Story Producing for Reality Television and Documentary

This book explores the nuts and bolts of the story producing process, helping students and professionals to transform hundreds of hours of source footage into cohesive, understandable, and editable scripts that translate to compelling storytelling.

After an introduction to the role of a story producer, the book dives into the structures and genres of unscripted and scripted television – and how the story producer should approach them. This includes breakdowns of how the story producer functions in the pre-production, production and post-production stages, as well as technical and ethical considerations in today’s television, new media, and documentary industries. These lessons are all informed by the Author’s experience in this role, as well as the insights of a wide range of industry experts in featured interviews throughout the book. Tim Prokop, show creator, writer, and showrunner; Vanessa Cochran, documentary and news producer and editor; Rosa Camero, marketing and distribution expert harnessing AI tools for film; and Evan Nguyen, a reality TV assistant editor, all lend their voices throughout. In addition, the book includes how-to guides to unscripted workflows in Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer (contributed by Cortney Taborn), and DaVinci Resolve (contributed by Joshua Ireland). In step with recent developments, the book also explores the transformative potential of AI and how every story producer can harness it.

This book is an invaluable resource to all students and professionals in television production, especially story producers, editors, writers, and producers.

Ashley Zahorian is an Assistant Professor at Regent University teaching film and television in the School of Communication & the Arts and the President of CMAX Media Corp. She is also an award-winning producer and director passionate about creating media that explores the expanses of the human experience and affirms human dignity. She has over twelve years of experience in producing and directing unscripted formats including Beyond Escape (Regent Film Institute, 2026), The Preacher to the Popes: Raniero Cantalamessa (Vision Video, 2023), FantomWorks (Velocity/MotorTrend, 2014-2017). Films and shows on which she was a producer or director have won twenty-six awards.