Documentary Filmmaking from the Field: How I Approach Every Assignment

Documentary · Visual Journalism · Euro News Agency

There is a moment in every documentary assignment when the planned story and the real story diverge. The journalist who cannot let go of the plan will come back with the wrong film. The one who follows the divergence will come back with something true.

The discipline of restraint

I have been filming documentary work since the mid-1990s — initially on video formats that now look like archaeology, and more recently on mirrorless systems and drone platforms that would have seemed impossible when I started. The technology changes. The discipline does not.

Documentary journalism requires restraint more than it requires equipment. The temptation — especially with modern cameras that can shoot in near darkness, and drones that can hover over a city like a silent eye — is to fill every second with something visually dramatic. That is almost always the wrong choice. The most powerful documentary moments I have captured across 107 countries have been quiet ones: a conversation at a market in Baghdad, a fisherman on the Bosphorus at 5am, a child in a camp on the Syrian border watching a phone screen.

Drone journalism: the aerial perspective

I added aerial cinematography to my practice because it solves a specific journalistic problem: scale. When you are covering a refugee movement, a flood, a political rally, or a destroyed neighbourhood, the ground-level image tells one story. The aerial image tells a different, equally true one. The best documentary work holds both simultaneously.

I operate as a licensed drone pilot in EU and UK airspace, and have produced aerial footage across four continents — from the rooftops of Istanbul to the volcanic landscapes of Cappadocia, from Budapest to Bali. The aerial sequence is not decoration. It is argument.

Building Euro News Agency

I founded Euro News Agency in London in 2008 as a vehicle for independent, field-led documentary and journalism production. The idea was straightforward: a multilingual team, rooted in original reporting, without the institutional pressures that flatten documentary work at larger organisations.

Since then, ENA has produced work across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Americas. The editorial model remains the same: go to the story, stay long enough to understand it, and bring back something that could not have been made from a desk.

Consent is not a formality

Before I film a person I explain who I am, who the material is for and where it will appear. If the answer is no, the camera stays down. This costs me shots regularly, and it is not negotiable: someone who agrees without understanding has not agreed at all.

The same care applies to children, to anyone in a vulnerable situation and to people whose appearance on screen could expose them later. A face that seems harmless in the edit can be dangerous in the country where it was filmed. When in doubt I ask again, or I leave the sequence out.

Sound is half the documentary

Viewers remember pictures but they believe sound. Recorded on location, the ambience places them inside the scene: engines, water, a market, the particular quiet of a room after a difficult answer. Library sound laid over foreign footage does the opposite, and the audience senses the mismatch without being able to name it.

So I record far more audio than I expect to use. In the edit it is the first thing I reach for and the last thing I would cut.

Working light

My kit has become smaller with every year of experience. A large crew changes the room it enters: people perform, conversations stop, officials appear. One person with a small camera is often treated as a person rather than as a production, and that difference is visible in the final film.

Working light also means moving fast when a situation changes, and being able to carry everything myself for as long as the day requires. Equipment you cannot carry is equipment you will leave behind at the moment you need it.

Where the edit begins

The edit starts in the field, not at the desk. Every evening I review what I filmed, label it, and write down what I still need. That habit prevents the common disaster of returning home with beautiful material and no sequence: an interview without its establishing shot, a scene without its ending.

It also keeps the story honest. Reviewing on the same day, you remember exactly what happened, and it is much harder to convince yourself later that a moment meant something it did not.

Commercial work, same rules

Brand and destination work follows the same discipline as editorial. What changes is the brief, not the standard. I tell clients at the start what I will not do: present staged footage as spontaneous, film people who have not agreed, or imply an endorsement that nobody gave.

Most clients accept this without discussion, and the ones who do not are better handled at the beginning than in the middle of a shoot.

What I look for in every assignment

The question I ask at the beginning of every assignment is: what does this place sound like at 6am? Not the official story. Not the press release or the political briefing. The ambient reality before anyone has had time to construct a narrative around it. That is where the documentary lives.

— Mohamed Bourbiza · Documentary Filmmaker · Field Correspondent · Euro News Agency, London

Continue reading

• Field journalism in conflict zones: what decades on the front line taught me
• Euro News Agency: independent journalism from London to the world
• Documentary and aerial work in the portfolio
• Discuss a documentary assignment

Aerial sequences are filmed under the operating rules of the UK Civil Aviation Authority and, in Europe, the EASA drone framework.