One of the most eagerly awaited documentaries of the year may also be one of the most controversial. The Blues, the seven-part, ten-and-a-half-hour documentary series on the influence of blues music on our society, premieres on PBS this fall. Martin Scorsese, who directed one of the episodes, is the executive producer. Alex Gibney and Margaret Bodde are the producers. The series, Gibney relates, was born out of a conversation between Scorsese and Eric Clapton while the former was producing a documentary on the latter. Both have a mutual love of blues music. Scorsese's original plan was to
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A review of Alan Rosenthal's 'Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Videos' (Third Edition)
How many of us documentary filmmakers have shelves or closets stacked with interviews or portions of interviews that never made it into our films? Or miles of footage that took thousands of dollars and months or years to gather? Or hours of material that had to be shaved down to a few minutes because of that one-hour television programming standard? Some of our footage has been around for years, possibly decades. Why don't we have the heart to dump those many boxes? Because that footage is still precious to us. I've been a full-time independent filmmaker for 14 years, and in that time I have
The bigger the image, the bigger the impact," says Robert Dennis. "Filmmakers have been experimenting with large format since the early days of filmmaking." Dennis is a real large format (LF) film buff. He is also president of the Large Format Cinema Association (LFCA) and director of sales and marketing for the 70mm Group at CFI/Technicolor. "The unique nature of LF allows documentary filmmakers to immerse the audience in the world they're showing," says Dennis. Each LF film frame, ten times larger than 35mm, is 15 perforations wide on 70mm film, which travels horizontally through the camera
It has taken a few years, but digital versatile disc (DVD), technology has matured. If you count the DVD drives in desktop computers, there are over 54 million DVD players worldwide. Electronics manufactures sold about 71 million DVD players worldwide last year and are expected to ship between 80 and 90 million units in 2003 and 95 million units in 2004. Clearly, the audience for content is there. To fill that gap, every major film is released in DVD. According to the International Recording Media Association, there were 1,740 million DVD videos produced worldwide in 2002 and a projected 2,415
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored three student documentary winners at the 41st Student Academy Awards ceremony, held June 7 at the Directors Guild of America Theater in West Hollywood. The Gold Medal went to Helen Hood Scheer of Stanford University for The Apothecary; the Silver Medal, to J. Christian Jensen, also from Stanford University, for White Earth; and the Bronze Medal, to Zijian Mu from the New York University School of Journalism, for One Child. With the top two honors, Stanford's MFA program in Documentary Film continues to dominate these awards. Since 2000
What would happen if technology stopped in its tracks? If filmmaking's tools of tomorrow were the same as today? It's slightly ironic in the midst of the Tribeca Film Festival—a festival itself with one leg in silver oxide and the other in hi-def digital projection—that this debate took center stage. The question was somewhat rhetorical, since all of the people on stage at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center acknowledged that the tools that make film are evolving in a dramatic and explosive evolution. But not everyone was willing to agree that all this change is good for documentary. The forum
The DVD industry is driven by an ever-growing roster of companies that embrace this format and are consolidating the key components of making this business work—acquisitions, filmmaker relations, post-production, distribution and marketing—under one roof. International Documentary spoke to three players in the industry about the keys to growth and survival Docurama New York-based Docurama ( www.docurama.com), a division of New Video, specializes exclusively in documentaries. Among its many titles are A Decade Under the Influence (Richard LaGravenese, Ted Demme), Lost in La Mancha (Louis Pepe
I am not a filmmaker. I don't even play one on TV. Last year, however, I did write direct and edit a three-minute film as part of a project called Funtown. Even better, I managed to talk ten friends into making films too. No restrictions on style or format. No budget. And a two-week time limit. We put the eclectic results on an enhanced CD with some music and released the package through a local record label. An amusing little experiment. At the end of March, I received an email letting me know Funtown would be shown as part of the Primer Festival Internacional de Cine Pobre (aka The first