Can you tell me a bit about your history working with documentaries? What inspired you to want to make them, and how did you get started?
I’ve worked in documentaries almost my entire working life. Prior to joining the Guardian in October 2014, I was the deputy director at Sheffield Doc/Fest for seven years; before that I was the editor at FourDocs, which was Channel 4’s user-generated content documentary platform. I’ve been to a lot of documentary festivals, watched a lot of documentaries, and met a lot of filmmakers. I got into the industry initially by being into artists’ films; a lot of the experimental and artists’ films I was into were dealing with factual material and documentary shooting, and I gravitated towards it.
What changes have you seen in the market since you started making documentaries? Have these changes presented any particular challenges, and if so, how do you deal with them?
The biggest change is probably that people want to watch them a lot more now! They’re a lot more high-profile – films like Amy and series like Making a Murderer have brought documentaries fully into the mainstream, which is exciting. The quality of documentaries is also so much higher – but so is the number of people making them, so it’s more competitive.
The other big change is the decline of traditional television as a platform for serious documentaries and the rise of video-on-demand (VOD) platforms – for example, Netflix has contributed massively to the profile of documentaries. The rise of VOD platforms as a space for documentaries means more have been seen, and that includes for short documentaries which are really in a good space at the moment. But, in a way that might seem contradictory to this, there’s also been a rise in theatrical releasing of documentaries, which is obviously great for profile.
The biggest downside is that there’s still not enough money for this bigger number of factual films being made out there!
What has been your favourite project to work on and why?
It’s hard to choose from all of our documentaries, because I really do love them all, but our upcoming documentary, Black Sheep (coming to the Guardian site in October), was really exciting. It’s a powerful story dealing with racism, identity and an ambitious hybrid of fact and reconstruction. It looks and sounds so good too.
What is the idea conception to realisation process like? In your experience, what are the key steps between thinking up an idea and seeing it come to life?
For our films, we’re responding to external pitches from filmmakers, so often they’re the ones coming with that plan – but whether it’s them or us, or a combination of them and us, doing that, it’s the same process: thinking about how it can be a compelling story that audiences want to follow. There has to be some kind of story journey. There are lots of ways to do that but you have to take your audience to a different place from where they started the film. You also need to think about what’s specifically visual about a documentary idea – what will we see and how does that make it different from what could be a written piece, for example? What’s the visual way to tell this story? Also, what’s achievable in terms of the access you’ve got and the time in which to make the film?
Can you foresee any challenges in the future of documentary-making? If so, what are they?
Mostly, money – there isn’t enough for everyone, and people struggle to make their work and properly sustain their living.
Finally, what do you hope participants of your October masterclass will be able to take away with them?
They’ll get a sense of what’s happening right now in the documentary industry, who’s out there to help them across funding distribution and marketing, and what is or isn’t a good documentary idea – plus a bit about what we’re doing with documentary commissioning here at the Guardian.
It’s a whistle-stop tour of everything you need to know at all stages of getting a documentary off the ground and sets participants up to find out more in detail after the event.
Charlie Phillips’ masterclass, How to develop your idea for a documentary, is on Tuesday 9 October.
