Documentaries can be considered short films or feature films, and within those categories, variation exists. The Screen Actors Guild defines a feature documentary at being a minimum of 80 minutes long, whereas the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that awards the Oscars, sets the minimum length of a feature at 40 minutes. Documentary short films are often less than 40 minutes and can be as short as two minutes or even less. I estimate that In the Shadow of the Franklin will run about 90 minutes. (I am not going to discuss “episodic” documentaries, like Tiger King, which have their own set of parameters.)
Variation also exists for the costs of making a documentary feature. In the general, and there are always exceptions, the budget can run anywhere from $30,000 to $1.5 million, depending on the subject matter, the experience level of the team and the quality of the production. Our film will cost somewhere in the middle of that range. A budget I created for grant proposal submissions in 2019 came to an estimated total of $270,000. With the increase in costs that have occurred over the past several years, the total is already above that figure. (And although I received some good feedback with my grant proposals, I did not receive any grants.)
Filmmaking costs are usually broken down into the different phases of the documentary process: development, which involves the research, planning, and laying the groundwork of the film, production, which is everything involved in creating the footage that will go into the film, post-production, where the footage is catalogued, the story is created and the film is put together through editing and professionally polished, and promotion/publicity, which gets the film out in front of audiences, usually at film festivals. The ultimate goal is to find distribution avenues for the film, whether it be a theatrical release in cinemas, which seems to be happening more often with some documentary films, and/or television release, online screening or streaming platforms, like PBS, The History Channel and Netflix. I won’t go into detail about distribution, as that information can occupy an entire web page.
The different phases of the documentary filmmaking process and the fundamental components of each are fairly standard for different projects. I’ve made a list below of the cost elements for our film for development and production and what I anticipate will be required for post-production and promotion/publicity.
Another element of filmmaking is time. There are the questions of how much footage is required to make a 90-minute film, how long will production last – in our case, it’s been seven years – and how long will post-production take. For the first question, the answer involves the “shooting ratio,” which is the hours of footage needed to make one hour of the final film. As you might guess, this is also variable from film to film, but the ranges I’ve seen are between 30:1 to 60:1, or even 80:1. That means, roughly, a half-hour to an hour of footage needed for each minute of the final film, or 45-90 hours of footage in our case.
To the question how long production will take, I am setting up the final filming trips and aim to wrap production by the end of 2025. The years of time we have spent so far in production for this film is not unusual for a documentary. If I were a full-time filmmaker, production might have progressed much quicker, but I don’t think by much because the main filming has been done at the reunions. Also, with the pandemic, we lost a year.
As for the time required for post-production, The Alliance of Documentary Editors (ADE) provides the following benchmark:
For an average documentary, a good rough guideline for scheduling is:
ADE “GUIDE FOR DOCUMENTARY EDIT SCHEDULES,” November, 2021
1 month of editing per 10 minutes of finished content.
If that estimate holds, our 90-minute film will require 9 months to edit. So if all goes well, the film could be completed near the third or fourth quarter of 2026. However, this is not an exact science, and sometimes things can disrupt a schedule (like a pandemic, for example).
Phases of this documentary project and the different budget elements for each
