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Organizations urge Congress to reduce risk for independent filmmakers.

In Missoula, Montana, a town surrounded by mountains, people line up around the block, in freezing weather, to watch films by local favorites, as well as overlooked gems. In its 12th year, the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which was started by local filmmakers, focuses not only on finding great films, but also on making sure that the filmmakers get as much out of the experience as possible. While the festival, which ran February 15-23, isn't premiere-centric, I did catch two debuts that really stood out. While it first played for enthusiastic audiences at IDFA last November, Big Sky was

On the making of the PBS production 'Japan: Memoirs of a Secret Empire'

A film production client of mine once insisted on hiring its own local security for a shoot on location in Mexico. It was a feature film, the crew and talent were in place, and shooting was set to begin the next day. You know what happened: The following morning, the producer and crew awoke to find all their equipment missing, never to be recovered. Foreign documentary productions can be perilous. Losing your equipment to theft is one of many risks you face when producing a documentary in a foreign country. Travel in unfamiliar, often remote locations. Unfamiliar language, customs, governments

A review of Carole Lee Dean's 'The Art of Funding: Alternative Financing Concepts'

Music supervision is one of those coveted jobs by individuals who are passionate about music and who sense they can match songs with images. Driving in a car listening to the right soundtrack is sometimes no different from being in a movie theater. Unfortunately, only about a third of the job is creative; the other two thirds is administrative, made smoother by relationships built up over many years. Most music supervisors service directors by helping them match a post-production budget with the appropriate music to parallel the directors' sensibility and the scene's required mood

Report on the 2003 IDFA Forum

Documentary filmmaking continues to enjoy a surge in popularity, visibility and exhibition, in styles and formats ranging from short to feature-length, fiction/nonfiction hybrids to music documentaries. As this trend continues, so follows increasingly sophisticated musical soundtracks to the films—and more complex creative, financial, legal and technical music challenges. The more the documentary filmmaker understands the role of a music supervisor and the services that individual provides, the smoother the musical ride can be for the project. From that understanding, the filmmaker can then

'Finding Vivian Maier' opens March 28 through Sundance Selects/IFC Films.

It's time to take Understanding Media (1964) and The Medium Is the Message (1967) off the shelf and reread them. If you haven't delved into Marshall McLuhan's media studies, it's never too late to learn. McLuhan was a Canadian sociologist who researched mass media while on the faculty at the University of Toronto. His core conclusion was that choice of media affects how the audience perceives the message. McLuhan's books were bestsellers, and he became kind of a media star to the point of portraying himself in a cameo role in the 1977 Woody Allen film Annie Hall. Producer/director Steven Jack