Lights Film School Blog

How to Create Film and Documentary Trailers

Creating a trailer for your documentary or film is a great way to expose your story to the world. Essentially a trailer is a short montage of the text, audio and visual components of your film that act as an advertisement for the longer format version. This usually means that the most exciting footage is used in condensed format in the hopes of stimulating audience interest in your film. Everybody’s style, of course, is different and part of the joy of filmmaking is putting your stamp on your...

How Many Scenes Does a Documentary Have?

In the past Lights Film School has deconstructed films and music videos but today we’re going to deconstruct a documentary. We’re going to look at the documentary “Encounters at the End of the World” by celebrated film director Werner Herzog. Many of your have asked us questions such as “how many scenes does a documentary have” or “How do I design a story arch for my documentary?”. This blog post seeks to help you answer those questions with the goal of helping you better structure your own i...

How to Light a Documentary Interview

If you’re shooting an interview for your documentary you will be using either natural light sources or studio lighting. This blog post will outline how to properly use indoor or studio lighting to optimize the production value of your documentary. If you’re shooting indoors or in a studio, the basic 3 point lighting technique is a favorite amongst filmmakers. It fully exposes the facial expression and emotions of your subject as well as isolates them from the background and hides unwanted sha...

How to Film a Documentary Interview

Interviewing a documentary subject can be challenging enough. Thinking about technical or editing opportunities while filmmaking can kill the creative spirit of the shoot. However, the technical elements of filming an interview are incredibly important if you want to create a high production look to your documentary. We’ll publish another blog post about how to light a documentary interview, but this blog post will tackle the subject of properly capturing enough “cutaway shots” for editing pu...