Beginner’s Guide to Filming a Documentary on a Smartphone

Documentary filmmaker David Tamés suggests filmmakers “should not worry too much about gear on your first project”.

“The intimacy and rapport you develop with your subject is more important at this point than mastering technical craft. Consider shooting your first video with a smartphone or an easy-to-use consumer camcorder to keep things simple. If you already own a video camera that is capable of shooting high definition video, use that. When you’re starting out, the best camera is the one you have.” David Tamés

Sound is still very important. Shooting a documentary, I would say getting good audio is possibly even more important than a narrative fiction film. With actors, there’s always the possibility of dubbing the voice after filming. This is impossible to do with your interview subjects or subjects recorded during spontaneous moments “on the fly”.

Audio

You can actually get away with the inbuilt smartphone microphone, especially with later, high-end phones. However, you need to be a minimum of about 1 meter away from the subject. The good news is that smartphones have wide lenses, forcing you to get in close.

The closer you get the microphone to the subject’s mouth, the clearer the sound: less background noise, less reflections from nearby surfaces (bare walls, ceilings and floors are the worst).

Preferably you will use some kind of external microphone. Good quality clip on mics can be bought for as little as $15.

It’s always useful to monitor your sound as you are recording. There can be audio issues you don’t notice without headphones on. For example, we recently filmed an interview and didn’t notice the subjects hair was brushing over the microphone while she spoke.

The problem is, if you have a mic attached to smartphone, it’s usually taking up the headphone socket. There are solutions however. For example, the IK Multimedia iRig Lavalier allows you to connect both headphones and a second iRig Mic Lav.

Note: try to use headphones which block out as much background noise as possible. You’ll need over-the-ear headphones or sound-isolating earbuds.

You might want to think about adding an external recorder. For example, the Roland R-07-RD Portable Field Recorder. You can even remotely control this recorder from your smartphone.

Alternatively, I have been using a Zoom H4N for 10 years and it’s never let me down. This recorder has stereo mics inbuilt so it can act as a portable microphone set up too. You can hide it in a pocket or around the shooting location – just leave it recording as you shoot.

Recording outside? Watch out for wind blowing against the mic. Use a windjammer.

Stabilisation

I’ve already listed a bunch stabilisation kit:

Release forms

Depending on where you are filming, you might need to get anyone appearing in your film to sign a release form. David Tamés has a free PDF of suggested release forms. You will have to check for yourself if they cover your needs legally.

Camera app

To get more manual control over your phone’s camera, you can use a camera app such as FiLMiC Pro.

I will always encourage any smartphone filmmaker to minimise the need to tinker with technology, when you could be being creative instead. However, the joy of such freedom while shooting can turn sour during post-production – this is when we receive our reality check.

Using a camera app, you can film with correct white balance and locked exposure. This will result in a more joyful, less hair tearing, editing and colouring process once you’ve imported the footage into your chosen editing system.

Over exposed or under exposed video results in the lost highlight or shadow details. So using a camera app and learning how to get the best results with it will save you a lot of headaches later.

Of course, there’s a learning process involved. There’s also a need for a healthy balance between spontaneity and technical perfection. Especially with documentary – don’t lose that perfect, dramatic moment while you tinker with the white balance.

Why a smartphone is perfect for shooting documentaries

Depends which kind of documentary you’re shooting, of course. If it’s mostly studio-based interviews cut with stock footage or stills, then not so much. But an out-in-the-field project, where you’re trying to convey the feeling of being there; where you’re trying to be spontaneous and catch your subjects unaware of being filmed as much as possible – then the smartphone has a distinct advantage.

Take the recent festival hit documentary, Saudi Runaway, shot using a couple of smartphones with the subject doing the filming. All this then cut together to create an edge-of-the-seat thriller.

Everyone (unless you are filming an Amazonian tribe) is so used to seeing people holding and using smartphones, you can be as anonymous as it’s possible to be with a camera in your hand. Smartphones are designed for the specific purpose of speed and ease of use. If you are used to using your smartphone camera in daily life, you can go from reading an email to shooting in 10 seconds.

Feeling of Being There

Richard Leacock was a British documentary filmmaker who dedicated his career to creating the feeling of “being there” in his films. As he started shooting before the 2nd World War, you can image the struggles he went through to achieve this.

This is a great quote from Leacock describing the difficulty of filming subjects, whilst keeping it real and natural.:

“In general, when you are making a film you are in a situation where something you find significant is going on. Usually the people you are filming want to help you get what they think you want to get; often as a way of getting rid of you. And this can be fatal because they are then second-guessing you and can end up destroying the possibility of achieving your aim.

“I remember Bob Drew and I coming into the lawyer’s office when we were making THE CHAIR. He asked what he could do for us, we said, “nothing”, put our equipment in a corner and went out for coffee. A little later we came back in and he was back at work doing what had to be done, having decided that we were nuts. We kept our distance and started filming as he picked up his phone…”

Leacock was working in the days he had no choice but to use large, clumsy 35mm or 16mm cameras. When audio equipment weighed 70 pounds or more and when trying to achieve the intimate direct cinema approach was almost impossible.

You can read a full extract of his adventures and struggles here. What’s interesting is that he describes how even once the equipment was available to film sensitively and discreetly, filmmakers would still barge in and clumsily create artificiality – because that was what they had been taught was “professional” filmmaking.

Although Leacock was happily using digital cameras and editing kit right up until his death, as he died in 2011 he didn’t quite make it to experience our 4K smartphone filmmaker landscape. We can only imagine he would have loved to have shot with a phone.

“Knowing just how long one can make a scene last is already montage, just as thinking about transitions is part of the problem of shooting.” Jean-Luc Godard, Montage mon bon souci (1956)

With documentary the quest is for observation footage

Even with our interview-based doc, you will raise the level of the work with some interesting observation video to cut with them. If not, you will simply be presenting a series of talking heads. To stop your audience growing tired of talking heads include some kind of visual storytelling.

Because, if you really aren’t going to include a visual story, then you might as well make it a podcast or radio doc.

Filming documentary footage is different to filming narrative fiction – it’s a lot more ninja.

To hunt… means to release yourself from rational images of what something “means” and to be concerned only that it “is.” And then to recognise that things exist only insofar as they can be related to other things. These relationships— fresh drops of moisture on top of rocks at a river crossing and a raven’s distant voice — become patterns. The patterns are always in motion…” Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (1986)

Look, you’ve got the most versatile, lightweight, least scary camera ever invented, right in your pocket. If you can’t get intimate, revealing, shocking, real, surprising, private, emotional footage with a smartphone camera, then you never will.

So, whilst some filmmakers are out there struggling to get anything raw because of all the kit they have to set up before they can start filming, make your advantage tell. Get footage you could never have got with a regular camera. Saudi Runaway is the perfect example of this principle.

You are part of the story

There’s no such thing as a truly objective documentary. That’s because a documentary is so often about the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject. However, it’s often in a filmmaker’s nature to hide behind their equipment and their filmmaking job.

Through this fear, perhaps under the misunderstanding that they want to be objective and influence the subject as little as possible, the filmmaker separates themselves from the subject. They draw a deliberate boundary: I’m the filmmaker over here – you are the subject over there.

If you do this, you are casting aside the biggest advantage you have as a smartphone documentary maker.

“Early in its history cinema discovered the possibility of calling attention to persons and parts of persons and objects; but it is equally a possibility of the medium not to call attention to them but, rather, to let the world happen, to let its parts draw attention to themselves according to their natural weight. This possibility is less explored than its opposite.” Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (1971)

The more you become subsumed into the world you are documenting, the more true and revealing the footage you will acquire. and with a smartphone, this process is so much easier.

Frame, focus, wait…

Be thoughtful about how you move your camera. The temptation is to swing left and right, following the subject here and there, searching for interesting images. We have a kind of inbuilt restlessness which drives us to search for better and better, or to avoid any second of boredom.

But when you return home with this footage, as a result of this “garden hose” type approach you will find yourself scrolling through take after take, desperate for moments of stillness.

If the subject is moving, why not allow them to move in and out of frame? This isn’t natural to us, as we normally move our heads to follow the action. However, it’s not a cinematic experience to have this motion forced upon us as a viewer.

The moving image becomes more poetic when the frame is still and we allow reality to take place without our interference. Now the view is more artful, more composed, allowing the viewer to dwell in their own thoughts.

Of course, you can still move the camera. But make those movements precise and thought out. Even if you are shooting on the fly, you can still develop a sense of where your view starts and where and how it comes to rest. And you can do this without wildly searching for something to focus on.

The more you shoot, the more instinctive this will become.

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