Dear Readers: This past fall, IDA presented a daylong Doc U devoted to sound and music. Over the course of the day, the leading practitioners in all things aural—recordists, mixers, designers, composers and filmmakers—proffered sage counsel on how to achieve the best sound—ambient, dialogue, music—for your documentary. A veritable feast for the ears! one might exclaim-and a valuable touchstone for a deeper exploration into the issues and topics that arose out of the seminar. So, beginning with a report on the Doc U , we present our issue on sound and music. Ron Deutsch talks to some seasoned
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Dear IDA Community: Every year seems to bring the release of more and more important documentaries, on an ever-wider range of topics, from an increasingly diverse and expanding community of talented filmmakers. This year was no exception. To anticipate and meet the needs of this growing field, IDA has to grow too. And it has to change. 2013 brought plenty of both growth and change. One of the biggest changes brought the end of IDA's long-running Oscar-qualifying DocuWeeks program and the launch of IDA's popular new Documentary Screening Series. The series is designed to bring the best
Being a judge this year on the IDA, Directors Guild of America (DGA) and Oscar Documentary committees, I got to see a large number of films. There are some very high-quality docs being produced around the country and abroad. But is it the best of times, or the worst of times for documentary producers? The last couple of years in particular have seen the successful theatrical release of some wonderful documentaries, including Capturing the Friedmans, Spellbound and My Architect. With the supposed 500-channel satellite and cable world opening up, it would seem that the possibilities for the
While shooting her documentary Somewhere Between, filmmaker Linda Goldstein Knowlton needed access to a remote area of China on a tourist visa with a camera crew. And she got it, thanks to her fixer. On a rooftop in Brazil, a team of filmmakers were trapped; armed drug users had barricaded the only exit. The project's producer Marilyn Ness and director Ross Kauffman knew there was exactly one person to blame: the fixer. Film shoots abroad require a fixer—a local guide whose job duties vary according to the team's needs. Ness said the fixer is "hugely important point in any shooting situation
At the Tribeca Film Festival, good luck trying to get a bead on the kind of longform documentary you'll find. It could be a hard-hitting, alarming doc like James Spione's superb Silenced, which describes the Obama-era prosecution of whistleblowers as leakers and even potentially terrorists. Or maybe it's a poetic meditation, like Andrew Renzi's deliberately slow-film-style Fishtail, in which you trudge along with cattlemen birthing calves in what seems like real time as both poetry and music cast the experience as art. Possibly it's a sturdy, no-surprises HBO doc like All about Ann: Governor
Interactivity ruled at Tribeca's Innovation Week, whether at Games for Change, the scruffy gamers-for-good conference that was folded into Tribeca activities this year; Storyscapes, the showcase for interactive projects; the mobile apps hackathon; or the all-day Tribeca Interactive Day conference. It even shone at the Disruptive Innovation Awards, where the business folks run things. Links between the old world of linear storytelling and the interactive one are still evolving at Tribeca. At Games for Change, while Tribeca's Jane Rosenthal optimistically said, "We're all in this together,"
China's documentary television sector has travelled light years in a decade. This boom is driven by China's vast-scale, rocketing economic growth, its deep cultural respect for content-rich programming and its top-down media policy. Documentary channels are flourishing at the national level—at CCTV (China Central Television), the predominant state television broadcaster, and in the regions as well. Viewers are hungry for informative storytelling that seems quaint by the "Big, Noisy Character" measure deployed by an increasing number of Western networks. Beijing has rejected reality TV and many
The Farmer's Wife, a documentary by David Sutherland, had a profound effect on me. It inspired me back into producing documentaries. After film school I wanted to make docs, and I did; several years later, I seemed to drift into directing feature films, then episodic TV and movies of the week. By 1998 I felt burnt out and was looking around for something new. I often watched PBS' Frontline, one of my favorite shows. When I saw there was a six-hour documentary scheduled over several nights about a farm couple, I'm sure I groaned at what it might be. But I was hooked into the miniseries in the
Guest post by recent USC Law grad Rom Bar-Nissim ’13, who was on the legal team on the brief.
By Belinda Baldwin and Robert Bahar It was during the height of America's post-war optimism when Richard Griffith, the American film historian who would later write the definitive book on Robert Flaherty, wrote these discouraging words about American documentary, in his review of Paul Rotha's Documentary: "Since few people now have real faith in the causes which documentary customarily promoted, it is hardly strange that they are indifferent to the documentaries themselves," he argued. "This is the background against which American documentary makers have had to work. It is a story of sporadic