Lower thirds – the credentials used to identify a film’s subjects, locations and dates – are often overlooked as essential, but I like to refer to them as the graphical equivalent to a cruise director for your film. They’re the first graphics your viewers meet, and they keep appearing to connect the dots for the audience that’s riding along. Shot-for-shot, lower thirds and IDs often outnumber other motion graphics in a feature doc. They’re the most repetitive design and tone influence on your film’s graphics style. As you approach lower thirds, think of them not as “who is this person,” but rather “who is this person to my story.” Lower thirds need to be concise to what’s relevant in that moment of your film.

In “The Social Dilemma,” which discussed the effects of social media on society, we designed the lower thirds to draw the eye immediately to the company where each interviewee worked. That way, if people got nothing else from the lower thirds, they knew they were hearing from a group of insiders telling this story, helping build credibility.

Maps give your audience their bearings, and they may seem obvious in their approach, but making them effective graphically can be challenging. First, determine what story question you’re answering with a map. If your audience needs to understand how long a journey is, too much detail may be distracting for viewers. Keep the map simple and show the route boldly.

In documentary filmmaking, data visualization – often dressed in graphs, charts or infographics – should quickly communicate information in your story. One of the biggest challenges (and our favorite!) is how to inject a tangible, memorable and human story into statistics. The first question to ask: what story does the data tell?

In early cuts of “The Social Dilemma,” audiences weren’t understanding the seriousness of the correlation between adolescent female self-harm and suicide with the introduction of social media on mobile devices. Seeing a line graph simply go up a few notches didn’t strike the emotional gravity the stat truly deserved. These numbers represent our daughters, after all, and losing them is a serious issue worth investigating. As our team thought about that loss, we asked ourselves what was left behind. If you can imagine the grieving mother who finds her daughter’s shoes at the front door after her daughter is gone, it hits you in the gut. Girls’ shoes became the visual for our data reminding viewers that these were not just dots on a graph, they were girls that didn’t need to die.

Animations can add more meaning where simple interviews or standard B-roll cannot, provided the animation matches the tone of your film and doesn’t catch your audience off-guard. If you’re telling a hard story about familial abuse, and it just wouldn’t be appropriate to go film a reenactment, an animation with earthy tones and abstract visuals that hint at what happened could be powerful to help communicate a rougher part of your story.\nNeed to recount history? Rather than embarking on a narrative-style period shoot, use animation to tell the story with illustrated imagery. Think about animations like these in the same way you would shoot a recreation. For subtle emotive moments without needing to focus on an actor, think about what you can do with more suggestive cutaways and details you wouldn’t be able to get if you filmed it.

The artistry of an opening title may make it one of our favorite types of graphics to work on, but creatives can often get distracted by focusing on the opening title and relying on it to do too much. Effective opening title graphics share the project’s title (obviously!), set the story’s tone and hint at what’s to follow, often cleverly foreshadowing the double entendre or meaning of the title and how it might change over the story’s course. Documentary graphics are a challenge because a lot of the story is found during the editing process. With “Chasing Coral,” we saved the opening title for last to let the film settle more into its final form.