Tome of Nonprofit Minidocs

Nonprofit Videos are simple minidoc style interview pieces that showcase the work of a given nonprofit, usually with interviews of key figures and then a decent amount of b-roll, though allowance is made here for more complex projects of the same type.

PREPRODUCTION - DIRECTOR/WRITER

Whether you’re one person or two, the most important thing you have to understand about videos like this is that even though it’s doc-style, it’s not doc-chaos. It’s up to you to come up with the plan for how you want the video to go, before you actually make it, just like any other production.

So we’re going to need three things: a creative brief, a treatment, and an outline. Thes documents will be deleoped and revised relative to each other to form the basis of the preproduction package.

CREATIVE BRIEF

A simple doc used across the board in advertising and design. It outlines the basic premise of the “business side” of the production, and as we’re the business, we’ll be helping make it, if not making it entirely ourselves and then bringing you on after it’s ready. But if you are invloved, this is the basics of what the brief will go over:

1. Project Background and Objectives
2. Target Audience
3. Key Messages
4. How and Where the Video will be Distributed
5. General Tone/Treatment
6. Mandatory Elements
7. General Timeline
8. Budget Outline
9. Approval Process
10. Success Measures

It should be presented in pitch-deck format.

TREATMENT

Like a music video treatement, or any other short form treatment, this is where you as Director determine the creative style for the work. The color pallete, the contrast curve, the editing style and any interesting effects you wish to use to help tell the story, any self-imposed limitations to help focus the creative impact, and maybe a general plot outline, though that will come for the most part in the next document.

SCRIPT OUTLINE

Professional documentary filmmakers will just call this a script, but it’s really just an outline of the general events you wish to get recorded, based on what you expect to happen during the time of filming. This is kind of tricky, and requires that you have some experience with the subject matter and (ideally) previous experience filming documentaries. In a lot of ways this is the most important document to make, as it informs the other two.

The key aspects you should focus on are not only what you expect to happen from a plot standpoint (so for a documentary on homeless refugees, maybe they try to get a job or an apartment), but also what you expect from an emotional standpoint. You need to figure out who the characters are (it’s always better to have characters than a general “topic” if you’ve watched Mark Bone’s YT), what their problems and goals are, and what is likely to happen in their story, and how to follow them through it. You should have this planned out, almost entirely.

Basically there are actually two plots going on here: the plot of the events as they occur to this character in real life, and the plot of the story, which you wrote out in advance, in this document, with the hope of matching it up well to the real life plot, then adapt on the fly as necessary to maintain that in an artistic, stylized way. This goes for all doc stuff, especially when you’re dealing with the chaotic lives of the people the nonprofits serve.

And yes, as a general rule: it’s always better to make your character someone the nonprofit is serving, instead of the actual nonprofit. The nonprofit should be a side character or a deus ex machina, as these videos are often about hightening the conflict, and thus the impact that the nonprofit has on the community, but showing how a member of that community struggles and is helped.

This section needs to be expanded, I haven’t come close to covering everything necessary here.

PRODUCTION

It’s important to limit the number of crew both because of budget and because having 3 people in a room watching a person talk about the problems they’re facing is much better than having 10.

So the crew you’re looking for are going to be run-and-gun guys with their own kit, who pull their own focus, have onboard sound, and operate their own camera, etc.. If possible, get a gaffer, ideally with a sprinter truck (or even less). If the director is also a camera op, even better.

The basic mindset from here on should be “do everything small”.

Unfortunately, especially for the larger, more minidoc-style projects, the process of principal photography is going to be different for each one, so we can’t get into more specific details here. It will be the work of the producer and director, in the preproduction documents above, to determine how they want the shooting to proceed.

I can give some specific Danzer Media Creative Guidelines, however.

Danzer Media Creative Guidelines

These projects can range from a simple half-day where you interview 1 person and get some b-roll, to multi-week shoots where you follow a community around and create a full-scale doc or even a minidoc series out of it. In either case, the pattern is the same:

• FOCUS ON THE VICTIM: often the people who run the nonprofit will want the video to focus on either them specifically, or what the nonprofit as a whole does. Don’t do either of those things. Find a victim, someone the nonprofit helps, and make them the hero of the story.
• GO HARD IN THE PAINT: Conflict is your friend. Depression is your friend. Despair is your friend. You want the viewer to see the struggle. This is very specific to DM: we don’t shy away from heavy topics, we charge at them headon. Often clients think that we should “focus on the positive”, what that leads to is a video that sends the opposite message the nonprofit wants (If you “focus on the positive” without showing the negative first, the end result is usually a video that implies that supporting the nonprofit is unnecessary, cause everything is already going great! Also videos without conflict are boring, so people who are forced to watch them–such as potential donors at a fundraising event–are likely to be annoyed they even had to sit through it). We focus on the negative, we show the negative events if at all possible (having someone talking about it is ok but actually seeing it is way better), and then we use the work of the nonprofit to partially tie everything back together, while still showing that more support is needed. That’s the story, and to get it, you need to be prepared to be sort of a benevolent, compassionate Nightcrawler-type interviewer.
• DON’T BE A DICK: coming off of that, it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that you treat every subject with respect and compassion. Since what you’re going to be doing is the emotional equivalent of an invasive surgery, you cannot have anything less than an excellent bedside manner. You need to be nice, you need to find and fulfill the subject’s needs, you need to give them time to start trusting you (it’s often better to shoot some b-roll first and then push the interviews back as far as possible), and most importantly, you need to be OPEN AND HONEST with the subject about what you’re doing, and the exact story angle you’re taking. You’re not Kubrick, and this person isn’t an actor, so never make the mistake of thinking that playing mind games with them to get a better performance or story is a good idea. Your goal should never be to humiliate them. This is not a guideline, it’s a law, and it applies to everyone on location & the entire crew.
• GET GOOD LIGHTING: having a small team of R&Gers is no excuse to not make it cinematic. Have a bounce on hand for outdoor stuff, and make sure the interviews look good. You’re encouraged to have a gaffer for good reason: even if you don’t, it still NEEDS to look good. Don’t let it look bad.

POST-PRODUCTION

Edit wise it’s generally pretty simple: follow the outline, start by cutting down the interviews into the right story with the right beats, add b-roll and any footage of key events, work with the director and follow the Tome of Nonscripted Edits.

Color, be prepared to deal with bad lighting.

Graphics/vfx, be prepared for silent, white on black titles with bold sans-serif text that ominously fades in and out, also be ready to do some patching and roto.