As both a genre of mediamaking and a topic of instruction, documentary occupies somewhat ambiguous ground. Depending on the specific institution and instructor, documentary courses might be framed within any number of (sometimes concurrent) curricular contexts, including cinema and media studies, journalism, public media, fine arts, or advertising and public relations. This certainly reflects the formal diversity of documentary as a genre, and courses focusing on the critical study of documentary face the ever-present problem of corralling a wide-ranging genre into a coherent syllabus. For courses in documentary production, however, this ambiguous status adds an additional pedagogical problem. How do instructors trained in one of the above-listed disciplinary contexts make decisions about the kind of documentary media around which they will center their instruction?

If the curricular context is production-centered and the instructor is a professional documentarian, instruction will tend to emphasize specific practical issues involved in whichever mode of documentary production the instructor has worked. However, if a production course in documentary is being taught in a curriculum that is otherwise more critical studies-focused or interdisciplinary, the question of which kind of documentary media to have students work in becomes a central concern. This is particularly true if an instructor without professional documentary production experience finds themselves in the not-uncommon situation (as the author did) of teaching a unit or course in documentary production. How might scholars invested in a wide-ranging definition of documentary media teach the specific practical issues involved in documentary production while still exposing students to the diverse possibilities of documentary form? Even more practically, how might a documentary course be designed around a type of film that students of varying academic backgrounds and technical experience will find challenging and engaging to produce?

This piece will offer a few findings about one potential approach to these challenges of documentary pedagogy: the “Op-Doc” (opinionated documentary). First commissioned by the New York Times opinion section in 2011 and published regularly since then, Op-Docs generally run between five and fifteen minutes. As the Times’ “Information for Filmmakers” page puts it, “[t]he goal of each Op-Doc is to use a creative visual approach to present a story, an individual, an argument, or a point of view.”[1] While some Op-Docs employ interactive web interfaces or virtual reality, the majority are simply short documentary films about contemporary issues, obscure events, or interesting people. Over the past decade, over 300 films have been produced for the Op-Docs series by both up-and-coming independent filmmakers and established documentarians like Errol Morris, Laura Poitras, and Alex Gibney, among others.[2]

The Times makes a clear attempt to subsume the Op-Docs under the traditional journalistic category of the op-ed; each film is accompanied by a short descriptive editorial, and the aforementioned information page is careful to “[n]ote that Op-Docs is part of the Opinion section, which is separate from the news department.” Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that the term “Op-Doc” describes less a coherent genre of documentary filmmaking than an overarching brand for short documentary videos published by the Times. Indeed, by “creative visual approach,” the Times essentially means any use of film form (and not just visual form) that is atypical of traditional video journalism. Judging from the wide variety of approaches taken by Op-Doc films, this could be anything from animation and collage to Interrotron interviews to whimsical soundtracks. The main unifying characteristic of the films, apart from the fact that they are documentaries, is that at least as much attention has been given to their form as to their subject matter. Nevertheless, the Times’ own requirement that the films take as that subject matter “a story, an individual, an argument, or a point of view” does to some extent impose on the films the constraint of “Opinion” (in the journalistic sense).

Because they straddle an indeterminate line between documentary filmmaking and the newspaper op-ed, Op-Docs work well to activate questions about the relationship between moving image form and notions of “truth” and “objectivity.” Students tend to associate video journalism with a particularly functional formal style associated with professional objectivity (talking head interviews, static B-roll), and documentary with more “creative” work that nevertheless deals with real (i.e. nonfictional) subject matter. However, making an Op-Doc helps students develop a more nuanced understanding of how their own formal choices inevitably trouble the notion of objective truth. For students who situate their video production within a journalistic context, having to think about form as a creative tool rather than an objective conduit for the world in front of the camera reminds them that all of their production practice—including the conventions of professional video journalism, consciously “opinionated” or not—is inherently discursive. Conversely, for students coming from a media studies or cinema production background who are used to thinking about form and style, the Op-Doc provides a crucial set of functional constraints through the opinion journalism-inflected definition of the format. Its explicit delineation of subject matter—“a [nonfictional] story, an individual, an argument, or a point of view”—helps students ground their stylistic choices within practical concerns while still thinking critically about their relationship to the real-world subjects of their films.

When I taught a practicum course centered around the Op-Doc, students produced short films that skillfully integrated more traditional journalistic techniques like the sit-down interview or B-roll—conventions that would typically be indexed as “neutral” or “objective” within a purely journalistic context—with more forthrightly rhetorical formal techniques of image and sound production. A sample of the produced work is available on the Illinois College of Media website: media.illinois.edu/students-create-opinionated-documentaries-macs-496. What follows is a summary of that course as it was taught in the Fall 2019 semester, along with an assessment of the affordances of the Op-Doc format from the perspective of its instructor and students.

The course, “Advanced Media Practicum,” originated as a collaboration between two units at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: the Department of Media and Cinema Studies (MACS) and Illinois Public Media (IPM), the state’s public broadcasting service. The course was originally designed as an IPM internship, but personnel changes necessitated that it be taught as a more traditional production course in documentary. Nevertheless, the use of IPM’s facilities and collaboration with IPM personnel remained a central part of the course, a fact crucial to its success. As the instructor, I had graduate-level coursework in basic production skills and work experience in public media, but I had never produced documentaries professionally. Using the Op-Doc as a model for what I wanted my students to produce in the course was thus partially a choice made out of necessity—I felt that I had the skills to properly train students in analyzing and producing aesthetically compelling films but leaned on the invaluable labor of Video Production Manager D.J. Roach as well as producers Sarah Edwards, Anna Casey, Steve Morck, and Sarah Whittington at IPM for technical and professional workshops. Class was held in IPM’s studio facilities, and those facilities were made fully available to students for their projects.

This collaboration between instructors, students, and IPM professionals enabled what might be termed a “full system” approach to teaching documentary production. In addition to covering technical production skills and basic journalistic techniques like interviewing and building sources, this approach emphasized distribution, promotion, and reception through multiple media channels. While shooting and editing their documentaries, students also created an overarching “brand,” Illinois Student Lens, which they used to promote and distribute their films on social media.[3] In asking students to think about professional media production not simply as a technical exercise in video and audio but as part of a larger system in which mediamaking is carried out with marketing and audience engagement in mind, I found that students coming from varying academic backgrounds and levels of production experience could find a specific niche of the process in which they could excel. The eight students in the course constituted a talented, diverse group; however, only a few of them had a solid grounding in documentary theory or history. In the absence of this grounding, the Op-Doc served as an invaluable shorthand for the idea of “cinematic” documentary.

We began the first session of the course by watching and discussing two Op-Docs: Ben Proudfoot’s Almost Famous: The King of Fish and Chips (2019) and Paloma Martinez’ Sanctuary City Hotline (2018).[4] I chose these particular films as introductory models for a number of reasons. First, they differed in their respective formal approaches. Proudfoot’s film creates a lighthearted style through frenetic editing, mixing stock footage with an Interrotron-style interview of 1960s fast food entrepreneur Haddon Salt to tell the story of his rise and subsequent fall into obscurity. Martinez’ film, by contrast, works primarily through sound, foregrounding audio recordings of calls to a legal defense hotline for undocumented people in San Francisco by setting them against apparently routine but carefully chosen B-roll footage of the city. Second, the films differed in the extent to which they had an obvious political positioning. Proudfoot’s film, though it gently critiques the notion of the “American Dream” at one point, is primarily interested in Salt as a charming (if somewhat eccentric) subject. By contrast, Martinez’ film clearly advocates for undocumented people’s right to protection from ICE harassment.

In having students compare the two films through our first session’s discussion, my main goal was to prime them to think about their own work, no matter its ultimate approach, as inescapably aesthetic and political (in the Times’ parlance, “opinionated”). A secondary goal was to show students that it was absolutely possible to create compelling short documentaries without having to produce intimidating quantities of original video, and to spark a discussion about production planning. Proudfoot’s only substantial original material was his interview with Salt, while Martinez’ image track is made up almost entirely of B-roll. However, as students pointed out, Proudfoot must have done significant advance work in setting up the critical interview shoot with Salt, in addition to significant time in postproduction given the pace of the editing. Martinez, by comparison, likely spent a daunting amount of time listening to the hotline audio and planning its organization to achieve greatest effect. These discussions made apparent the crucial importance of preproduction and clarified the level of time and commitment the course would ask of them.

The first six weeks of the course were organized around two objectives: bringing students’ technical skills up to standard through a sound and B-roll assignment and having them work collaboratively to come up with three workable proposals for Op-Docs, complete with production plans and shooting schedules. Weekly workshops conducted in conjunction with IPM served the first objective, while individual brainstorming followed by structured group discussions helped students to achieve the second. Key to students’ success in generating workable production proposals was a clear sense of the hierarchy of the component tasks that would go into making their documentary. High on the list of “mission critical” tasks for almost all of the groups was setting up interviews—often via cold calls, which the students conducted admirably and very professionally (here, the imprimatur of IPM was a real asset). Shooting B-roll, by contrast, was much lower on the list. The quasi-journalistic character of the Op-Doc format thus made the importance of scheduling and prioritization skills obvious to students.

After this period of planning and ramp-up, the remaining eight weeks of the Practicum were devoted to production and postproduction. Biweekly check-ins with the wider group during scheduled class time provided opportunities to share rush footage and audio, plan, or consult with the instructor and IPM. The students premiered and critiqued their finished films the last week of class in front of each other and IPM producers, who provided their own professional feedback.

Overall, the Op-Doc proved a successful model for student work because of its blending of film form and journalistic subject matter. Many students appreciated the format’s emphasis on aesthetics; as one wrote, “[u]nlike the typical newscast package, many Op-Docs use a more expensive look, one which confers prestige and is associated with artisanal production.”[5] Other students appreciated the training they received in conducting interviews and the psychological “seriousness,” “professionalism,” and “credibility” of working in the facilities of IPM. Perhaps the most valuable student comment, however, noted the expansiveness of the Op-Doc as a format:

Obviously, not every instructor will enjoy the privilege of the resources we have at IPM, and the Op-Doc may not be a useful model for all documentary production courses. But for students coming from a diverse set of curricular backgrounds, I cannot think of a better summation of what makes a compelling subject for a documentary than “the unseen or forgotten.” What truly makes the Op-Doc such a potent teaching tool, however, is its cinematic capacity to uncover those unseen subjects.

Derek Long is Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His book Programs, Playdates, and Percentages: Film Distribution and the Making of the Studio System is under contract to University of Texas Press.

1. “Op-Docs: Information for Filmmakers,” New York Times, April 30, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/opinion/about-op-docs.html. ↑

2. “About Op-Docs,” New York Times, January 22, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/opinion/about-op-docs.html. ↑

3. Instagram page, Illinois Student Lens (illinoisstudentlens), https://www.instagram.com/illinoisstudentlens/. ↑

4. Ben Proudfoot, “The King of Fish and Chips,” New York Times, August 20, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/opinion/almost-famous-the-king-of-fish-and-chips.html; Paloma Martinez, “Sanctuary City Hotline,” New York Times, August 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/opinion/san-francisco-immigration-sanctuary-city-ice.html. ↑

5. Carson Wang, email correspondence with author, September 17, 2021 (shared with permission). ↑

6. Nick Arroyo, email correspondence with author, November 11, 2021 (shared with permission). ↑