When making a documentary, it seems that the best way to get the most raw and down to earth interpretation of the “real” people and situations you are filming them in, is to firstly make sure that you have done plenty of research on the topic you will be filming. This appears to be a vital step, because the only way you are going to know what the most important aspects of your documentary are going to be, is if you can get yourself into the mindset of not only the audience that is going to be watching your documentary (so that you can interpret what your target market will want to see), but it will also help you get onto the same wavelength as the person that you are filming. This could be helpful for many reasons. For example, if you were making a film about an Olympic Athlete, at first glance you may think that the main body of this film will be about what it is like for them to perform under the heavy pressure of an event as public as the Olympics. However, if you put yourself into their mindset and researched into what your target audience would really like to see, then you would soon realise that the majority of this documentary would be better spent looking into the time leading up to the Olympics. Researching into this topic beforehand would show you this because you would see that the target audience for a documentary about an athlete, will likely be people that want to be inspired to bring aspects of physical exercise into their own lives. How we would make this film appealing to this audience is by demonstrating the athlete as someone that is achieving a goal that anyone could also achieve if they worked hard enough. This would mean avoiding showing the athlete doing things that only he would have access to, (like training in large stadiums for example), and instead show montages of them going running, in the gym, or just simply showing how they diet themselves in preparation for the event.
Another way of making a documentary more relatable to “real” people and situations, is by having your main character talk about what their life was like before they had any success in what they now do. A good example for this is if you were making a film about a famous musician. You want to spend the majority of the film documenting this person’s crazy lifestyle, showing the good and bad of constantly being on tour as well as what it is like dealing with fame. However, in order to entice the audience by making them believe that this is something that they too could one day achieve, you would need to try and ground whoever it is that you are filming. This may be easier said than done, seeing as we are talking about a famous musician who could be seen as a god to certain hardcore fans. Nevertheless, giving fans an idea of how this person used to lead their life before fame, would remind them that at one point this person was just an ordinary individual like themselves. The reason that fans would want to see this is because it will give them the aspirations to bet on themselves just as the musician did, and hopefully inspire your audience to take action. All of this inspiration could easily stem from you simply taking the time to ensure that you make the main character of your film as relatable as possible.
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