ABSTRACT
If you are working on a documentary project, background information about your topic is necessary to construct a meaningful narrative and to write a voice-over commentary. Researching a project for visual media is different from term paper research because you not only need a factual background, you also need images — old photos, engravings, artifacts, and locations. Every scene in the script must be represented by an image. Suppose your script is historical. A good example would be the Civil War documentary by Ken Burns. 2 You cannot interview Civil War veterans, but you can interview historians who
are knowledgeable about the Civil War. You can fi lm locations of some Civil War battlefi elds. Location research is critical to this kind of project. You can shoot existing images such as photos, engravings, and paintings. All of these images have to be found. A number of picture libraries sell the use of pictures from their collections, including the Library of Congress, which has a huge collection of Civil War photos that are in the public domain. Finding the right picture is a specialized task. There are people called picture researchers who make a living doing this particular kind of research.
