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Seminar

IDA Member Hours: How to Position Your Project (Beyond Grant Writing)

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PT

  • Headshot of a middle-aged male of caucasian descent, short gray-blond hair, wearing a butterscotch sportcoat, blue sweater and green striped shirt.
    Frederick Greene, Speaker

There are many paths toward securing outside support for your project, but all of them involve the development of written and visual materials. Whether you are applying for grants, seeking a slot in a film festival market, looking for a sales agent, pitching to production companies or commissioners, sending materials to partners and collaborators, or readying your film for screenings, it’s vitally important to think about how you are positioning both the project and yourself as a filmmaker. Writing all with these varied audiences and goals in mind can help filmmakers not only frame their projects but also summon into existence more opportunities for their documentary filmmaking career. The audience for your film is not only the general public that will watch the finished product, but also the supporters that will get you there and beyond.

In this IDA members-only workshop, veteran marketing expert and researcher Fred Greene will give a brief presentation on different moments filmmakers can position and present themselves in their projects. Greene will follow this talk with a series of short strategy sessions with pre-selected projects workshopping their written materials, and conclude with an audience Q&A. 

All attendees will be able to observe all of the strategy sessions. Four projects will be selected to take part. Depending on interest, not every project will be selected. 

Registration is required to attend and is limited to the first 200 IDA members to sign up by 9AM PT on Tuesday, May 9, 2023. Members with projects at any stage are encouraged to attend. Having a project to workshop is not a requirement of attending the office hours. If you are interested in workshopping your project, you must fill out the form by 5PM PT on Monday, May 5, 2023.

To register, log in to the IDA member portal!

Event Participants

    Headshot of a middle-aged male of caucasian descent, short gray-blond hair, wearing a butterscotch sportcoat, blue sweater and green striped shirt.

    Frederick Greene, Speaker

    Fresh from a Ph.D program in English Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Fred Greene left academia to pursue a career as a marketing and advertising copywriter in the film industry. Writing movie poster taglines and scripts for trailers and pitches, he was soon involved researching and writing documentaries, having completed 7 distinguished documentary films (as the writer/researcher) in the interim. One of those early projects, produced in conjunction with UCLA Archive and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences examined the history of audio-visual movie marketing (trailers) and from that experience, Greene went on to contribute significantly to the academic literature in this area of film studies. Soon he was hired by UCLA Theater, Film & Television Department as a visiting assistant professor to teach, for three years, a movie marketing seminar within its fabled Producer's Program. In addition to teaching writing at California State University, the University of California at Santa Barbara and Los Angeles City College, Greene has worked extensively in film development and written all manner of marketing and promotional copy for his own and other projects, along with a range of materials for corporate and non-profit clients in Los Angeles and abroad. He has worked as a consulting writer for IEFTA since its founding in 2007, where, most recently, he has worked with a talented cohort of emerging filmmakers in Africa, the Middle East and S.E Asia, advising on their presentational and positioning materials, scripts and applications.