The Discipline of Organizing: Core Concepts Edition, 3rd Edition

11.15. Making a Documentary Film

By Suhaib Syed, December 2013.

Overview. As part of a small crew, I was in pursuit of making a documentary film shedding light on the problems in the higher education system in India. We had traveled far and wide, capturing many thought-provoking stories, illuminating interviews, and shocking truths. Due to the relatively small crew and a tight schedule, we ended up with our raw footage being labeled in a generic format (MVI_1234 etc.). I, being the director, had the task of assisting the editor in renaming and reorganizing the files to make our lives easier, do justice to all the efforts that were put into capturing all the clips, and incorporate them in an impactful manner.

What is being organized? The primary resources being organized were the video clips (digital, shot on DSLRs) acquired during the shoot. In this context, they could be classified as passive resources having no real capability to produce any significant value on their own, and which had to be acted upon or interacted with to produce any effect. But the key problem here was to formulate usable resource descriptions based on the following resource properties:

Intrinsic static

Date and time of creation, duration of the clip, type of external lighting used, camera used, lens used, exposure, ISO, white balance, frame rate, compression type

Extrinsic static

Shot sequence number (assigned to each story element during story-boarding), shot movement type (dolly, follow focus, zoom, macro, ...