Good idea! Using your framework, plus 'progress', which you added nicely:

1 - Theme
2 - Story
3 - Audience
4 - Rough Storyboard
5 - Progress

Title: Vermont's Independent Country Stores

1 - Theme: How Vermont's country stores are both needed and threatened by changes, and how they respond.

2 - Story: Divided into sections after an introduction, set off by titles: Daily Events, Community, Thinking Back, Telling Stories, Changes, The Goods, Looking Ahead, credits.

3 - Audience: Local stores, customers, schools, and travelers (via web clips).

4 - Rough Storyboard: Story was created after the interviews, letting the storekeepers and customers lead. Resulting storyboard:

I. Titles over slo-mo old patron walking into store, and ten quick comments by storekeepers.
II. Overview feel of stores & daily life, including great shot of guy on tractor getting lunch, local dog.
III. 'Talking table'; comments and look at 'subrural' character, local trade, 'heart of village culture', programs with schoolkids; post offices in stores; end with comments 'we are independent'.
IV. Old store images with comments on store histories and quirky background tales about marble quarries, nail shelves, crockery, Morgan horses; telling stories by customers & storekeepers, old travel routes, tossing chickens off roof w/ old pix, bamboo story, casket factory, cutting ice in January w/ old pix.
V. Divided into three subsections: Coping with changes, abandoned rail tracks, busy road, old ways (driving phone messages to customers, grinding sage for sausage), new products including hemp, ATMs, pizza, French quimpere, in increasing fast cuts, and one who doesn't like change at all; the addition of wine sections in every store, with voiceovers that suggest each storekeeper thought it was their own idea; and expansion of local products, ice cream, maple, artwork, bread, honey, plus postcards (zoom back from stills), and wrapping up with classic store signs.
VI. Short philosophical look by storekeepers, country stores as 'darwinian', 'life gets faster', village culture again, close circle with answers to own opening questions.

Progress: Everything was shot in 3 days, driving over 1,000 miles in Vermont (which is hard to do, since it's only 263 miles long!). Nobody had cameras to rent, and the Country Store Alliance had no money to buy, so I shot on my old Sony 8mm from 1984 (gasp!). I collected six hours of material, too much of it good.

I logged all the good stuff and imported it to HD. Since I had the story in my head by then, editing took a week (after I learned the hang of VideoFactory, during which my first posts appeared here).

There was to be nothing special to the production except the arch of the story. Technically, there were only titles, dissolves, voiceovers, bunches of head shots, quite a few historical stills (the ice cutting ones were great -- chromes from 1953!), and little else. It's one of what I call 'slowtalker' documentaries because of its niche audience; I have a good eye, and previously had worked with film.

Last week I composed the score (my "real" life's work), about 18 minutes of music in total. I rendered some very nice versions in Sonar, also recorded a few connecting voiceovers, and placed it all together in VF.

Then I came up against the mad crashing problem during rendering, so instead rendered 50 separate one-minute sections, and pasted 'em together in TMPGEnc. (I finally got a complete playback now that I've installed the VIA latency patch; I think that may do the trick.)

That's it! 50 minutes of slow-talker documentary with nifty historical tidbits and nice flow. (Only wish I'd had a digital camera to do the originals.)

Dennis