Seduced by Fernanda Rossi

How many factual filmmakers have fallen under the spell of Robert Mckee, prolific screenwriting workshop guru and author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting?

In his book and workshops, Mckee deconstructs many of Hollywood's most famous films and shows how most follow a similar structure, what is known in the industry as "high concept." Basically, the protagonist runs through a series of increasingly difficult conflicts until he or she finally prevails and the film ends.

This structure works beautifully for fictional films, but real life rarely plays out in such neat little story lines. And yet many many factual filmmakers have succumbed to his ideas and drive themselves crazy trying to fit their films into his structure.

Enter Fernanda Rossi, who calls herself the Doc Doctor. I recently attended a weekend workshop with Fernanda and was quite impressed. She's obviously spent a great deal of time watching and thinking about documentaries and has come up with a structure theory far more suitable for factual films.

It's hard for me to do her theories justice here, and I encourage you to take one of her workshops, but basically she says factual films fall within a spectrum. A few mimic the high concept films of Hollywood, and on the other end there are films that work through the information with no dramatic arc. What's most interesting is that in the middle there are lots of excellent documentary films that have dramatic arcs to keep audiences on the edge of their seats, but no escalating conflict. Instead, the protagonist faces a series of increasingly difficult obstacles (these can be physical or mental) before the conclusion of the film.

No longer feeling the pressure of searching for conflict (or trying to generate it) in my films has freed me to think more about how to portray real life in a dramatic and accurate way.

You can visit Fernanda's web site here: The Doc Doctor.

And check out her book on creating great trailers, Trailer Mechanics, which will show you how to create better film trailers and therefore raise more money for your next film. She's currently writing a book on documentary structure. Hurry up Fernanda we all want to read your new book.