Response to Dan

Dan's first question is about the development a documentary would need to go through prior to filming and finalizing it. It seems to me that, unless you have a very specific argument to make, it would be a good idea to get an idea, and then go through and film everything surrounding it, before you tried to establish a huge over-arching theme. Take Katrina documentaries for example: it would have been very difficult to say what the film-makers argument would be beforehand, seeing as they had no idea what to expect when they started shooting. In that case, they knew sort of what they wanted to look at, but the real interest drawn into the documentaries only came after really examining the situation.

If, on the other hand, you wanted to create a very specific argument like "An Inconvenient Truth" it would make sense to have a very well-thought-out argument designed for the purpose, and utilizing specific footage to add to that. Though some of this takes place in every documentary, via editing, this is the kind of project where every assertion needs support, something you can't necessarily just hope to find while filming.