Narrator vs Host vs Subtitles (by Sean Malone)

by Sean Malone - Director of Media | FEE

Consider your goal.

If all you're doing is "explaining" a political issue to your audience, then you don't really need to put real people with real stories on screen. What you are actually trying to do is get your audience to connect emotionally with those subjects, and to do that, anything that is on screen that isn't the individual sharing their own story directly will be a barrier. Imagine that you hear someone say "I was working my whole life to build this business, and then because of this law, I lost everything!" For most people, that has a very different level of emotional resonance than a narrator saying "Bob worked really hard to build his business.".

A personal story is personal, so let the individual be the focus, not a narrator or host.

Now... That said, sometimes it is the case that you know of a great story but the individual isn't the best storyteller. If your subject struggles with this or isn't every charismatic on camera, I'd recommend a few things from many years of experience interviewing and editing:
Focus as much of your attention as possible on building rapport. The subject will only open up to you in a way that is dramatically useful on camera if they are comfortable with you. If you're not very good at that, get a different interviewer.

Let them know that the statistics and numbers don't matter. You can always fill that in later with graphics on screen or other voices. The subject doesn't need to be a political expert or an economist to talk about these kinds of issues. The only thing they have to be an expert in is their own experience.
Remind them that the beauty of a recorded interview is that it can be re-cut. If they don't like how they phrased something, they can say it a different way. They don't have to be perfect, and as long as they trust you to edit them honestly, that should be take some pressure off the performance.
Make sure they know it's ok to cry or get upset. The goal is to capture the emotion, so try to make sure they're comfortable expressing emotion. A lot of subjects I've worked with will get emotional and then apologize for it, as if it will be useless in teh film... I gently let them know that it's normally the best material.

Lastly... If they're still really flat and not very passionate, find a different subject.
Once you have great raw footage, hire as good an editor as you can find to take this content and turn it into a clear, concise story. You should do this anyway, but a competent editor can take an emotionally gripping but perhaps circuitous or confusingly told personal story and form it into something that makes sense; has a clear beginning, middle, and end; and allows the subjects' emotions to convey meaning in a way that no amount of exposition or narration will ever be able to match.

For inspiration, I'll offer one of our own recent documentaries:

This has zero narration, and only a handful of title cards to circumscribe some of the need to include multiple minutes of exposition. It was just accepted to its first film-festival this week, and it's been very well-received online already.

I'd also recommend that you look at Smock Media's work with Victims of Communism on the Witness Project. Check out my current favorite video from that series:

Dugan Bridges is an award winning filmmaker whose work has been distributed by Amazon & TimeWarner, featured in the NY Times & USA Today, while garnering millions of views online.

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