How to Make a Documentary: A Step-by-Step Guide to Filming Like a Pro

On my way to Dreamforce this year, I hitchhiked 1,000 miles in a painted caravan full of people with jackets that read “Bandit Tour.” The running joke was that anytime strangers in the towns we passed through asked if we were a band, we said yes and made up a place we were playing that night.

There was a lot of laughing. But there was also a lot of holding back tears. As part of the tour, we volunteered for nonprofits and did everything from stuff backpacks full of clothing for foster kids to rip out clumps of invasive scrub grass from the beaches of California’s Humboldt county.

I can’t recall feeling so touched. Or so shaken to my core by acts of raw human kindness. Or so grateful that Vidyard’s CEO Michael Litt, Community Engagement Program Manager Laura Galbraith, and I were asked to join the tour, and I (as the Video Production Manager) to make a documentary about the experience.

This article is about how to make documentary videos, but it’s also about the specific documentary I made about the Bandit Tour for Good, and how it came together. It covers everything from what equipment to buy (love me that DJI Osmo Pocket Gimbal) to whether you should be making a documentary at all. If it leaves you with one new idea, it’s that businesses can create great documentaries too, and use them to do good.

Watch the Mini-Doc

Watch the 18-minute documentary I made about the 2019 edition of the Bandit Tour for Good.

What’s a Mini-Doc?

A mini documentary or “mini-doc” is a 10 to 30-minute nonfiction video that aims to document reality for the purpose of education. It’s shorter than feature-length, but also a lot longer than the typical two-minute marketing video which the world seems to run on. Mini docs are time-consuming to make and to watch, but I think they can be immensely valuable.

What separates documentary-style videos from most marketing videos is that they aim to educate, inspire, and transform for their own sake. They connect us as people. While corporate documentaries may have tangential benefits, like allowing a company’s message to piggyback on what’s otherwise pure entertainment, they work best when they’re based on motives that are pure.

Bandit Tour is a volunteer experience organized by the founders of the Salesforce consultancy Traction on Demand and held every year since 2013. On it, people from the company travel from Vancouver to San Francisco for Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference. Along the way, they volunteer for nonprofits like Teen Feed and A Better Life Foundation. In that collective act of generosity, I saw a story about a culture, about a team, and about a group of people undergoing a transformational experience together. That’s the stuff great brand documentaries are made from.

Michael, Laura, and I joined the bandits on a tour that took seven days. In that time, I captured six hours of footage (about 1.5 hours of interviews) which I cut down into an 18-minute film.

How to Make a Documentary Film Step-by-Step

If you watch feature-length documentaries, you’ve probably noticed a few similarities. First, the film or trailer usually starts right in the middle of the story or the action and then jumps back to explain to viewers how they got there. (Sort of like how I started this article—right in the middle of the action.) That out-of-order intro is your hook.

More broadly, the whole documentary typically follows a classic storytelling arc of conflict, rising action, falling action, and resolution. You see this in popular documentaries like The Biggest Little Farm, This Changes Everything, Shark Water, and even in Disney Nature’s documentaries where, for the sake of connecting viewers to prairie dogs, they give rodents personalities and narrate their struggles.

1. Start with Pre-Production and Planning

The planning phase typically accounts for 50% of all the time you spend on a brand documentary (or any kind of doc). It’s that important. The better you prepare here, the smoother filming and editing go. For instance, if you know exactly what shots you’re looking for, shooting them is quick, and they require fewer edits.

For your brand documentary, ask yourself, “What’s the goal?” Don’t just shoot blindly—have a thesis going in. You don’t always know the full story, especially if you’re covering an event that hasn’t happened yet, but you usually have an inkling.

On the Bandit Tour, I was given very little direction. I was simply asked to capture it and make sense of it. But I did know we’d be traveling, so I’d need to capture stable footage of our vehicles on the road for B-roll. (That’s filler footage, more on that later.) I also knew people would be having emotional experiences during their volunteer work, so I’d need to be there and ready to interview.

Sometimes subjects have requests or preferences that you have to respect. For instance, the Traction on Demand team kindly asked me not to capture night time footage when people were unwinding and getting to know each other over beers. So, I only filmed during the day, and that had unexpected benefits.

2. Gather Your Equipment

The better you know your equipment, the more you can focus in the moment. Nothing’s worse than seeing the opportunity for a great shot but fumbling to get the camera on the right setting.

If you’ll be on the road like we were at the Bandit Tour, you’ll want a lightweight kit. Cameras aren’t any good if they’re big, bulky, and not with you when the action’s happening. On the tour, I brought a DJI Osmo Pocket Gimbal, a tiny handheld camera that I could keep in my jacket pocket. I also had a higher quality Sony A7III which could shoot up to 4k video. Together, that was enough.

Don’t think you need to go out and acquire a ton of expensive equipment. At the level of equipment I carried, it’s hard for people to tell the difference between that footage and higher quality footage. The exception here, however, is sound quality. People will forgive grainy footage but they will not forgive choppy sound.

My Bandit Tour documentary film kit:

DJI Osmo Pocket Gimbal
Sony A7III
Lenses
Lavalier microphone x 2
Monopod
Headphones
SD cards
Portable hard drive
Extra batteries

3. Focus On the Story, Not the Gear

High quality footage is nice. But you have to make sure that the story you’re looking to tell is in place far more than you need to use flashy equipment. So, again, stick to a lightweight gear kit.

On the Bandit Tour, I was just one person. In that situation you have to figure out how to make a documentary by yourself and you can’t be lugging a trunk everywhere, or have enough time to set it up and break it down.

Would I love to have a RED cinema camera and capture this stuff in 8K? Definitely. But anybody that’s worked with a RED cinema camera knows how finicky they are to set up. It’s not really realistic for an on-the-fly shoot when you need a volume collection versus hoping to nail one good shot.

4. Collect a Variety of Shots

Documentaries are a collage of different shots. You don’t always know what you need, to give you (or your editor) lots of options. If you have a strong sense of how documentaries are constructed, you’ll know what shots to look for, and will have a mental checklist. For instance, “Oh, I need a strong opener and a strong closer. Where are those pieces?”

On the Bandit Tour, I did have some backup. Sacha Vanhecke from Traction on Demand was filming their own brand documentary about the startups we’d helped. Though we were working on different projects, sometimes we’d ask each other to capture B-roll from whatever we were doing.

Common Types of Documentary Shots:

Talking Head: Someone speaking to the camera.
Vlog: An informal shot of a narrator—possibly the cameraman—speaking into a camera that they either set up or are holding.
A-Roll: Your best footage, often of interviews, which narrate the central theme.
B-Roll: Contextual footage for transitions, or to cut to while people are speaking.

Plus, in the cutting room, you can add:

Animations: Watch The Biggest Little Farm and you’ll see that they animated much of the introduction, probably because they didn’t have all the right footage.
Text Overlays: Titles and subtitles help viewers orient themselves, so they know where and when the events are taking place.

Where should I use B-Roll?

B-Roll is wonderful footage to show while people are talking. A talking head segment can get monotonous, so cut to B-Roll of the surrounding area or even better, something related to what they’re talking about.

During the Bandit Tour, I knew the road trip would be central to the theme, so I captured lots of B-Roll of the car, the bus, and all the branding elements on the vehicles. To get some of it, we’d use walkie talkies so I could tell the other vehicles in our convoy, “Slow down the bus so I can drive past you and get a cool shot.”

How to Film a Great Interview

When you watch a documentary interview, you’re seeing just a tiny fraction of all the conversations had. If you have a good sense of where your documentary is going and what parts you need to flesh out, you can use your questions to guide people to discuss things you want to cover. Here are some interviewing tips I’ve picked up over the years:

Choose settings that are conducive to conversation
Choose interviewees who are emotive
Choose good lighting
Test your sound beforehand
Go off-script—the question list is your safety net, but the gold comes from the in-between stuff
Don’t look down at your notes too much; you disconnect from the interviewee
Interview people before, during, and after events: Anticipate, describe, reflect

This is one of my favorite interviews from the documentary. It was with Braden Ford, UX Design Lead from Traction on Demand, and I thought he had an interesting story to tell. During the tour, he spent his birthday giving back to an organization that really needed the help, which was a very unique experience for him.

5. Each Night, Offload Your Footage and Organize It

Don’t lose footage you worked hard to collect. Each night, I offloaded my media cards onto a laptop with a cloud storage backup. That way, a spilled drink couldn’t ruin all my work. Once it was on my computer, I arranged all the shots in chronological order for each day.

If I’m being really specific, I lay all of my footage per day on a video timeline in my video editing software. Then I comb through, trimming the fat and moving the usable content up one level on the timeline. That way, when I bring the good footage in from the next phase of my editing (when all the days are spliced together), it’s already been meticulously picked through.

I will typically have each day clustered on its own group on my master timeline and if there are common elements like “driving shots,” I will cluster those together so I know where to pull from.

6. Assemble the Story in Post-Production

The magic happens in post-production. Sometimes you go into it knowing you’ve got incredible footage and exactly how you’ll assemble it. Other times, you have no clue, and you discover these incredible, inspiring quotes that you’d totally missed because you were so focused on your list of questions.

Re-read your pre-production goals. The people you planned to have interviews with—were those the right subjects? Did you get enough time with them?
Conduct a first edit. Go through all the clips day by day and trim out the good stuff, leaving the rest behind.
Conduct a second edit. Select the best clips from those remaining. Arrange them into an interesting story. By this stage, I had the Bandit Tour down to 34 minutes of mostly interviews.
Conduct a third edit. Add B-roll, which serves as added context to the story and also helps to cover up jump cuts in your edit. That was my footage of sand dunes, of people laughing, and of cars passing. B-roll helps paint a picture of what your speakers are talking about.
Add transitions and animated chapter titles. You see transitions throughout the Bandit Tour doc. Transitions and titles give audiences a moment to breathe and help establish the setting. They’re also useful if you didn’t get a shot of a road sign, like I forgot to do in Tigard & Coos Bay.
End it on a philosophical note. If the goal of your documentary is to educate, inspire, or transform, leave people on a note that prompts them to think. That could be an interviewee asking a powerful question or clips of everyone reflecting. In the Bandit Tour documentary, I ended things on a shot of the team all standing on a big beach rock with the ocean breaking around them. (The footage, interestingly, wasn’t mine. It came from a DJI Mavic Drone provided by Greg Malpass, Founder and CEO of Traction on Demand.)
Build a trailer. Trailers are short, two-minute teaser videos for the mini doc. Take your cues from Hollywood: Pack the trailer with the most interesting stuff. Try to convey how exciting the documentary is without giving it all away.

7. Share and Promote Your Documentary

You’ve spent a lot of time and energy making a documentary, now it’s time to send it off into the world so people can see it. There are a ton of different channels you can use to share your video, so think about who would be interested in seeing it and where they’d be most likely to come across it.

Put Your Videos to Work
Create, host, manage, and share your videos.

Brand Documentary Examples

Now that you’re thinking about them, you’ll start to see brand documentary examples everywhere.

1. Jabil

The manufacturing services company Jabil gave its team the editorial freedom to investigate the future of sustainable packaging and produce a documentary.

2. MailChimp

The email software firm MailChimp produced a series of mini documentaries about small businesses and the passionate people behind them.

3. Patagonia

The environmentally-conscious clothing company Patagonia is a prolific creator of documentaries. Below, a Patagonia mini documentary about the stories behind our clothing.

4. NETSCOUT

The cybersecurity company NETSCOUT partnered with legendary documentarian Werner Herzog to tell the story of the internet in “Lo and Behold.”

5. Volvo

Car maker Volvo filmed a documentary about a father and son team who, despite having no farming experience, got into agriculture and transformed the industry.

6. Coors Light

In a play on its iconic mountain-shaped logo, Coors Light sent photographer Ruben Wu and his journey to capture the blue ice walls of Peru’s largest glacier. (It’s a mini-mini documentary—just four minutes long. Of all the documentary examples, this is my favorite.)

7. American Express

The credit cart giant American Express produced a mini documentary about the 70 million Americans without access to traditional banking services.

My Tips for Making a Documentary-Style Video
1. Find Your Overall Narrative

I’m a mid-tier planner. Some people like to script a documentary to a T. Others do zero planning and wing it. I’m in the middle.

If you’re capturing something like the Bandit Tour, you can’t script or storyboard it because it hasn’t happened yet, and you want to document reality, not direct people.

Through my questions and the people I choose to interview, I’m constantly guiding them to answer what I consider are the big questions the documentary considers. In the case of the Bandit Tour, that was, “What does it mean for a company to really give back? And how does that enable some pretty amazing nonprofit organizations to be even more impactful?”

Traction on Demand sends 110 of their 800 employees to Dreamforce each year and those that go on the tour dedicate an entire week to volunteering. How interesting is that? How often do you have an opportunity to unplug like that? I asked people to reflect on that theme, and we got lots of great stuff.

2. Earn Your Interviewees’ Trust

Vidyard CEO Michael Litt, Laura Galbraith, and I got dropped into the Bandit Tour not really knowing anyone. In that case, you’re starting from zero trust.

As it turned out, Traction on Demand’s request that I not film at night ended up being really helpful to me because it gave me this perfect opportunity to get to know everyone off-camera. Then, on camera, they trusted me and were a lot more open.

3. Stay Fresh

Filming all the time is exhausting. Take breaks, set down the camera, and stay sharp so when interesting things happen, you notice and capture them.

4. Be Present

There are times in documentary work where you’re part of the experience you’re recording. There was a moment when we were all in a forested area near the grass-covered dunes and everybody was told to close their eyes and take a breath. Well, if I did that, I’d miss capturing the shot of everyone doing it. My job is to convey that visually, so I had to shoot instead of breathe.

5. Obsess Over Your Audio Quality

Bad audio bothers people a lot worse than bad quality video. I highly recommend that if you buy no other piece of documentary equipment, you invest in a microphone that clips to your interviewee’s shirt. Decent ones can be as cheap at $50 on Amazon.

Excellent audio comes from just about the top of the speaker’s chest. Lavalier mics sit there and provide for great resonance. They also reduce ambient noises from entering the microphone so you avoid a popping P’s or hissing S’s, which can happen when the microphone is right in front of the speaker’s face.

6. Don’t Forget the Wrap-Up

Once the event you’re recording is over, keep the camera rolling. Get everyone’s take on what happened, their experience, and their in-the-moment reflections. Are they thrilled? Disappointed? How does what just happened change them?

7. Remember That Not Everything Has an ROI

If you’re being asked to create a documentary with an ROI, suggest another format. In the case of the Bandit Tour, what’s the return on doing good? Or on making a documentary about doing good? There were lots of costs involved, but I have to believe they were far outweighed by the experience of the team doing good. But just because you can’t affix a dollar amount to the outcome doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile.

8. Close Your Documentary on an Expansive Note

The bus we used on the Bandit Tour, as well as the airstream and the Trans Am, are all packed away in storage now. Dreamforce is over. The team has returned to everyday work. What are we left with? Just the residual feelings of knowing that in our ultra-busy modern lives, a group of us took a week away to volunteer and really sit with the idea that we can all make time to give back if we want to. And by giving back, we learn about all the amazing people doing incredible, heartfelt work every day, and we grow closer to those around us.

I’m grateful to have been invited. I won’t forget the Bandit Tour, and I hope others learn about it and choose not to forget either. I hope people are inspired and sign up to become bandits. And if this documentary does anything, I hope it spreads that message.

Corporate Documentary FAQ
Can I mention my product?

Try to avoid it, unless it’s critical to the story. For instance, if viewers won’t understand what’s happening without you explain it, go ahead. But the focus should be on the subjects and their experiences.

Is making a mini doc expensive?

It doesn’t have to be. Lots of great documentaries are made with equipment that costs hundreds of dollars rather than thousands.

How should I promote my documentary?

Just because you make it doesn’t mean people can find it. Work with your marketing team to create a landing page (like the Bandit Tour one) and a promotional strategy.

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