This lesson will explore documentary conventions and representations of realism in moving image products. This will allow students to learn the necessary visual language needed to tell a story within this form, but will also enable them to understand the selection process involved in telling a story, even if it is based on real events or people.

After you conduct an interview, how do you select how to structure and frame your story out of all of the possible details you have collected? Choosing what type of story to tell, is the first step to structuring your information into a narrative that places the person you have interviewed at the center. This lesson allows students to explore different lenses through which they can focus a story.

How do journalists get all their information to write news and feature stories? This lesson explores the role of journalists and invites students to consider the challenges that may come with the profession. More focus is placed on feature stories, and person-to-person interviews, and the aim is to enable students to plan their own individual interviews, develop their own question set and conduct an interview with another person.

How do you take a story from an idea to a fully realized digital story? Understanding the different aspects of digital stories is important in determining the necessary steps to bringing a short personal story to life. This lesson is focused on getting students to structure to plan a short documentary, around a scripted voiceover narration.