Genesis of a Drag Documentary
I can’t claim the idea for Queen of the Capital. My first year teaching at Maryland, I taught an intro to multi-media class, mostly full of masters students. For their final project, I assigned them a documentary short. They had to profile an interesting individual. One of my students went to DC Pride, and looking out across the crowd saw Muffy’s hair. She marched up to Muffy and set up her final project.
A week or so later, I was talking to my class and one of them asked what I wanted to do beyond teaching.
“I’ve always wanted to make a feature-length documentary,” I said.
Brandi replied, “Why don’t we do one on Muffy?”
A few weeks later, we sat down with Daniel (Muffy’s alter-ego) at Bently’s in College, Park, Md., and he explained the Court system, running for empress, and all of the amazing things they do for the community. I knew I had a good story.
I have a background in TV news. I was a TV reporter, I did video production for a state agency and I teach broadcast, but I had no idea about how to produce or direct a documentary. I decided to just jump in and start filming. If I was going to do it, this was my chance.
I used the camera I had, a Panasonic GH3. It’s a prosumer, mirrorless camera (at Slamdance, an audience member asked me if I shot it on a Red 🤣). I recruited two other students to help, along with Brandi, who pitched me the idea. I suggested they buy the same camera and we started filming. We made some mistakes, but we didn’t let the fact that we didn’t know what we were doing hold us back.
You can learn everything you need to produce a documentary. You can learn how to compose a shot, how to edit a sequence or how to write a grant proposal, but your documentary isn't going to make itself. You don’t need fancy equipment. You can start shooting with your phone. You have to just do it. Make the time and start filming. Once you start, keep on yourself to finish it. You can always start with a documentary short, that will help you raise money for a feature anyway.
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”
—Wayne Gretzky —Michael Scott —Josh Davidsburg
Ok, You have your idea, now what?
You’re sitting at lunch with a friend and they tell you about an amazing story. You think to yourself, this would make a good documentary. Now what? How do you just dive in and get started?
It takes a lot of planning and organization to do a full feature-length documentary, but before anything, you have to make sure that the people you’re profiling are willing to participate. You need to think about how you’re going to approach them. As documentary filmmakers, (I believe) we're journalists, but we’re also salespeople. We need to sell them on being in our film.
Before you approach your participants, here are a few key points to think about:
Why would they want to do it? Do they benefit from the promotion? Is this an opportunity for them to reach a new audience or can they use this to spread their message? Ethically, we shouldn’t pay our participants, so make sure you’re on the same page.
Why are you the best person to do this story? This will help you connect with your participants. Are you ethnically connected to the story? Do you have a personal connection to it? Is it just something that means a lot to you?
What’s your timeline? How much time do you want to invest in the doc? Are you doing this in your spare time or is it full-time? You’re going to want to get a rough idea of a schedule from your participants. At this point can you see an end (in Queen of the Capital, we knew that Muffy would either be elected or not in a little over a year)?
You should also make sure you’re the only one doing this documentary subject. A quick Google search can tell you (although there may always be surprises). Just because someone else is working on something similar, doesn’t mean you can’t do it, but you should probably think about how you’re going to differentiate yourself.
As you’re developing your pitch, you should write a logline. A logline is a brief one or two-sentence synopsis of your documentary. We’ll get into the more later, but my synopsis for Queen of the Capital is:
“Muffy Blake Stephyns is a government bureaucrat by day, drag queen crusading for charity by night.”
My next documentary’s logline is:
“A documentary following the lives of inner-city Baltimore boys, who are students at a prestigious ballet preparatory school, using dance as a path to a better life.”
A logline will help you focus your idea and will be the basis for your elevator pitch, which you’ll recite over and over again, whether you’re trying to talk your subject into participating or selling your documentary to a distributor.*
Now you’re ready, your subject approved the idea, you’re ready to start shooting.
*I’ll do a whole post in the future about log lines.
Next log line, drop the 'who are' and 2nd comma? Can see the cadence in current one though. Peace.