Just as you want your protagonist to have a worthy goal, you want him or her to have a worthy opponent. A common problem for many ﬁlmmakers is that they portray opponents as one- dimensional; if their hero is good, the opponent must be bad. In fact, the most memorable opponent is often not the opposite of the hero, but a complement to him or her.

Worthy Opponent

“Who are your characters?What do they want?What are the stakes if they don’t get it? Where is the tension?Where is the story going?Why does it matter?” And so on.

Story Is All About

A satisfactory ending, or resolution, is often one that feels both unexpected and inevitable. It must resolve the one story you set out to tell.

A Satisfactory Ending

Story Basics: A story is the narrative, or telling, of an event or series of events, crafted in a way to interest the audience, whether they are readers, listeners, or viewers. At its most basic, a story has a beginning, middle, and end. It has compelling characters, rising tension, and conﬂict that reaches some sort of resolution. It engages the audi- ence on an emotional and intellectual level, motivating viewers to want to know what happens next

What Is STOR

Audience have empathy for main character. • This somebody wants something very badly. • This something is difﬁcult—but possible—to do, get, or achieve. • The story is told for maximum emotional impact and audience participation in the proceedings. • The story must come to a satisfactory ending.

Dramatic Story

The somebody is your protagonist, your hero, the entity whose story is being told. Note that your hero can, in fact, be very “unheroic,” and the audience might struggle to empathize with him or her. But the character and/or character’s mission should be compelling enough that the audience cares about outcome.

Who (or What) the Story Is About

The something that somebody wants is also referred to as a goal or an objective. Storytellers speak of active versus passive goals and active versus passive heroes. In general, you want a story’s goals and heroes to be active, which means that you want your story’s protagonist to be in charge of his or her own life: To set a goal and then to go about doing what needs to be done to achieve it.

What the Protagonist Wants

It does have to matter enough to be worth committing signiﬁcant time and resources to. If you only care a little about your protagonists and what they want, your ﬁnanciers and audience are likely to care not at all.

Perfect Goals

Think of a movie thriller in which you’re aware, but the heroine is not, that danger lurks in the cellar. As she heads toward the steps, you feel escalating tension because she is walking toward danger. If you didn’t know that the bad guy was in the basement, she would just be a girl heading down some stairs. Without tension, a story feels ﬂat; you don’t care one way or the other about the outcomeWeather, illness, war, self-doubt, inexperience, hubris—all of these can pose obstacles as your protagonist strives to achieve his or her goal. And just as it can be useful to tell a complex story.

Example Of Tension

The concept of telling a story for greatest emotional impact and audience participation is perhaps the most difﬁcult. It’s often described as “show, don’t tell,” which means that you want to present the evidence or information that allows viewers to experience the story for themselves, anticipating twists and turns and following the story line in a way that’s active rather than passive

Emotional Impact and Audience Participation

Documentaries are many things to many people, often simultane- ously. They are a form of self expression, like novels, songs, or paintings. They are a form of journalism, independent and unmedi- ated. They are tools for bridging the divide between cultures or exposing the harsh realities of a volatile world. They inspire, moti- vate, educate, exacerbate, and entertain. Documentaries reﬂect all that is great, challenging, disturbing, and humorous about the human condition.

What Is DOCUMENTARY?

The something that is wanted—the goal—must be difﬁcult to do or achieve. If something is easy, there’s no tension, and without tension, there’s little incentive for an audience to keep watching. Tension is the feeling we get when issues or events are unresolved, especially when we want them to be resolved. It’s what motivates us to demand, “And then what happens? And what happens after that?” We need to know, because it makes us uncomfortable not to know.

Difﬁculty and Tangibility

Another tool of emotional storytelling is to have something at stake and to raise the stakes until the very end.a good storyteller, even small stakes can be made large when their importance to those in the story is conveyed.

Raising the Stakes

Improve Cinematography & storytelling knowledge 

Documentary Storytelling is unique in offering an in-depth look at story and structure as applied not to Hollywood fiction, but to films and videos based on factual material and the drama of real life. With the growing popularity of documentaries in today's global media marketplace, demand for powerful, memorable storytelling has never been higher. This practical guide lays out the basics and applies them to diverse subjects and film styles, from cinema verite and personal narrative to financing and budgets. It shows how good storytelling can bring mundane or difficult subjects to life, and demonstrates that good films can be both rigorous and entertaining. Offering practical advice for ever state of production, Documentary Storytelling is filled with real-world examples drawn from the author's career and the experiences of a range of filmmakers, both emerging and established. Special interview chapters explore storytelling as practiced by David Guggenheim, Jon Else, Nicholas Fraser, Susan Froemke, Sam Pollard, Onyekachi Wambu and others. This third edition has been updated and expanded, with a look at newer and internationally-distributed films. It also features new coverage of financing and budgeting in the world of digital distribution of documentary films and the troubles that young filmmakers face as a result.