What are the best ways for writting documentary scripts?

Unlike writting fictional screenplays documentary mainly deals with true stories with non-fictional charactors. If you were written a documentary before please posts some tips.

In my mind there's no real "way" to write a script for a documentary because its non-fiction and you are dealing more with "as it happens" factors. The four basic points to a documentary are:

1. Story
2. Interviews
3. B-Roll
4. Narration

As long as you have these and perform these really well, you'll have a solid documentary about anything really. What is it that you have in mind actually?

As of right now, I'm writting it as a screenplay. I'm thinking of shots that will go along with the narration and writting in spots where i feel interviews should go.

Anyways my idea for the documentary is under the Idea page

A documentary doesn't really have a script; to the extent that it does, it's a completely different kind of script than what you'll see on this forum, for two reasons:

1)  The script format here is ideal for spec scripts.  I think it's safe to say that there are no spec scripts for documentaries, since the person who wants to make the documentary is the one who makes it - there's no pitch etc. involved.

2)  In the script format you write out a whole scene.  A documentary can't do that.  In a documentary you're not deciding what happens, you're just documenting it (hence the name).  So unless you're staging your scenes, you can't write the standard way.

The only thing close to screenwriting in documentary-making is deciding things like the pacing, the flow of the "plot" (like in Farenheit 9/11, Moore moves from the election to the vacationing to 9/11 to the war in Iraq), and writing up interview questions and narration; which being one-sided, don't have much in common with dialogue writing.  All of this can be done in whatever format is comfortable, and would be better named a "plan" than a script.

Thanks for the input.

I must disagree with some of your points.

Mainly your 2nd point.

If the events already happened then you can write out scenes. Then dediced where in your scene interviews should go.  So it could be stagging but with factual events.

The only time when you can't do this is when the event is currenly happening. When Micheal Moore made his 9/11 film, he filmed during the start of the iraq war. The movie was release in 2004 and Iraq war started in 2003.

But for documentries I guess it depends on the filmaker.

My documentary starts off with a town. A town that has nothing to do with illegal immigration. The hispanic population is like 0.2 percent of the population. But has everything to do with immigration on the politics side.

As the story continues on the documentary will cut back and forth to this town as it will revel its past history and how this town was effected by past events that effect illegal immigration today.

The main point being,  people are still suffering from this past event, as Americans we should resolve our differences and make better decisions in the future.

A lot of a documentary is filmed (without a script) and then edited to fit the director's/producer's needs.  Michael Moore was a magician when it came to this.



Phil