Making a Documentary in 2017
Today's documentary is not your grandfather's documentary.
Heck, I don't even know what your grandfather's documentary looks like besides the 50/50 chance it's in black & white instead of color.
The rapid advance of computers has revolutionized the way people tell stories and attempt to persuade the public to action. The sheer amount of content that took months to generate decades ago could only take minutes to hours today.
I'm talking about the full versatility of the term documentary encompassing all narrated videos. Some may label these "web only" but anyone could burn these to a DVD and attempt to market them that way as well.
When I made Banks Fear Bitcoin I did use some live footage, specifically for the narration. A unique appealing approach I'd say, as the video has nearly half a million views. Most documentaries do NOT get seen by 500,000 people! Michael Moore could barely boast such an achievement.
Dozens of documentaries can get hundreds of thousands of views, up to millions and not have a second of live original footage but a collage of internet based "stock footage" often reused from other online documentaries!
It's became easier and easier to create these, opening the gates of oversupply but more importantly it's like an exercise of free speech. You could throw together some clips in one day and put it out and it could be the best compilation of clips for that specific topic or to achieve your specific purpose (for example to show the federal reserve is evil.
As long as YouTube and streaming platforms like it are alive, anyone's video with any amount of effort could go viral. This also includes just straight re-uploads of past documentaries that didn't see much light. Maybe they had the wrong title or were simply released at the wrong time to not get widespread viewership. One person sharing could make or break it as I've seen in my experience many times. If it's an economic collapse Drama-Doc, sgtreport could spark some big ratings if it's just posted on SGTReport.com
If you don't get re-posted your video could be left in the dark no matter how good it is. And that is a problem with such a flood of videos available now. But like many markets, more competition usually produces better quality products at cheaper prices. Today's documentaries are often free to watch! Sometimes without the creator's consent, they are just posted on YouTube and it's up to them to register their video to enforce copyright restrictions.
Steps to Creating a Modern 'Documentary'
Will it be narrated? You can outsource this
If YES:Who will write the narration? You can outsource this or even ask to use someone's article on your subject
Who will edit? You can outsource this as well
How to market?
Bare minimum you can just upload to YouTube. You can tweet out, post on your blog, contact other blogs to post or share. Contact anyone you know with a website or social media platform with viewers to share. You can even try your hand and paying through fiverr. If you have $500 you create a cool web based short documentary. In addition if you have a bigger budget you may want to throw the most into marketing, it's a very important if not the most important aspect of releasing your creation. You can promote it on twitter, youtube (through google adwords), and now even steemit!
I love fiverr it's just too bad they stopped accepting bitcoin earlier this year for unknown reasons.
If you want to release your own online documentary you can contact me for tips and I can even hook you up with narrators, editors or marketers.
Solid article, thanks for the mention! Upvoted and following you now.
thanks sean for all your work awakening people over the years
It's definitely a different ballgame these days. I've been doing docs for tv, which has a lot of restrictions on them but now you go to the doc festivals and it's a huge crowd.
The trick is finding the quality over quantity.
oh, yes I should have expanded on the freedom aspect (even though much violates copyrights and youtube does crackdown, for the most we have a lot of freedom these days)
Lovely read! upvote and follow for you