The distribution landscape is changing — fast. Here's ten digestible bits of advice to keep in mind as you take your film out into the world.
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Like legions of filmmakers before you, you've spent months, perhaps years, getting the money to make your film. Unless you're one of the lucky few, much of your financing came out of your own pocket and those of family and friends. Along the way, you learned that film financing, like telling a story on film, requires special skill. That was the first step. The second step was the months, maybe years, it took to make your film; researching and getting the story on film, ensuring that your images revealed your passion for your subject. Writing and re-writing, finding the right narrator, music
"Since we started, a lot of our ideas seemed strange at first," observes Fenton Bailey, co-founder, with Randy Barbato, of the Hollywood and London-based production company, World of Wonder (WOW). "But then the way the agenda has shifted is that things on the edge have tended to become more factual, and I don't think anyone would have projected the way television has changed in the last ten years. It's been good for us because our sort of wacky, outer edge vision has suddenly seemed not so wacky or outer limits." The curious realities of life that World of Wonder has brought to the screen—
Any accidental tourists strolling through the lobby of Wyoming's Lake Lodge sometime during the last week of September might have thought they had wandered into a mecca of devout followers on their customary pilgrimage. All they had to do was overhear any of these devotees wax poetic about the value of this film festival to understand why it is a "must attend" for natural history filmmakers and broadcasters. Although the Wild Screen Film Festival, held in alternating years in Bristol, England, shares the "must attend" status, the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival (JHWFF) remains the
Celebrating and Preserving the Latino Experience–His Own Way
The series will highlight four new documentary films, with a filmmaker Q&A after each screening.
When was the last time a documentary inspired Americans to throw 3,000 viewing parties for nearly 100,000 people, making $850,000 in the first three days of distribution alone? When was the last time a documentary screening was co-sponsored by four competing presidential candidates, enabling the Dean, Kerry, Clark and Kucinich campaigns to put aside their differences for a night in Los Angeles to support the film and its defining issue? How many documentaries have inspired a punk rock band to approach the filmmaker for 10-20,000 copies of the film to hand out to fans on their tour? Yet this is
I have always considered myself privileged to have had my baptism of fire as an apprentice documentary filmmaker in the turbulent 1960s. It was a time of great social and cultural upheavals and a time of violent brutality and political repression. The era began with the civil rights movement's assault against segregation, a flood of protest that in turn fructified into a series of liberation movements for a variety of oppressed groups—the anti-Vietnam war movement protesting the senseless slaughter of Americans and Vietnamese; women demanding equality in all phases of the country's social
Dear IDA Community, This fall, we debut IDA's new three-day Documentary Film Conference in Los Angeles. Held in conjunction with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with the support of funding by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Catapult Foundation and the Kallis Foundation, this conference, we believe, could become a game-changer. It's a thrilling opportunity. We're hoping to kick-start something new, something that we desperately need in our community: a frank conversation about the state of the industry. Rather than hold more panels about festival strategy, self
Even during the annual Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival's celebration of everything nonfiction, not every Canuck obsesses over documentaries. Some are more concerned about hockey, the weather and, if in Toronto, Mayor Rob Ford. Still, it's heartening to note that while hiz-dizhonor was making international headlines by allegedly smoking crack, and local sports fans found their attention divided by, of all things, a basketball playoff, a record number of 192,000 Torontonians and visitors stood patiently in downpours of rain to attend screenings of the 197 films selected to