MORE things I´ve learned about making documentaries--ORGANIZATION

Aside from RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH, I've learned that to do right by a documentary, you need...

ORGANIZATION.

Organization has always been one of my weak points.  I am very scattered.  On the one hand, this has the advantage of allowing me to be more creative.  If you're scattered, you see possibilities everywhere.  You see connections everywhere.  You have ideas all the time.

But on the flip side, this indicates a disorganized mind.

Well, I'm not entirely against a disorganized mind in the sense that I WANT to have those ideas, see those possibilities, see those connections.  HOWEVER...

If you want your public to be able to follow you, you must create a path and stick to it.  Small asides are ok so long as they connect naturally to the main path, but you need to keep those asides down to a minimum and not stray too far, or for too long.


The HISTORY of Afro-Peruvians and black Latinos COULD have been my path, but in the end, it's not what I chose.

And you need to decide what will be that main path, that narrative thread.  With a documentary about, say, Afro-Peruvian music and dance, it could be the technique needed to perform.  It could be the training needed to perform well.  It could be the situation and community that has created these performance arts (which is more or less the path that I chose).

There are other possibilities, of course, but one way or another, you do need to choose, and you should choose early on so that you don't waste a lot of time pursuing interesting ideas that in the end you won't be able to use.

photo:  Carlos O. Lopez & Cimarrones del Peru

 Just to make life for a person like me even a little more complicated, you not only need to choose your main path, but you have to choose your destination.  If you decided to focus on the training and technique, you might conclude that these are something everyone can learn in one week flat, or that you need years and years of practice with excellent teachers, or whatever.  But you do need to decide on a conclusion.

Believe it or not, for me the most difficult thing, next to choosing and sticking to one specific path, has been to decide on that conclusion.  I am extremely prone to presenting something simply because I like it and I think it's cool, without organizing my thoughts sufficiently to decide WHY it's cool, or WHAT'S cool about it, or why anyone else should be interested.  I have trouble deciding on what my point is.


I decided to focus more on the music and dance, but the documentary does more than just present them.

And a documentary without a point can be very boring for your audience.

SO...with A Zest for Life, it took me several YEARS (I kid you not) to figure out what my point was.  My point, of course--  that we shouldn't let these performance arts disappear-- has several sub-points, the most important of which are that these performance arts are in danger, and in the long run, to keep them alive, we need to understand the background out of which they came, and the history out of which they arose.

It has been my task in the documentary to select and organize my material to communicate this.  I hope that I have done so.  I present it to you with my fingers crossed.

OUR NEXT POST will be a slight detour.  We'll look at a 13-year old Peruvian-American saxophonist playing with his "adopted grandmother," African-American jazz singer Barbara Morrison.