Chapter 18Writing and Structuring the Documentary
There are millions of different ways to make material work. You can make the material serve what you see as the truth of the situation. It’s really in your hands. You have to decide what you think happens in this footage; then you have to take, say, an hour and a half of film of a particular event and make it into a three-minute scene that communicates what you think happened in that hour-and-a-half event. It’s the only way you can proceed. You’re trying to distill. That’s essentially what you’re doing in this whole process, distilling the truth, as you perceive it.
Tom Haneke, Documentary Editor1
Documentary films are written four times. The first time you write it is when you conceive ...
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