Documentary films are peculiar beasts, as varied in form and genre as fiction films, but they often prove that truth is stranger than fiction. “For me,” Roger Ebert once said, “the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that, to me, is the noblest thing that good movies can do and it’s a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them.”

What better way to generate empathy than by showing someone the truth in the form of a film?

Now more than ever, that truth is easier and easier to capture. Everyone has a camera in their pocket capable of capturing moving images and sound good enough to project in a movie theatre. Documentary filmmakers of all ages, abilities, and skill levels can capture the images, but that’s only half the battle. Transforming all of those disparate bits of footage together into a cohesive narrative arc—a story with beginning, a middle, and an end—is the other half. That battle is waged in the writing of the piece.

Documentary films have crossed over into the mainstream and have become more and more sophisticated. They can follow subjects around to tell a personal story or they can expose the secret truths of our entire society. They can show us how different our lives are from others across the globe, but they can also show us how similar our lives can be. Documentaries can help us understand our world better and make sense of our existence. They can, quite literally, do anything these days.

But writing a documentary can be complicated.

Yes, a documentary will feature the same sorts of storytelling tools and techniques as narrative feature films and fiction, but it has an added burden. How to tell the story with the truth and the disparate bits of footage that have already been—or still need to be—collected. A massive, audio-visual jigsaw puzzle of story.

This course will help you understand how to see the picture on the box of that jigsaw puzzle in your mind so you can start crafting the pieces of a documentary, whether that writing happens in pre-production, during the collection of footage, or in post-production as you work to craft the final narrative.