Documentary Voice & Vision

Chapter 3Structuring the Documentary

We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these . . . We can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories.

Roger C. Schank, from Tell Me A Story ¹

■ Basic Approaches To Documentary Storytelling

Documentaries are a form of storytelling. They originate from someone trying to communicate an experience, information about an issue, or an idea about the world we inhabit. And they speak to an audience in an organized fashion. As we saw in the last ...