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Workshop

IDA Insight: Budgeting and Scheduling 101 with Robert Bahar

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PT

  • three quarters view posed headshot of a white man in black glasses and a black turtle neck. he is smiling softly and has a brown and gray short trimmed beard.
    Robert Bahar , Speaker
  • A person sits in a director's chair at a festival, holding a microphone.
    Abby Sun, Moderator
dimly lit image of a paper with financial information with a red pen and calculator scattered on top.

IDA Insight: Budgeting and Scheduling 101 Workshop with Robert Bahar

Date: Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Time: 10:00 am–1:00 pm PT

Location: Virtual on Zoom

RSVP Required: To RSVP, login to your MyIDA portal

Open to IDA members and 2024 Getting Real registrants. (Getting Real registrants will receive a separate registration email.)

As filmmakers, we yearn to immerse ourselves in the creative process. We pursue people, stories, issues, and ideas that fascinate us. We strive for cinematic ways to bring those stories to the screen. And we spend years in the field and the editing room, working through the labyrinthine, wonderful, frustrating process that documentary-making can be. Yet there are also crews to be hired, workflows to suss out, schedules to draft, and money to be raised and spent. This is show business and our work is half “show” and half “business,” whether on a huge doc financed by a studio or on a passion project made by a lone filmmaker in a small town, who must wear all hats herself. Budgeting is as much an art as a science, and it both reflects and supports the dynamic, complicated, beautiful process of bringing a documentary film to fruition.

In this webinar, Peabody, Goya, and three-time Emmy-winning producer/director Robert Bahar will help demystify the budgeting process and empower participants to use a budget and a schedule as proactive tools to manage production and serve the creative process.

Robert Bahar’s influential introduction to budgeting articles for Documentary Magazine, starting with 2008’s “Don't Fudge on Your Budget: Toeing the Line Items,” have been a valuable resource for filmmakers for nearly two decades. During the 2018 Getting Real conference, Robert presented an updated version of his introduction to documentary budgeting. We are excited to offer the latest revision of this invaluable work, a make-up session from Getting Real ’24. In this three-hour workshop, Robert will walk the attendees through the new 2025 version of the budgeting guide, which now includes access provisions and a schedule. 

After Robert’s presentation, Abby Sun, IDA’s director of artist programs and editor of Documentary magazine, will moderate an audience Q&A. This session will not be recorded.

Event Participants

    three quarters view posed headshot of a white man in black glasses and a black turtle neck. he is smiling softly and has a brown and gray short trimmed beard.

    Robert Bahar

    Robert Bahar is a Peabody, Goya and three-time Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. He produced and directed, with Almudena Carracedo, YOU ARE NOT ALONE, which has been seen by millions, was the #1 film on Netflix in Spain, and spent two weeks in Netflix’s Global Top 10 for non-English films. It won Spain’s Premio Ondas and is currently nominated for a duPont-Columbia Award. He and Carracedo produced and directed THE SILENCE OF OTHERS, which won the Berlinale Panorama Audience Award, Berlinale Peace Film Prize, the Goya (Spain’s Academy Award), a Peabody, two Emmys, and was shortlisted for an Oscar. They also won an Emmy for their documentary MADE IN L.A., and he spearheaded the three-year impact campaign which brought it to audiences around the world. Robert is a Creative Capital Fellow, Sundance Documentary Fellow, and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and Spain's Academy of Cinema. He holds an M.F.A. in Motion Picture Producing from the USC School of Cinema-Television, and regularly teaches at the Documentary Campus Masterschool and at NYU Madrid.

     

    A person sits in a director's chair at a festival, holding a microphone.

    Abby Sun

    Abby Sun (she/her) is IDA's Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary magazine. Before joining IDA, Abby was the Curator of the DocYard and co-curated My Sight is Lined with Visions: 1990s Asian American Film & Video with Keisha Knight. As a graduate student researcher in the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Abby edited Immerse. She has bylines in Film Comment, Filmmaker Magazine, Film Quarterly, MUBI Notebook, Sight & Sound, and other publications. Abby has served on festival juries for festivals like Hot Docs, Dokufest, Palm Springs, and CAAMfest, as well as nominating committees for the Gotham Awards and Cinema Eye. Abby has reviewed projects for grants and markets such as IDFA Forum, BGDM, NEA, SFFILM, LEF Foundation, Sundance Catalyst, and spoken on and facilitated panels at Locarno, IFFR, TIFF, NYFF, and other film festivals. Along with Keisha, Abby received a fall 2022 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship. She produced Shared Resources and, with Jordan Lord, received a 2022 American Stories Documentary Fellowship for the upcoming The Voice of Democracy. Her hometown is Columbia, Missouri, US.