Documentary Films

The French used the term documentary to refer to any non-fiction film medium, including travelogues & instructional videos. The earliest "moving pictures" were, by definition, documentary. There were single shots, moments captured on film; whether of a train entering a station, a boat docking, or a factory of people getting off work. Early film (pre-1900) was dominated by the novelty of showing an event. These short films were called "actuality" films. Very little storytelling took place before the turn of the century, due mostly to technological limitations: cameras could hold only very small amounts of film; many of the first films are a minute or less in length.

We produce a wide variety of documentaries, everything from
documentaries for private individuals & corporations to documentaries for retail sales to the general public. Among our documentaries is the documentary, "Touched upon by a Rabari", & a riveting history of child marriages which are still rampant in some parts of India even today. It is a story depicting the Rabari Culture as it is today. This documentary was an effort to reach out to as many people creating amongst them an awareness of the way the Rabari community lives.

People giving their personal testimony to camera can be a very powerful way of getting a message over to your audience. We have captured quite a few people's personal stories & have the experience in documentary filming to put people at their ease in front of the camera so they can concentrate on just talking. This is portrayed in our documentary www.muchadpaan.kaun - a story about a beetle maker in Mumbai.

Kapil Sharma Films produce, shoot & edit documentary videos for public television, non profit organizations & private companies. We use state-of-the –art production techniques& equipment. Contact us to enquire about a future collaboration.

The fundamentals of the style include following a person during a crisis with a moving, often handheld, camera to capture more personal reactions. There are no sit-down interviews, & the shooting ratio (the amount of film shot to the finished product) is very high, often reaching 80:1. From there, editors find & sculpt the work into a film. The editors are often overlooked elsewhere, but at Kapil Sharma Films, their input to the film is so vital that they are often given co-director credits.

Box office analysts have noted that this film genre has become increasingly successful in theatrical release with films such as Super Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, & March of the Penguins being among the most prominent examples. Compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets. This has made them attractive to film companies because even a limited theatrical release can be highly profitable. Fahrenheit 9/11 set a new record for documentary profits, earning more than US$228 million in ticket sales & selling more than 3 million DVDs.

Modern documentaries have some overlap with other forms of television, with the development of "reality television" that occasionally verges on the documentary but more often veers to the fictional or staged. The making-of documentary shows how a movie or a computer game was produced. Usually made for promotional purposes, it is usually closer to an advertisement than to classical documentary. Modern lightweight digital video cameras & computer-based editing have greatly aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic drop in equipment prices