In March of 2019, Tom Clavin’s novel, ”Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier's First Gunfighter”, inspired me to launch a documentary project on the life of James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok. There were a few pre-production considerations that we wanted to share with our readers.
Identify your target audience. Who would want to see this film and on which platform? This is an expensive question. Opting for the commercial route often results in more costly permits and licensing fees; whereas, editorial or student films can often arrange for free access to places and materials, as well as have a larger pool of stock footage to select from. The downside of editorial films is the legal hurdles one must jump through (E&O for one) in order to distribute your film for a profit. Your answer to this question will typically mandate what technical formats will be required in order to distribute the film. There’s also a chance that the targeted distribution platform will change either due to licensing constraints or simply go under (e.g., Distribber). At a minimum, I would determine the following requirements with example values during pre-production:
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Resolution: 1920x1080p
Frame rate: 23.976
Codec: MPEG-2
Bitrate: (Stereo) 384 Kbps
Sample Rate: 48 kHz
Captions: English, SubRip text file format
Lastly, don’t forget to conceptualize who is actually watching your film? What are their interests, professions, and even locations? This will aid in your marketing efforts later on; especially, with location-specific Facebook Ads. For this documentary, we broke down our target audience into two categories:
Local Documentary Film Festival Submissions
Streaming Video
American History Educators
Old West and Civil War Historians/Enthusiasts
Don’t forget to collect business cards and/or the contact information of those who you meet throughout the documentary making process! They will likely watch your film; especially, those that assist with your research, location access, etc.
Identify the locations that have meaning, then fight to gain access. Our protagonist had adventures across the United States ranging from northern Illinois to New York City, until his murder in South Dakota. To avoid expending a ton of cash on travel, I had to select those locations that a.) contributed to the story, b.) still retained a sense of historical accuracy, and c.) provided some form of visual interest. Thankfully, the key moments occurred in geographic pockets. Perhaps due to limited movement by horseback? I then set about gaining access to these locations via phone or email correspondence.
Northern Illinois: Troy Grove, LaSalle, Utica
Missouri: St. Louis
Kansas: Abilene, Hays, Fort Hays
South Dakota: Deadwood
Given that most locations in the 1800s has been destroyed, we needed to secure access to National Park Service property. For an in-depth discussion, we have a blog post that provides tips on filming NPS property.
Collect research materials and build your story. The research materials you use to help shape your story can also be of great importance for B-roll or any voice-over narrations. Throughout this documentary, we found the below resources invaluable:
Library of Congress. The majority of artifacts are in the public domain, but you MUST be careful as some collectors’ or museums’ artifacts within the Library of Congress still have their rights retained by the owner.
Local Museums and Universities. Unfortunately, we had to purchase a commercial re-use license for most artifacts obtained through these channels. In my experience with making this film, local museums and universities’ historical departments will have the most relevant materials on your subject material. Because of this, you will need to have an adequate budget available for licensing fees. Once again, this may be a moot point if you are going the non-commercial route.
Artwork in the Public Domain. For our stop motion film and this documentary, we heavily leveraged artwork. Whether portraits, landscapes or even surveyor drawings, these images can be vitalized with a bit of motion (e.g., Ken Burns effect).
Historical Experts. Each National Park Service or historical location I visited had its own designated or ‘informal’ historian. I encourage you to reach out as they have a wealth of information on hand! For Deadwood, we arranged a private tour with a retired museum worker to provide historical context. If your lucky, he or she will ‘grease the wheels’ and arrange for unfettered access to sites and museum artifacts; thus, no need for cold calling!
Newspapers and magazines. Despite the material’s content being written prior to copyright laws, the actual artifact’s scanned image (e.g., an1800s newspaper article) may belong to a historical society or a museum. I avoided displaying an image of the artifact but did use its content in narration as the material itself is in the public domain. My recommendation though is to consult an attorney. We also needed to purchase a photograph from a magazine and I strongly urge you to find an alternative. This is by far, the most costly of the licensing routes; yet, it can still be far cheaper than traveling to the location.
Creative Commons Licensing. Although I am a big proponent of the Creative Commons licensing model, read the fine print! We had to pass on a few materials as the license required us to make the resultant product (our entire documentary) available under a non-commercial, CC license. No need to surrender all your project’s rights unless that’s your motive.
I am going to close out this post with one last and possibly, the most important aspect: Rights Management. If you were diligent with your research, you have amassed a large amount of content. My method was to convert our narration script into a documentary script format that lists media (images, audio, stock footage) file names along with the script’s corresponding text and running time. The next logical step is to start dumping the items in order along your NLE’s timeline once you acquired sound. Additionally, I would keep a backup of these media items along with their licensing or usage rights screenshots along with the file. I would simply copy the original filename and append “_Lic” to the end of the licensing proof to facilitate searching.