As a journalism student and an aspiring documentarian, I often ask myself (and my teachers) if I have the skills needed to take on a project as massive as a documentary. Are the skills I learn in journalism school – idea generation, research, interviewing talent, and coming up with an angle for a story – sufficient to turn an idea into a documentary? What about other skills like creative direction, or having an eye and ear for images and sound? There are people who go to film school just to acquire such creative skills? Where does a journalist fit into the equation? I found someone who might have the answers to my myriad of questions.

Louisa Lim, is a former BBC correspondent who turned an idea into a documentary on a weekly basis. Speaking to Louisa made me realise that the way to enter the world of documentary making is to start small. Producing mini documentaries which I can easily record on my Zoom kit (audio sound equipment), using the skills I have picked up in journalism school, is something I am confident of undertaking.

Listen to my podcast: Turning an idea into a documentary.

Credits: Interviewee – Louisa Lim; Music – Nostalgia by GoSoundTrack

Transcript of podcast:

Grace: As an aspiring documentarian, the biggest challenge I grapple with isn’t coming up with material for my documentaries. The biggest challenge really is self-doubt. Do I have the skills to turn my idea into a finished product? I spoke to Louisa Lim, a former BBC correspondent who produced documentaries on a weekly basis.

What kind of documentaries have you produced?

Louisa: I worked at the BBC World Service and when I was there I worked on a program called Analysis where every single week we would single-handedly research, write, produce and report a fourteen-and-a-half-minute radio documentary. So I’ve done a large number of radio documentaries and I’ve also done some longer ones. I did a 23-minute one as well for a program called Crossing Continents.

Grace: At which point in your journalistic career did you produce the documentaries?

Louisa: So at that point I’d been working at the BBC World Service for about five years. I had some experience in Audio Journalism but I didn’t have a lot of experience in long form journalism of that kind, so it was a real challenge.

Grace: Could you walk us through how you went from coming up with an idea to the finished product of a documentary? What were the steps you had to take in the workflow process?

Louisa: So my boss would dissect the topic of the documentary on a Monday morning and tell you what you would be reporting on that week. Then you’d have the rest of the week. By Friday afternoon you would have to record your documentary. So the first thing that I would do would be to go online and read as much as I could about the particular topic and I would start looking for interesting people to interview. I would find interesting people, ring them up, talk to them, try and figure out my angle, see if they were available to be interviewed. And then over the next couple of days I would do the interviews and then sit down and write it.

Grace: And what kind of skills do you think you had at that time or you could bring to the table which helped you succeed in making the documentaries.

Louisa: I think it was the skills that I learnt through that job that were really important. The skills that I learned were speed reading – to read incredibly fast. The ability to take in lots of information and sort of crystallize it into an idea. Also the ability to ring up large numbers of people and ask them to do interviews and to be quite decisive to decide what the angle would be and to pursue that quite persistently. And then of course, you learn efficiency because you only had four-and-a-half days to do this. You couldn’t miss your deadline. So that taught me to work incredibly fast which has been a very useful trait.

Grace: If you are hiring a fresh graduate to produce a documentary, would you hire someone from a film school or would you hire someone from a journalistic course?

Louisa: It really depends on what kind of documentary you’re making and what kind of person would complement the skills that you have. I think I would just look at the kind of work they’ve done. I would be looking for someone who’s incredibly persistent who has tons and tons and tons of ideas and who can realize these ideas and who has a sensibility that means they’re able to take what might be quite a dry subject and really bring it to life. And I don’t think that it really matters where you learnt your skills. It’s how you put them to use that counts.

Grace: Speaking with Louisa has definitely helped me find an entry path into the world of documentary making. This has been Grace Tan. Thank you for listening.