CBC Doc Makers | CBC Radio

A program that aims to develop Canada's next generation of Indigenous audio producers.

CBC Radio's Doc Mentorship Program teams up emerging and intermediate audio producers with veteran doc makers to bring innovative and unique stories to life.

CBC Radio's Doc Mentorship Program teams up emerging and intermediate audio producers with veteran doc makers to bring innovative and unique stories to life.

CBC Radio's Doc Mentorship Program teams up emerging and intermediate audio producers with veteran doc makers to bring innovative and unique stories to life.

Making a documentary can be an overwhelming experience. So much tape ... so many scenes ... how do I put this together?! It's structure my friend, structure. Effective structure will help you produce a cohesive item that contains tension, action and a narrative arc.

As a doc maker, a lot of the interviews you do are with people you've already talked to before showing up, mic in hand. But there's another kind of interview that doesn't involve any of these things: on-the-fly interviews in the field with strangers (aka, basically winging it).

We don't often think about the narrator in our documentaries as a character. But the narrator, usually the producer of the doc, has already made editing, structure, sound, music and script decisions. Veteran host and producer Dick Miller takes us through the role of the narrator in documentary storytelling.

The freelance life is not an easy life — it's a constant hustle with no guarantees, but if you are self-motivated, obsessed with sound & stories and have an insatiable curiosity, then maybe this is the life for you too! Freelancer Veronica Simmonds shares some of her hard-earned tips and advice.

Writing is the bones and the sinew of the radio we make. And yet we spend little time talking about the craft of writing for radio — it's just the thing you do once everything else is done. Veteran producer and script-writer Chris Wodskou shares his tips and experience.

It can feel like we all have our own personal systems for how we approach a script. How do other people go about it? We decided to ask three incredible radio producers about their scripting process.

When you edit someone's documentary there are two crucial phases: The first is when you listen critically to a draft of the work for the first time, and the second is when you give the doc maker your feedback. Veteran radio producer Neil Sandell takes us through the role of the editor.

In radio, the material has to fit the time-slot so documentary and show producers often need to find a way to lose a few minutes. But the process of figuring out how to shorten a piece that feels like it's finished isn't easy. Kalli Anderson asked 3 doc producers for their best tips and tricks for shortening docs.

There's one tool that everybody has that can make doc making easier — and sound better. So grab your smartphone and veteran radio producer Cesil Fernandes will share four tricks that can save your audio life.

Whether interviewing someone in a foreign country or recording streeters close to home, there are some things you should never leave the office without. Veteran producer Cesil Fernandes shares what you need to have in your kit to guarantee a great sounding doc.

As documentarians, we know we can't control what we'll discover when we're in the field. Sometimes the story we find diverges from the story we anticipated. And since making a doc is a negotiation between recording life accurately and rendering it artfully, it's dangerously easy to put up blinders to the reality of what's occurring in front of the microphone.