The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 121
preliminary script that can be adjusted on location. Just remember
that the danger of improvising a lot is that you might end up with a
story lacking some of the essential elements.
As regards the storyboard, within the genre of the short fiction film
the best short films tend (with some exceptions) to contain little or
no dialogue (cf. Richard Raskin's Five Parameters for Story Design in
the Short Fiction Film and Kortfilm og novellefilm – der er forskel). In the
documentary short film the spoken word (monologue or dialogue)
plays a more important role – especially within the ‘portrait’ subgenre.
Still, it is worth keeping Alfred Hitchcock's words in mind:
In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema:
they are mostly what I call "photographs of people talking".
When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue
only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try first to tell
a story the cinematic way [...]. (Truffaut, 1985, p. 61)
Consider whether you can give information 'the cinematic way' and
show rather than have people tell the story (through talking-head
monologue, explanatory voice-over, and so on).
The documentary is always a sort of creative adaptation of reality,
regardless of whether the camera acts as "a fly on the wall" or a
voice-over commentary intervenes and interprets the pictures for
the viewer. In Filmmaskinen (1979) Jørgen Leth phrases it a bit
differently:
Each choice is a fiction. That's how it is in my consciousness,
anyway. Innocence is irretrievably lost (Leth, 1979, p. 123; our
translation).