A documentary-making masterclass with Christopher M Nicholls

Storyboarding

Storyboarding can be the most useful tool in your arsenal, but sometimes it can put you in a corner creatively if you become too beholden to it. It’s really important to storyboard, to have that idea of what you’re trying to record, but on the day, especially if it’s a documentary, you need flexibility. Filmmaking is all about problem solving and flexibility, so have a storyboard, but roll with the punches and work with what you get.

Storytelling

Documentary makers have a responsibility to tell the subject’s story in the most genuine way possible, so my approach always starts with understanding the person and making sure my style is authentic to them. In FLOW, I talked dancer Mimi beforehand so I could understand her and her dancing and represent her style authentically.

Storytelling is all about rhythm, and for this film the rhythm developed organically. Watching Mimi dance, I noticed the speed and style of her movements and thought, “How can my camera movements match that?” Then in post, it became, “How can my edits also match that?” Everything – framing, angles, pacing – had to work together cohesively. If you’ve got super quick camera movements but really slow edits, it can be jarring, and vice versa. It’s about creating that balance of fast and slow, giving viewers time to sit with characters and locations without losing momentum.

Interview technique

Some subjects have experience of talking about themselves and they just nail it first time, while others can be really talkative in person but, the second you call action, they freeze up and get nervous. For me, it’s about understanding your subject on a human level, just talking to them one on one.

There are practical things you can do to help get deeper answers, like phrasing your questions to be open-ended so they don’t just respond with ‘Yes,’ or ‘In 1985,’ or something short like that. You want to draw out the kind of responses you’re looking for, and that comes with practice.

Ahead of the interview, give them an idea of the things you want to talk about. Of course, there have been times when a subject hasn’t wanted to talk about a certain thing, and as a filmmaker, I have to respect that. I wouldn’t want to be treated any differently myself. But by appealing to people’s good nature, you can often get more out of them than you’d expect. Showing genuine interest in someone’s life goes a long way. If a subject can see that you’re passionate about what they’re passionate about, it creates a rapport.

Lens choice

For people starting out, having too much freedom and too much gear can actually make you, no pun intended, a bit unfocused in your filmmaking. By only using the NIKKOR Z 28-135mm f/4 PZ, I focused on what it could do and what cool things we could create with it. It was liberating. Instead of endless choices, I was thinking about the different clips and styles that this lens could deliver, from more creative and unusual angles to traditional beauty clips and classic documentary set-ups. It was a really interesting challenge to work with just a single lens, and it’s something I’d like to try more often.

One of the cool things we did with the lens was mount it on a gimbal and control it remotely* which meant I could pull off a dolly zoom – running towards the subject while zooming out – and really dial in the speed for a smooth, dramatic effect as you can see in the video below. Normally, that’s very technical, requiring a dolly, a focus puller and careful set-up, but being able to do it on the fly as we were driving around Tokyo was so much fun. We also managed some fantastic push-ins from far away. At one point, I was on the eighth floor of a building with a walkie talkie looking down at Mimi on the street below. She stared straight into the camera while I pushed in. The lens made it possible to get steady, consistent zoom footage that could be slow and fluid or fast and punchy when needed, which was really fun to experiment with.

I’d never worked with a motorised zoom lens before, but it’s solidly made and well-balanced and a great piece of kit for solo ‘run-and-gun’ filming. I was impressed with how the engineers had managed the torque on the zoom ring. I’m used to manual zoom rings where you feel everything in your hand and it’s all about the force you put through it. With this one, the motor smooths it out, but it’s been engineered so that if I flick it fast, it still has this smooth roll-off from one focal length to another. Also, the length of the lens didn’t change as I zoomed from one end to the other, which was great as we filmed a lot of the project on a gimbal – if the lens length had changed, I’d have had to rebalance it every time I changed focal length.

Camera settings

The settings you use should reflect your understanding of the subject. For this film, I wanted a mix, a contrast between fast and slow, because if everything is fast it can be overwhelming for the viewer. You need time to sit with characters, locations and moments. So I filmed with a range of apertures depending on the action. For the interviews, I wanted some roll-off in the background, so I used f/4 to create that ‘cinematic’ feel through the story itself or movement within the clip. Filming dancing at f/1.8 would have been impossible – everything would be out of focus! At f/4, whether the action was slow or fast, I got exactly the amount of bokeh I wanted. The further you punch in, the more f/4 starts to look like a wider aperture, so I didn’t find any limitations with it. It worked really well.

With built-in variable NDs, filmmakers who are starting out should definitely use the hood and get a good screw-on variable ND to protect against glare from the sun and other light sources.

Composition

Tokyo was an incredible backdrop. There’s so much verticality with tall buildings, raised highways and vantage points where you can be above or below the action. I looked for ways to use that focal range to be present in the scene with Mimi, but also to place her far away. There are clips where she’s up on a bridge and I’m down on the ground, pushing through lampposts to find her, or I’m on the balcony of a building and she’s at street level. The Autofocus worked great, especially in the outdoor scenes where it needed to lock on to Mimi’s face and track her as she danced. It was all about using the environment to its fullest and having fun with it.

When I was on the gimbal, if I wanted a nice wide scene, I could be at 28mm and orbit around her as she danced, then punch in to 50mm without stopping or changing lenses to get a completely different feel. Above 85mm on a gimbal starts to get shaky just because of the physical limitation of me as an operator, but the power zoom, combined with the grip and camera controls, gave me flexibility to move within a clip and switch focal lengths without rebalancing.

The zoom itself was beautifully smooth, with variable speed settings from really slow to super quick almost like a crash zoom. At low speeds, it stayed perfectly consistent throughout, something that’s tricky to achieve by hand. You see a lot of that kind of slow zoom in the work of directors such as Wes Anderson, which I love. At high speeds, if you’re doing it by hand, that kind of fast move can be a bit messy, but it can look cool. But what’s great is that with the power zoom, the speed was 100% consistent throughout the entire range, and that’s definitely what adds to the cinematic feel.

The video below shows the difference in video zoom speeds.

Lighting and mics

When you’re just starting out, you don’t necessarily have access to the most incredible rental locations or expensive lighting equipment, so I wanted to film this project with that in mind, staying faithful to the people we are demonstrating this lens to. I kept the interview set-up really traditional. We had two cameras on tripods; a standard A-cam for the wide, and a B-cam slightly punched in from the side. I had both a lav and a mic on a boom mounted to a tripod, positioned just above her head, and Mimi also had a Sennheiser pin mic tucked under her T-shirt. I found a room that was nice and long, so that even at f/4 the focal roll-off was visible. The lens has a creamy focal roll-off, so it looked great on the A-cam, and on the B-cam we punched in a bit further, making f/4 look more like f/3.5 or f/2.8. I had an Aputure LS 600d as the key light but, as it was a sunny day and the room had a really long window running down the side, I put an 8x8 scrim on the veranda to diffuse all the sunlight and used that as my key, because you’re never going to get a better key light than the sun. I added a small hair light at the back of the room to accent Mimi’s head, and a big Matthews Floppy negative fill as close as possible to create the nice shadow you see on her face.

Sound

Nailing the sound is, in my mind, one of the most important aspects of filmmaking. As a director, you have to decide what atmosphere you’re trying to create and think about the feeling and vibe. For this project, I edited some of my favourite hip-hop tracks and a few jazz tracks that I liked, and sent those to a composer, who did his best to recreate that vibe. When you set the film to music, you find a lot of that rhythm will come in post, but you can also set your in and out points, based on the tracks you’re using. That helps create the rhythm that runs through the piece.

Editing

Most of the project was filmed in 8K, but I did a few scenes in 4K to get a slightly higher frame rate. Normally, I’d film in 4K with the intention of outputting at 1080, so you get the cropping, sharpening, and extra detail. But seeing 8K downsampled into 4K was actually really cool. We used DaVinci Resolve for editing because it’s one of the best softwares for handling N-RAW files.

By the time I edit, I’ll have already filmed thinking, “OK, that’s my opening, that’s where I want to go with that.” I filmed the interview at the very end so, as I was doing it, I was thinking, “Do I have a clip that can go over that part?”, while sometimes I do it the other way around, because both approaches are valid. When it comes to deciding when to use the interviewee as a voiceover or show the interview, I find cutting to the subject whenever they say something particularly emotive – or when they give me a great smile – works well as something we can all relate to. Those are the moments we connect with as viewers. If you see someone smiling, psychologically we all feel more open and relaxed around them. In the interview with Mimi, the first time we see her she’s introducing herself, and the very next scene is her smiling and laughing. For me, those moments are gold dust, they’re exactly what I’m looking for when I cut to a talking head.

Final thought

The most valuable thing you can do when making a documentary is to be genuine, both to yourself as a filmmaker and to the subject and what they’re telling you about their life. They’re being kind enough to let you into their world, and I think we have a duty as filmmakers to represent them in the most genuine way possible.

*The NIKKOR Z 28-135mm f/4 PZ zoom function can be controlled wirelessly using Nikon SnapBridge, NX Field or NX Tether apps. For wired remote control the Nikon MC-N10 is available separately.