner and the professional
alike will find most challenging. That is, how to
 find stories happening in real life
 define an approach and point of view
 collect cinematic materials using research and the tools of the cinema
 edit the material into a story made out of actuality
 use the exciting language of the modern documentary cinema to tell that story

Let your passions show. In its opening chapters the book appeals to the latent idealism
of those attracted to documentary, since I believe that teachers should encourage
students’ humane principles and ambitions. Young people shelter from the ridicule of
their contemporaries and family by affecting a distanced relationship to everything
around them. It will be important to your students that you let them see who you are and
what moves you. Good teaching helps students connect with their latent passions.
You’ll do this best by unashamedly showing your own concerns and emotions. It’s no
accident that my lifelong interests (and yours too?) reflect those of my best teachers.

Point of view and collaboration. The book stresses that a good documentary is a corner
of actuality seen through the prism of a human mind. It is a construct that implies a
point of view. Usually, of course, that mind is really a consortium of minds, and the
commonality of their approach arises out of collaboration and dialogue—a powerful
factor in making film of any kind. A film class is special because it is a laboratory for
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 2

shared creativity, a kind of collaboration notably absent from most contemporary

education, which pits the individual in competition with others.

The audience is like a jury. A documentary film sets out to build a bridge between an
observable (or recreated) actuality and an audience. I mention the analogy between the
film audience and the jury in a court case. In any life situation, we change our outlook,
see and feel differently, whenever we encounter persuasive and emotionally loaded
evidence. The quality and relevance of the evidence that the filmmaker assembles, and
the way that he/she presents it, will determine the journey of discovery that the
audience/jury takes.

Film language, the book explains, is nothing more and nothing less than an
approximation of human perception. All films are a human stream of consciousness
designed for an audience to experience; so all wise camera and editing decisions are
modeled on how to construct an interesting, integrated stream of consciousness rather
than one that is technically driven, sterile, and otherwise detached and uninteresting.

Teaching is really learning. Learning about narrative and consciousness, and teaching
it, are endlessly fascinating because they keep returning you to the mystery and
profundity of everyday human experience. When you are out in the world experiencing
a range of large and small impressions, any of them might go into a film, so making
films leads you to live your life more purposefully and consciously. Then, each time
you make a film, you find out what level of consciousness you are able to credibly
sustain on the screen. Teaching others, you get to see a number of people tackling
similar tasks in different ways, so you learn from them. Teaching will make you a better
filmmaker and a better teacher.

Learning from doing. Most students learn best from doing and this is especially true for
learning to make films. The simplest production involves juggling a great many
variables. Students learn most enthusiastically from work they find challenging,
engaging, and mind-expanding. Thankfully the digital age provides us with superb and
affordable tools for this task. Even if it were possible to deliver a thorough intellectual
preparation, most students could still only absorb a fraction of it before needing to put
theory into practice. Projects and theory must advance in step. Making films is not
unique in this regard: to learn dancing you must dance, and to learn swimming you must
use water. Directing the Documentary thus accompanies explanation with practical
projects and experiments, each having its own expressive and production objectives.
These help to develop every area of your students’ skills—from critical writing to full-
fledged filmmaking. Your job as a teacher will be to construct as thorough and
fascinating an obstacle course as your students’ time and abilities permit.

This book is mostly about conceiving documentary: the book addresses college-age
students and industry professionals wanting to develop their conceptual skills. The why
is much harder to learn than the how of shooting and editing. Unless you teach in a very
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 3

sophisticated high school, Directing the Documentary probably won’t be suitable for
younger students. You can however use it as a guide for yourself, and select and
simplify for students whose tolerance for the theoretical underpinnings is probably not
yet developed.

The book is not primarily a technical primer, so when it describes the necessary
technology and techniques, it does so in broad terms. Given the pace at which digital
equipment and software are evolving, it would anyway be futile to make hard and fast
recommendations. Happily, most institutions can draw upon the technocrats among
their senior students who spontaneously emerge as experts in digital tools. Whether
formally or informally employed, these invaluable people often make excellent “tech”
instructors.

From the ground up: The book presumes no prior knowledge of documentary or of
filming, and its first Book addresses the absolute beginner. Many of your students will
come from particular genre enthusiasms, and will need exposure to broader issues of
cinema language and digital equipment. There is help in the book on these topics, but
most university or film school students usually have some familiarity with fiction
cinema since documentary is usually a sub-specialization rather than a basic cinema
course. There are many excellent books on sound and camerawork.

You, your students, and setting learning goals: Schools, their curricula, equipment
levels, and students vary greatly, so it’s impossible to say how best to use Directing the
Documentary. You, better than anyone, will know what you teach best, what your
students bring to the table, and under what constraints of time and equipment your
classes will have to work. The book aspires to be fairly comprehensive so you will have
to select from it rather than use it holistically. By the choices you make, you can guide
your students into using what works best for them at their particular level of education
and development.

Student expectations: All students, individually and as a group, start out with some
preponderance of expectations and prejudices, so a good place to start is to survey what
your students want to get out of the course. Your part, of course, is to decide what you
want them to learn and what you think they can accomplish in the available time.
Attaching learning goals to the syllabus and to each project is useful because students
know then what they are supposed to be mastering. The assessment forms in this
website are really helpful in articulating, then evaluating their success in each aspect.
More about this later.

Forming groups and who’s in charge of what: Because making films is a collaborative
endeavor, you will need to form your class into production groups of two, three, or four
persons. If the students already know each other, they may have fixed ideas about
whom they want to work with. If you hand out a skills and availability questionnaire
you can solicit the kind of information that will allow you to make better choices for the
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 4

groups. Usually you want to distribute the skills and genders so you don’t have a group,
say, of three cameramen competing with each other. Some students have their own
equipment, so you will want to distribute these members to help the groups be evenly
equipped.

Especially in the beginning, everyone needs to get basic experience. Some will try to
hog the most cherished positions. Apart from this being unfair, premature specialization
prevents students getting a holistic understanding of filmmaking. So, to ensure that each
group member gets comprehensive experience, I suggest you ask that,
 students stay in the same group for the duration of the semester
 group members rotate equally through all the major creative roles (director,
camera operator, shooting sound, and editing)

Under some circumstances, such as observational coverage of human processes, the

camera operator has to take most of the shooting decisions, so a two-person crew may
be in order, with the director shooting sound. Other types of coverage, such as those that
require careful lighting, benefit from a larger crew.

Some aspects of the project work, such as critical writing, or researching and directing a
complex film, may primarily be under the control of one person, but most work is
teamwork and the organization of the team comes from the team itself. As groups
become more experienced, and as the members recognize each other’s capacities and
talents, people tend by mutual agreement to specialize. How soon you allow your
students to adopt fixed roles may be a matter of choosing between the best-produced
projects or the broadest education. Too much specialization too early can deny directing
experience to, say, a camera operator and relegate him or her in later life to becoming a
good rather than ideal collaborator.

Some cinema schools require their students to opt for roles on entry to the academy, and
thus fix the division of labor from the outset. I think it essential that at some time each
person, however temporarily, tastes the responsibilities and decisions that govern the
lives of their collaborators. The end result is that each person is more likely to be
tolerant and respectful of the other team members. It also gives each person experience
on which to found their choices and ambitions.

_____________________________________________________________________
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 5

2. TEACHING CONSIDERATIONS

How you configure groups, and what set of experiences you construct for their
education will depend on a number of variables, which are perhaps easiest to consider
as an FAQ list:

1) Who am I teaching? Undergraduates, or graduate (“post-graduate” in European

parlance) students? Are you leading a special interest or other professional or semi-
professional group? What kind of students does your institution draw? For
instance:
i) A polytechnic that teaches documentary probably draws the technically
minded. You might budget less time teaching the science behind sound and
video recording, and more time to develop conceptual, narrative, and editing
skills.
ii) Young undergraduate students may come with excellent computer skills, but
have no experience of writing and conceptualizing, or of giving and taking
criticism. Often students have never been asked to form opinions and
vocalize them to a group of people, amazing though this is!
iii) Students in a fine art school might have to concentrate more on the physics
of light and sound. They may understand individual expression very well but
be much less intuitive when using editing software or production hardware.
You may also have to persuade them to collaborate with each other instead
of competing for distinction. In individuals first drawn to painting,
photography, or sculpture, narrative skills may be undeveloped. A class of
photographers I once taught could only see imagery as symbolic and had no
idea of dramatic development through time.
iv) Graduate students are sometimes making a career change and arrive wanting
to use film to further the work they have been doing professionally in, say,
the juvenile justice system or local politics. Without efforts on your part to
broaden their idea of effective documentary, they may try to operate entirely
within the television tradition of interview-driven journalism.

2) What preparation do my students have? To determine this, try defining their

strengths and deficiencies:
a) Conceptual. What do they know about the purpose, history, and range of
documentaries? What do they know about narrative traditions, in particular
the dramatic ingredients that go into “telling a good story”?
b) Film literacy. What do they know about the evolution of film as a medium?
What do they know about the range of film language and its relationship to
traditions of literature, theater, painting and other imagery?
c) Artistic. What can you expect your students to know about the self-
exploration endemic to the artistic process? Are they likely to be at all
sophisticated about using film as a medium of expression and self-
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 6

expression? How well are they likely to understand the need to act on the
viewer, rather than to passively record and reflect what is “there”?
d) Self-expressive. Most education up to high school level pays lip service to
educating the individual, because the teacher-to-student ratio leaves teachers
unable to do more than follow the syllabus. Your students probably have
never had any demands made on their individuality, and may even feel
threatened. Then again, some cultures and social classes encourage
individual expression, while others frown on it as blatant egotism. Students
may come from cultures where it is politically dangerous to have ideas or a
conscience different from that of the officially sanctioned collective. But
self-awareness to the arts is like brushes to paint, so you will almost
certainly need the authorship exercises to develop a critical self-awareness in
your students, if they are to appreciate that they already carry, albeit
unconsciously, a developed and critical point of view. This is very different
from one intellectually imposed and governed.
e) Critical. How critical are your students of the world around them, and how
prepared are they to develop a critical tension in their work?
f) Technical. Are they computer literate? How much will you have to teach the
fundamentals of camerawork, sound recording, and editing?
g) Collaborative. Have they worked with others before or will filmmaking be
their first experience? Do they know each other and have preferences for
working together? Or will you need to determine who has particular skills,
and distribute these people equably through the groups rather than let them
clump together? How will you prepare them for making shared decisions?

3) How should I develop appropriate coursework? You will need to:

a) Assess the goals of entering students.
i) If the class is required, then the department presumably has its goals.
ii) If the class is an elective you will need to integrate your students’ goals as
well as those you set yourself, or they won’t enjoy the course enough to
recommend it. What do they want? What skills do they hope to emerge
with? What do you think they would like to learn about themselves?
iii) If the class is part of an existing curriculum your job will be to build a bridge
between your students and the competencies that the curriculum demands as
an outcome. Where do the students go next and what will they need from
you to perform well?
b) Acknowledge that people approach learning in different ways. Some students,
for instance, prefer to understand the theory of a thing before embarking on
actually doing it. Such individuals have a high capacity for abstract thinking.
Others, usually the majority, will best discover what they further need to know
through making something and encountering problems in a real world context.
For those who want a great deal of information prior to production, you have
Directing the Documentary. It will also serve as a resource for those who do
first and inquire what they should have done after they have concrete results. For
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 7

those who hate to read, you will probably need to develop some quiz questions,
week by week, that force the pre-literate into applying themselves. Tell yourself
you are teaching study skills. Some students feel a sense of relief and
accomplishment from learning to read closely.
c) Take some approximate decisions about
i) How much historical overview will benefit your students, and what they will
reject as “ancient history” until they have tackled some pioneering problems
themselves and are ready to share an outlook with their forebears?
ii) What projects you want them to undertake in order to develop particular
skills and outlooks.
iii) How much work you can reasonably expect your students to complete in the
given time.
iv) What films to show in order to inform and enthuse your students about their
project work.

4) What are my strengths as a teacher? Most teachers feel deficient in either

teaching experience or production skills—or both. Do not be discouraged by this:
instead, figure out how to use your strengths to best advantage. You should cast the
work your students are going to do in your own most effective mode, at least until
experiment leads you toward other, equally effective modes. Remember, you will
teach best what you yourself enjoy.
a) How are you used to teaching, and how do you best engage your students? You
may like to give lectures, or you may excel in a more Socratic mode of
questioning and evoking discussion. You may like to set problems for the
students to solve, and let discussion of principles arise out of their efforts to
solve the problems. You may instruct in technology and then let the students
decide what they want to film. Begin with whatever mode will work for you,
and develop your ideas in subsequent classes. If you aren’t comfortable, your
students won’t feel secure either. Look upon teaching itself as a work in
progress, and expect to learn from your students.
b) Do you teach from a body of production experience? It’s helpful but by no
means vital.
i) If you have a production experience: Is it on the technical or on the
conceptual side? Few filmmakers have all-round experience, so inevitably
you will be teaching what you know, but also what you don’t know, too.
Honesty is the best policy. Tell the class when you won’t have the answers.
Use email to communicate after class, or have the answer ready for the next
session. Luckily, teachers usually learn as much as (or more than) their
students from the sheer responsibility of having to teach. In each repeat class
extend your range into your areas of deficiency.
ii) If you don’t have documentary production experience. You can still
approach the class authoritatively from a wide range of other specializations.
You can run a documentary course from a background in journalism,
sociology, anthropology, or photography, and approach making
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 8

documentaries as a shared endeavor with your students. It’s wise to be

candid about what expertise you do and don’t bring, since students will soon
find out anyway. There’s nothing wrong with students and teacher sharing
discovery as a form of learning. The teacher does not have to be an ultimate
authority to be liked and respected by students since organizing, goal-setting,
coordinating are all leadership activities. Especially if you are young, being
a senior colleague to your students is an effective stance from which to
teach. Your seriousness, commitment, and drive will be most important.

5) What do I need from the experience of teaching? To teach only what you already
know leads to dull classes that reek of stale repetition. Consider what you need to
sustain your enthusiasm and energies. Whatever interests you, as a filmmaker and as
a teacher, should affect how you use the book. Breaking new ground will renew you
and make you a more exciting teacher, so take every opportunity to make films
yourself, however short and fragmentary.

6) What does my institution expect of its students? These expectations may come
from school traditions or from top leadership, or they may come locally from a dean
or department chair. There are two main kinds of expectation, neither of which you
are likely to change:
a) Some departments or institutions must justify their funding by turning out
prizewinners and pride themselves on admitting only “talented” students.
However, those who are socially adroit, good at academics, or like the
examiners aren’t necessarily going to succeed in filmmaking, which takes other
qualities like persistence and long-term learning ability that don’t necessarily
register in admissions tests.
b) Others (and I trust your institution is among these) are more inclusive and try to
administer a good overall education to all their students. Despite such
egalitarianism, stars still arise but nobody begrudges them their achievements.

7) What technical support will I need? The trend today in making documentaries is
to have fewer people in a unit, each having a range of better-developed skills. The
days of the five-person crew have all but vanished; a director will have to know
either camerawork or how to shoot sound. Both cameraperson and director should
know editing. The ideal training for documentarians is therefore holistic, and they
become all the better as filmmakers because of it. In the technical area they will
need:
a) Video theory & practice. Students should know the basics about video (frame
rates, interlace, digital recording, codecs, luminance, chrominance, time code,
drop frame and non-drop frame, etc.) There are plenty of good manuals that
cover this. If you have to teach this stuff, look for a mentor who can help you
with anything you find difficult in the class text.
b) Sound theory & practice. Sound is the fatally neglected area of filmmaking, and
unless you are lucky enough to be teaching musicians, your students will mostly
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 9

have cloth ears (this is Brit-Speak for having no critical hearing abilities). This
you may have to teach, and students will learn most through analytic work on
film sound tracks and from conducting experiments. If you are out of your
element teaching this kind of thing, conduct the experiments on your own first,
so you know what to expect.
c) Camera and sound operating practice. The book has many exercises for this,
most with a set of assessment criteria to help you and your students make
judgments and dig into the reasons why a particular technique does or doesn’t
work.
d) Editing software and editing in practice. Professional-caliber editing software
has a learning curve like the side of Mount Everest, but most young people take
to the software like ducks to water. They do it far more easily, sad to say, than
their teachers. Most students’ ability to produce professional-looking editing is
nothing short of astonishing. That’s because most have seen around 18,000
hours of television by the time they enter college, and you reap the benefit. If
only they had 18,000 hours of reading too! Where they are much less at home is
in researching and proposing a film, and once their material is shot, in producing
a compact, interestingly sequenced narrative. Here, gaining an understanding of
human perceptual processes and of traditional dramatic theory (both of which
the book returns to often) will work wonders. Your class or your institution
should have its complement of natural editors whose specialty is the software.
Do not, however, cede them complete control of the aesthetics of editing—its
rhythms, logic, moods, and narrative function. Those remain very much the
business of the class as a collective audience.

8) How long do I have in which to teach them? How much you can teach your
students depends on how often you teach them, how long each session lasts, and the
length of the school term. Most classes last 2–4 hours, and term lengths vary.
a) Semester system. This is usually a 15-week term, twice a year, and sometimes is
expanded to include an optional summer semester to make what is in fact a
trimester year.
b) Quarter system. This is a 10-week term, three times a year, and sometimes
includes a fourth summer quarter as well.
c) Periodic meetings versus an immersion course. Where a documentary course is
part of a liberal education, students may be taking two, three, or four other
concurrent courses that compete for their time and attention. Immersion courses
are less usual. They help students concentrate by temporarily excluding the
outside world.
i) Long immersion courses are good because students can concentrate on the
one subject with minimal distractions. In a national film school, for instance,
students will take a set of core cinema courses and then concentrate on
documentary only. This has some hidden dangers: when other inputs,
personalities, and activities are excluded, students can experience such
heightened pressures that the class turns into a dysfunctional family.
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 10

ii) Short immersion courses are popular (and hard to find) as a form of further
education. Older students like them because they can take short periods only Formatted: Not Highlight
away from jobs and families. You can cover a lot of ground in a week of 8-
hour days, but the pace is exhausting for students and teacher alike, and
there is little or no time for the all-important production. The shortest course
in which I have been able to effectively include production is a two-week
course meeting 4 hours a day for ten sessions. Students shoot over the
weekend and edit at night during the second week. During the second week
fatigue is a problem for everyone.

9) What work should I expect students to do in class and what outside class? Some
work (such as lighting experiments) is best done as a large group; other work can
only be done in small production groups or even as individuals. As a general guide:
a) In class:
i) Viewing films and discussing their attributes.
ii) Anything that develops common knowledge or standards, such as hardware
instruction, lighting, camera handling and movements, composition, or
critiquing each other’s work.
b) Outside class, anything concerning,
i) Research (which you review and critique).
ii) Production (its outcome shows on the screen, and all its faults and virtues are
evident in a viewing of the rushes).
iii) Post-production of group or individual projects, all of which will proceed at
inconsistent speeds. For those students who own editing software, they no
longer need long hours of editing on scarce school equipment. Everybody
benefits.

10) What preparation should I do for each class? Because each class develops its
own rhythms and dynamics, planning too closely and too far ahead may be
counterproductive. I recommend instead that, before each upcoming class, you
make a brief list of issues you want to cover, and a brief list of questions that will
get your class there. Having this to hand will liberate you to watch and listen. Then
you’ll work off the energies and issues arising in the moment. Every time you pose
a question, you invite your students to problem-solve and you also open up a space
for yourself to look ahead while the class is grappling with the problem you have
posed. Students are energized when they feel they are making the direction and
pacing of each class, but it’s wise, within this framework, to have a rough agenda
that you want to follow, and to prepare to cover more ground than time will allow.
Most students like a detailed syllabus and they like you to fulfill what is in it, every
week. Having a set path, yet elements of freedom while completing each step,
requires an alert performance from you, the teacher. Also recommended:
a) Pose each question to the class as a whole so it engages everybody in thought.
After the students have had a few moments to think, nominate someone to
answer. I spin a ballpoint pen like a lottery pointer.
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 11

b) If you have the time, select anyone who appears to be struggling a little, and
encourage this student to reason his or her way through the issues. To let
students opt out because they failed to do their homework is to reward
indolence, so you sometimes must pressure students to fabricate answers on the
spot. That person, you may be sure, will come better prepared next time. So
much about filmmaking requires thinking on your feet that expecting your
students to rise to any challenge is essential anyway to a good film education.
c) Pick on the withdrawn or work-shy to answer more often, until they engage with
the work or the social challenges, and pick up speed. Be encouraging, not
punitive about this. Explain that the film industry is a tough taskmaster, and that
you want all your students to succeed. They may grumble but will love you for
it.
d) Pick winners to answer questions only when you are running out of time and
must cover the ground on the double.

11) What equipment will I need? This often pivots on what the students themselves
may own, which is not always possible to ascertain in advance. If you have a class
of 15 students (the maximum size in which to see everybody’s work and give
everybody adequate attention) you will need the following:
a) Projection. You will need a DVD player and either a monitor or (better) a video
projector. Play sound through a hi-fi and speakers, not the TV monitor’s
speaker. This treats the material as cinema while a monitor forces it to be seen as
“television.” Students know there’s a world of difference.
b) Cameras per class. Depending on how many projects and how many students
have their own camcorders, I suggest three camcorders minimum per class of
15. Having too few camcorders may limit the type of projects you can allow.
c) Editing rigs per class. Likewise, depending on how many projects and how
many students own computers equipped for editing, I suggest three editing rigs
available 12–15 hours a day, five days a week, or better seven days a week. You
can conserve on editing time by requiring that students view and organize their
approach at home in advance of editing. This speeds up the process.
d) Classroom. The classroom can be any space large enough to hold a table around
which the class can sit, plus space for the monitor or projection screen, and a
board you can write on. There should be shades for the windows. If you have no
table, sit students in a circle, never in the institutional bus formation. I
particularly hate teaching in a screening room because the setup makes the
teacher into the authority and superior being, and students subordinate. This
message is utterly contrary to the collaborative spirit of making documentary.
12) Library. In Chapter 3: Documentary History there is a list of just over a dozen
“must see” films that ideally would be available for students to take home and
study. Adapting critical writing projects to one or more of these films will enable
your students to dig deeply into the way a film is constructed, something few will
ever do unless you make them.
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 12

13) How can I grade the elements of documentary work? Giving grades to
expressive work, especially to a genre that depends partly on chance and that has
many interconnecting aspects, can be a quagmire. These web notes supply
assessment forms that list outcomes criteria for each project. What these are, and
how to use them, is the subject of the next Part. Most importantly, making an
assessment after each project means you apply continuous measurement throughout
the semester, rather than relying on the traditional “Big Bang” set of examinations at
the end. Continuous assessment lets you point out strengths and weaknesses as soon
as they appear, and this gives students the opportunity to self-correct.

3. OUTCOMES ASSESSMENT

Educators used to concentrate on what they wanted to put into the student, but today the
trend is toward defining objectives that students can demonstrate in their work as
outcomes. Measuring the success of work this way has gained wide acceptance in
American education, and is particularly helpful in film instruction. Armed with a
production-oriented textbook, the documentary teacher can at last concentrate on the
work that the students produce. Classroom discussion can go beyond basic matters of
technique and equipment and consider the real purpose of the cinema—to say
something about contemporary life.

The Assessment folder contains assessment forms, one for each production project. As
you see from the specimen form below, it consists of criteria defined as desirable
outcomes, each phrased in positive terms that invite degrees of agreement on a 0–5
“trueness” scale:

0=Not true/inapplicable
1=Minimally true
2=Somewhat true
3=True
4=Considerably true
5=Outstandingly true

This assessment is for the Interviewing project, which is assessed as an edited result.
Other projects may assess dailies straight out of the camera.
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 13

INTERVIEWING ASSESSMENT FORM

Name____________________________

Criteria Rating
DIRECTING effective since interviewee is at ease 0 1 2 3 4 5
Tends to use wide shot for new subject matter 0 1 2 3 4 5
Tends to cover moments of intensity in BCU 0 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewee’s story has good exposition of information 0 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewing produces moving testimony from interviewee 0 1 2 3 4 5
SOUND good and no mike visible 0 1 2 3 4 5
CAMERA work effective, compositional proportions match at cuts 0 1 2 3 4 5
Zooming and recomposing happen simultaneously and smoothly 0 1 2 3 4 5
EDITING maintains natural rhythm of speaker’s speech 0 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewee’s body position and expression matches between cuts 0 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewer’s voice successfully eliminated 0 1 2 3 4 5
Interview successfully restructured to develop meaningfully 0 1 2 3 4 5
Story builds to a climactic or pivotal moment 0 1 2 3 4 5
Story arrives at a resolution 0 1 2 3 4 5
Story told with intensity 0 1 2 3 4 5
Story has an impact 0 1 2 3 4 5
Film leaves a sense of meaning and purpose throughout 0 1 2 3 4 5
TOTAL

As each score is circled, they form a bar graph of accomplishment. And since criteria
are grouped under their craft specialty (Directing, Camerawork, Sound, Editing, etc.)
that graph shows where the filmmaker excels or where he or she needs more work. A
student who garners high ratings throughout a course in, say, camerawork or editing can
see at a glance what their abilities might best lead to as a career.

Download the assessment forms from the book’s website, and you can amend them or
recycle them for other projects as you see fit. Since each project represents a great deal
of work, you may want to simplify them so your students concentrate on a few
essentials.

Try handing out extra copies when projects are screened in class, and have everyone
rate each project. Discussions can then concentrate on the highest and lowest areas of
assessment. When everyone can respond to the strengths and weaknesses in a work,
they usually find constructive ways to discuss aspects that could have been different or
better.
Teacher’s Notes, Directing the Documentary 5th Ed./ Vers: January 8, 2009 Page 14

You will of course make your own assessment to grade the project, but often the points
you would make, laboriously and in private, get covered in class and need only a simple
endorsement on your part. To the student this process feels fairer and more objective
because he or she is hearing from an audience, not just the big Pooh Bah. Your job
becomes more one of mediating, problem-solving, of helping everyone shape and
articulate their values, options, and alternative approaches to widely perceived
problems. You are a helper and not a dragon the students must fight to succeed.

Often you will find that your grading is pleasantly forestalled by the values of the whole
class. Low scores from peers are a particular incentive to improve, and you can provide
encouragement by rewarding special effort, ingenuity, persistence or other filmmaking
virtues by raising the basic grade earned through the criteria.

4. DEVELOPING YOUR SYLLABUS

While a two-year graduate level course in documentary might conceivably use many of
Directing the Documentary’s projects, most documentary teaching will be in
communications programs for undergraduates, and can afford to give relatively little
practical work. Most film or communications departments that cover documentary at all
give some training in the tools of production, a course on documentary history, and a
course that includes production. Students who emerge from college hooked on
documentary then either look for work—which can be hard to find unless they are well
connected or highly motivated—or they go to graduate school to study film in greater
depth.

Most teachers must try to deliver an impossibly large amount of education in an

impossibly short time. If you are starting up a course or courses, try using the Internet to
survey what documentary courses offer in the various types of schools. Here are some
American film schools that have developed documentary programs: Columbia College
Chicago (www.colum.edu), New York University
(http://filmtv.tisch.nyu.edu/page/home), Stanford University
(http://communication.stanford.edu/documentary), University of Southern California
(http://www-cntv.usc.edu/academic_programs/production/academic-production-
home.php), and University of Texas at Austin (http://www.utexas.edu/coc/rtf).