Research is the foundation for all non-fiction film-making. The word sounds serious, scientific, impressive even, though possibly a little dull. It has strong academic associations. But research for a television documentary is no academic exercise; it is practical, sometimes exciting and often fun. For many film-makers the research is the most enjoyable stage of the documentary production exercise—the time for finding things out.
To do so, the researcher brings to bear on the problems an armoury of techniques many of which are more closely related to the world of the private detective than to that of the university library. In some ways research is easier than detective work. Informants are usually far more willing to give information to someone introduced to them as making a television programme, than to someone claiming to be an employee of the Philip Marlowe Detective Agency—the opportunity to be interviewed on TV is generally more appealing than the chance of appearing in the witness box at the Old Bailey.
Films may be researched by the film-maker him- or herself, or by a researcher engaged for that purpose by the production. In many cases both the documentary maker and one or more researchers work together, especially when making a film which is not based on pure observation. If a documentary is about an idea, a concept, an area of knowledge, the first essential for everyone working on it is to get a grasp of the subject.
Documentary research can therefore be divided into two kinds, usually carried out at different stages of the production process. Naturally there is some overlap. The first kind of research can be called theoretical, or content research, and must be done before anything else can happen. Content research may continue throughout the production process, but at some point, the emphasis will change to the second kind of research, which can be called practical, or production research. Content research informs the members of production team about the subject area in which they are working. Production research provides material for the shooting and the sound recording.
The first task of content research is to collect and collate sources of the information needed to make the film. The result may be a list of books, publications, magazine articles, newspaper cuttings which need to be read. Or it may be a list of experts, consultants, lecturers, witnesses, activists who should be spoken to. Research needs a good knowledge of available libraries, both of books and newspaper cuttings, museums and collections of written archives. Many companies, institutions and newspapers maintain collections of their own materials to which they are usually happy to allow a researcher access. A number of handbooks are available in different countries containing lists of such collections.
The second task is to absorb as much of an understanding of that information as is possible or necessary. Every documentary maker and researcher will have his or her own preferred way of gaining understanding of a subject. For some documentary makers, the pile of books, magazines and other documents may be the best possible informant of first resort. For others, personal contact and long conversations with people who understand the subject are the most comfortable ways of introducing themselves to the issues. Some researchers prefer to be already well briefed about an area before going off to talk to experts. Others are happier to receive information verbally than in writing.
The difficulty of the first approach is knowing when to stop delving ever deeper into the subject. Documentary makers have been known to become so involved as to abandon the production and end up with a PhD thesis, and consequent doctorate, instead. The other approach, learning about an area by directly consulting the experts working in it, has the advantage that a preliminary filtering takes place. Experts mostly restrict their explanations to what they think essential and relevant, as well as to what they believe the lay person can understand. Of course there is the danger that the film-maker will only receive a highly partial view. Many different sources of information will have to be consulted, just as many different books will have to be collected, to avoid bias and prejudice.
Whichever approach is taken, desk research or going out to speak to experts—and most content research is a combination of both—the task is initially to compile a survey of the subject of the film, to get an idea of what is known about it, what is its history, what has been written about it, what is the available evidence, who are the experts and where they are to be found. For some subjects, particularly those dealing with ordinary events and everyday life, a good level of general knowledge is all that is needed to form a working overview. For others, some science documentaries for example, or perhaps films dealing with such arcana as the world’s financial markets, even a superficial understanding will only come after serious specialist study. Whichever class the subject in question may belong to, the filmmaker will need to become familiar enough with its details as to able to hold a reasonably intelligent and informed conversation about it. This will greatly help later on when trying to secure the co-operation of contributors to the film. Many film-makers will themselves have had the experience of being consulted by nonexperts; they will know their own reactions to daft questions and ignorant comments about their own business.
This first stage of exploration will take different amounts of time depending on the subject and the film-maker. The documentarist who works regularly in the same field has an advantage here. A producer of science films or a television financial journalist, when first presented with a new theme for a documentary, will probably already know quite a lot about the general subject area and may need to do little more than check up on the latest published papers or articles. Neophytes have to put in rather more work to bring themselves up to speed. Their recompense is the excitement of engaging for the first time in a new subject area and looking at the world from a fresh perspective. It is surprising how little time it takes for the members of almost every documentary making team to make themselves so familiar with their subject, that its best known concepts and most famous names quickly become the small change of conversation in the production office.
While content research is about discovering and understanding the story, and in the process creating the outline of the production, production research is about filling in the details and tracking down actual material for filming, leading to the full development of the treatment and perhaps a shooting script. The items usually to be sought are: people, events, locations, visual materials and sometimes props. Many of these categories go together, as in a documentary they will almost always be connected with each other. The choice of an event to film will necessarily specify the people who take part in it and the location where it takes place; the choice of a person to appear in the production will mostly define the locations where he or she is to be seen.
People to be found will include those who are to act as advisers, experts and consultants as well as those who will actually appear in the production. Finding people is a central task and a major skill of the television researcher—finding items in the other categories may well depend on first locating somebody who knows where that item is to be found. This is where detective work comes into play. It usually starts with the telephone. The first step begins with a name, perhaps mentioned in a newspaper article, perhaps known to someone in the production team, or perhaps located through an organization or institution. Journalists from local radio or television stations or local newspapers are often a good starting point too.
In many cases the first name is only the entrance to the maze. It is too much to expect to discover the central target in one go. The first contact will often only be the starting point of a lengthy process. From the first person spoken to, the researcher must usually follow a long and convoluted trail leading from person to person, contact to contact, until the goal of finding just the right contributor, the one with the right qualities, the right experience and the right knowledge, is reached.
Once the right person has been tracked down, contact will have to move from telephone talk to a meeting in the flesh. In spite of all our era’s progress in communications technology, there is no substitute for face to face conversation when trying to determine the suitability or otherwise of a contributor to a documentary film. Where the film-maker is not personally carrying out the research but collaborating with a researcher, the researcher will often conduct the first meeting, leaving the film-maker to pick up the contact at a stage nearer the shooting time.
What does a documentary maker look for when selecting—‘casting’—contributors to the production? Clearly some matters are of basic importance. What are mostly sought are primary rather than secondary sources. That is, those with direct personal experience or knowledge of what they are required to speak about. Secondary sources are those who can report on not what they themselves, but only what others have done or experienced. This is the equivalent of hearsay evidence, which is no more valuable to a film than it is in a court of law. Naturally, there will be some cases in which a primary witness is impossible to find but filmmakers usually make every effort to seek out a contributor with personal knowledge. The problem is greater when engaging experts to comment on or to provide a framework of understanding for a subject. For an expert’s contribution to be truly useful and authoritative, the expert should have done the research or other scholarly study him or herself. The use of all-purpose television pundits to comment on matters far beyond their own expertise is, though not uncommon, not very helpful.
Honesty and truthfulness must of course be assured. No documentarist would wish a film’s argument to be founded on dishonest testimony. Unfortunately there are some people for whom appearing in a film is such a lure that they are prepared to say almost anything just to get in front of a camera. There are also those with an axe to grind. When selecting contributors, the researcher will need to keep an open mind and a sensitive nose to detect the signs of the parti pris or the hidden agenda. Coming in on a subject without a long and deep understanding of its complexities—the inevitable situation of the television documentarist—makes it all too easy to be captured by those who nurse a wilfully distorted view. Television history has many examples of films which were fatally flawed because they expressed the documentarists’ too gullible acceptance of the face value of what someone had told them.
Equally, the contributor must not only be honest and truthful but must also appear to be so. Sadly, some contributors, while in reality scrupulously and totally honest, can make a shifty and untrustworthy impression when speaking before the camera. Coaching them a little in self-presentation can help. In part, an aspect of the film-maker’s skill is in putting subjects at ease when filming, so that they come over as relaxed, natural and straightforward. Of course it is not always possible to detect problems in advance. Many film-makers will have had the experience of cultivating contributors for a long period of time in the conviction that when filmed they will perform as splendidly as expected, only to find that when the camera crew arrives their sangfroid has completely and catastrophically deserted them. Sadly, there are some people who become so nervous when being filmed that an air of relaxation is totally impossible for them. They speak, if they can get the words out at all, as if from a prepared text, become totally wooden and unnatural, or worst of all, respond to the interviewer’s questions with frozen silence, like a rabbit mesmerized by a snake. Nobody is to blame for such an outcome and it is a matter of plain courtesy to avoid making the contributor feel that he or she has let the film-maker down. In the event, shooting may sometimes be completed using a so-called ‘strawberry filter’—no film or tape in the camera—to avoid making the contributor feel a failure.
The final task of the researcher is to prepare the subject for the actual filming. It is important that contributors know what will be involved and what is expected of them. The contributor should be given a clear idea of the filming process, particularly how long it will take. The researcher should make it clear that agreement to be filmed has consequences which must be accepted in advance. Filming can be a disruptive process and it is as well that everyone involved understands and accepts this at the outset. It is important to try to avoid a situation in which limitations on what can be shot are suddenly placed on the team at the time of filming. Most documentarists find that if they are open and honest about what filming involves, the contributors will be prepared for most eventualities.
Contributors should also be given an honest account of the theme and other contents of the film. There is often a temptation to misguide a subject, in the fear that a truthful exposure of the purpose of the documentary may put them off agreeing to take part in it. This is not a fruitful way for a documentarist to behave. If the film demands honesty from an interviewee, it is only fair that those making the film should be equally forthright about their own intentions. There is a somewhat macho attitude not uncommonly found, particularly among those working in current affairs and politics, which suggests that all is fair in love, war and film-making; that the important thing is to get the material on film or tape and never mind what it takes to get it there. This may work on a single occasion. But once bitten, twice shy—such participants are unlikely ever to agree to take part in a film again. This may not matter to the documentarist at the time, but it hardly leaves a good taste in the mouth. Many film-makers would seriously deprecate such a short-sighted way of working.
On the other hand unrealistic promises should never be made. A film-maker should not promise to give the contributors the final say about their contributions. Those taking part in the film should know from the start who has editorial control over the production. When working on a film for a private client, it is not unreasonable that the client should have the final word over what is or is not included. In all other circumstances, a film-maker should make it clear from the outset that editorial decisions will be the responsibility of the film-maker or the commissioning organization. It is acceptable for the production to promise to make a preview of the completed film available to the contributors for their comments, as long as it is understood that the contributors will only be able to make suggestions and that the film-maker commits him- or herself to do no more than take the comments into consideration.
Location research for a documentary is rather different from the location finding which is a frequent aspect of drama pre-production. Documentary locations are largely predetermined by the intended content of the relevant sequence. If the content is the location itself, for example in a travel documentary, the location is a given fact and is determined from the outset. If the content is an event, the location is equally fixed; it is usually not possible to change the place where that event occurs. If the subject for filming is a person, the location will be wherever those activities occur which are part of the contributor’s life.
So rather than searching out a location which has a particular look or suits a particular action, location research for a documentary works the other way round: it mostly involves finding out what the place is like, what its atmosphere may be, and what visual contribution it may be able to make to the production. It is also important to seek out any disadvantages it may present to the shooting process. Where in a drama, the conclusion may be that a different location should be found for the shoot, in a documentary this is generally not possible and the research will be limited to helping the filming team prepare for both the pluses and minuses of the given place.
Researching locations in the home country is fairly straightforward. Location research for foreign filming will include extra tasks that may not directly relate to the documentary itself but rather to the logistics of filming it. There is an overlap here with the planning and perhaps the recce stage of the pre-production process since few documentary productions are well enough financially endowed to be able to afford multiple journeys to the filming destination. Some of the information needed may be possible to acquire by telephone research from the production base, but it may fall to the researcher during the trip to find interpreters and fixers, ascertain legal and bureaucratic requirements and possibly to make contact with local film photographers and sound recordists, if it is decided to take on such personnel locally rather than shipping out the entire crew from the home base. It may even be necessary to grease a few important palms to make the filming possible at all.
Event research can be the most difficult of all, as the event concerned may be a once-only occasion for which full preparations have to be made without anyone from the production team ever witnessing the occasion themselves. There is little that can be done other than to get as much information as possible about what is supposed to happen, where and how. And to get that information from as many viewpoints as possible—they may differ remarkably.
Alas there is much that can—and often does—go wrong on the day. For the documentary series Face Values1 the team filming the New Year’s Eve ritual in the village of Comrie in Scotland were given an exhaustive description of the occasion. There would be a torchlight procession around the bounds of the parish—a ceremony which had taken place annually for some hundreds of years. The problem for filming was that so many people were to take part in the procession that once it had passed any particular shooting position, the camera team would find it impossible to move through the dense crowd and get back to the head of the march. Using information provided by a number of local informants, a complex shooting plan was drawn up using five camera positions in different parts of the village. Unfortunately allowances were not made for the earlier part of the ritual, which involved a long drinking session in the village tavern beforehand. When the moment came, the participants had imbibed so much whisky that they staggered off in a direction exactly opposite that for which the crew were prepared. The moral? Prepare for everything that could possibly go wrong—it probably will.
Many documentaries contain materials which are not directly filmed for the production but borrowed from elsewhere. Sequences from news films and other documentaries—television or film—may be included, as may still photographs and printed or written documents which are to be shot under a rostrum camera.
Seeking out these items is usually the task of specialist researchers who gather, over the years, an extensive knowledge of where appropriate film and stills libraries can be found. As with archive research, there are catalogues and books available with lists of film and stills libraries as well as museums and other organizations which have collections of visual materials. Failing that, most broadcasting organizations maintain catalogues of sequences from their productions which they make available for the use of other film-makers. Feature film companies, too, have extensive ‘back catalogues’ which can be consulted.
Though some libraries issue catalogues in both printed and electronic form, film and stills research can in some circumstances be quite expensive as viewing copies may have to be made—at the production’s expense. It is important to have a very clear idea of what is needed before approaching a library, as while some charge only for any material finally included in the edited documentary, others charge for all material supplied. The researcher will also need to check on what rights to the material are available and the cost of clearing them.
Unless the film-maker is researching the documentary alone, most productions require researchers to write a report on what they have found. This may seem an unnecessarily formal way of going about things, but there are a number of advantages to having everything written down in black and white. To start with, it concentrates the mind to collate all the information gathered, to sort it out and to commit it to paper. In fact many documentarists who work only by themselves, nonetheless still compose an account of their researches for future reference, when the fresh memory of the visits they have made and the people they have met have long since faded from the mind. If the film is being made by a team, it is a great help to have all the information available in the same form to everyone working on the production. The exact format of the report is not important—some researchers write an extended personalized account of their experiences, others simply supply notes containing the essential information in an easily assimilable way.
We can’t miss Alcoy. The symbolism of the Moros Y Christianos is simply too rich. What’s more it looks like brilliant fun and we have an official invitation from one of the leading characters.
This type of festival is quite widespread, but nowhere else is it quite like at Alcoy, a rather lumpy town of 70,000 people in the hills of Alicante province. The Alcoy event purports to commemorate an actual historical event - the defeat of the Moors in 1257, with the aid of St George.
The number of people taking part in the actual event is limited to 12,000, who are divided up into 14 groups of Moors and 14 of Christians. Each group has its own traditions, costumes and plans, to upstage the others.
I met and chatted with this year’s Alfares (the lieutenant) of the ‘Cristianos’, Francesco Javier Vicedo, who assured us that we would be his honoured guests and have complete access to his group’s activities. Appropriately enough for our film six, his group is the ‘Crusaders’.
Good close access to the fiesta denouement scenes might be difficult, but with a brazen film crew and perhaps some staging, we should be able to get really good action sequences.
The rough schedule of the Fiestas is as follows:
24.4.91 On the first day there are various preparatory rituals, music and celebration of St George’s day. Vast qantities of ‘plis-plas’, a vicious mix of coffee liqueur and coca cola, are consumed.
25.4.91 The second day sees the emergence of the bands and squadrons in their full regalia. Our man will appear after a ceremonial breakfast with his bodyguard of knights. Up to this moment, the costumes have been a closely guarded secret. I have seen the design of our Alfares’s gear, and it is fantastic. It is also costing more than £5000.
The squadrons then process through the streets, often with camels, or even elephants, as well as vast floats. More ‘plis-plas’ is drunk as feasting, dancing and singing go on into the night.
pages from a research
report written by Jeffrey Lee
for Living Islam
26.4.91 On the final day, after a Moorish embassy to the castle (a temporary structure in the main square), the battle is joined in earnest. Those with hangovers are kept on their feet by the constant roar of exploding powder from hundreds of muskets as the morning battle leaves the moors in charge of the castle after hand-to-hand combat. Our Alfares will be taking part in all these activities, which should help us get better shots.
In the afternoon, it is the Christians who approach with an embassy, and then after another battle and staged sword fight, win the day. The fiesta climaxes with the appearance of ‘Sant Jordet’ a boy representing St George on a white pony.
Unlike other villages Alcoy does not humiliate the vanquished. The nearby village of Benares that has its fiestas around the same time as Alcoy, ends them with the ‘Despojo’, the ritual conversion of the Moors in the town cemetery. By all accounts the village takes this very seriously. People in Alcoy look down on this sort of activity. As Franceso puts it, ‘Here, we’re all Moors.’ The Benares fiesta might be on 25.4.91. We need to check as Easter is interfering.
Other villages such as Biar and Villena, go even further than Benares, carrying around an effigy of ‘La Mahoma’. This is a representation of Muhammad as a sort of dragon or dragon-man that is reviled by the mob. Generally the Moor is represented as a thing of evil.
The whole Moros Y Cristianos thing is so rich with imagery - Islam reviled, St George spearing Moors instead of dragons, Muslims being walloped, triumph of the West, that we shouldn’t pass it up.
Other bits and bobs include a vast painting of the battle inside the church of Alcoy, various paintings and sculptures of St George, and the fiesta museum, replete with the costumes and relics of fiestas gone by.
We might even be able to get the comments of some Muslim onlookers. Arab traders come to sell goodies to the crowds and it’s possible that we’ll get something good from one of them - if we can find them in the throng.
Alternatively we might even find some Arab big-wigs coming to watch. They enjoy it, it seems, and one rich Kuwaiti even offered to buy the whole museum of the fiestas.
Note
1 BBC 1975