Documentary for the Small Screen

Chapter 3

How do we Start?

A documentary begins with an idea and the desire to communicate it to an audience. In this it is little different from the starting point of a fiction film. But the idea which begins a documentary is usually subtly different from the starting point of a fiction. Both arise from the real world—else there would be no contact point with the audience. But where the fiction film-maker turns inward to explore his or her internal world, putting imagined characters into an invented situation and following the consequences, the documentarist devotes him- or herself to the external world, the real world as we are forced to call it.

Both forms tell stories with which their creators hope to say something about life, the world and ...