Editor's note: This article was revised for the Winter 2019 issue, adapted from the session Getting Real '18. Since then, a second revision was published in December 2024. A well thought-out budget is a clear plan for making a film. And a good budget reveals a lot about how a film is going to be made, what kind of story you'll be telling, what kind of crew you plan to use and what sort of equipment you've selected. But how do you prepare a budget that fits your documentary? This article provides a nuts-and-bolts primer on documentary budgeting. Preparing to Create a Budget It is often said
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Making a film is a huge undertaking, and definitely not for the faint of heart. A major part of the work--more than you ever imagined--is the process of generating funds from various sources to get it done. So the first big decision is about how to do that, what kind of help might be needed, where to go looking for dollars and, most important, the difference between the budget you would like and the budget you can live with. Fundraising these days is tougher than ever; the competition is fierce and the funders are smart and savvy. There is not and never will be enough money out there for all
Michael Tucker' and Petra Epperlein's 'Gunner Palace' gets an 'R' for language.
A profile of the documentary community in Finland.
"...we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes." --President Dwight D. Eisenhower With these foreboding and prescient words, President Eisenhower bade farewell to the White House. And it is that speech that opens Why We Fight, winner of the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. "Why We Fight" is a difficult
Doug Bruce, subject of Unknown White Male. Courtesy of Wellspring Media When filmmaker Rupert Murray heard about an old friend who had lost his memory overnight, he couldn't get the story out of his head: A 35-year-old stockbroker living in New York City finds himself riding the subway in Brooklyn with just a few random articles in his backpack. He has no idea who or where he is. He goes to the police department and is subsequently sent to the hospital in an ambulance. Since he has no identification with him, the nurses identify him as "Unknown White Male." But, thanks to a scrap of paper
Nonprofit media arts organization to collaborate with Web-based doc distributor.
It's been a year of epochal keynote addresses to the indie filmmaking community-bracketed by Mark Gill's gloomy "Yes, The Sky Is Falling" back in June at the Los Angeles Film Festival and Ted Hope's more sanguine "How the New Truly Free Filmmaking Community Will Rise from Indie's Ashes" at Film Independent's Filmmaker Forum two weeks ago. And somewhere in the stoical middle is the documentary community, facing a shrinking pool of opportunities among the traditional models of getting work out there, but entertaining a wealth of possibilities in the ever-mutating Web 2.0 world. In this spirit
They've been running for over a year, spending more time and more money than any Presidential candidates in history, each surviving grueling primary bouts with able opponents whom conventional wisdom thought had a better shot at earning a chair in the Oval office. Neither candidate is running as a party insider, and neither has been able to close the sale with the voters. If you don't already think you know all you need to know about John McCain and Barack Obama, then you've probably been in a coma for the last two years or sharing a cave with Osama bin Laden. For most, it's been impossible to
By Michael Galinsky We all need a beginning, a middle and an end....which is why filmmakers are drawn to elections and boxing matches. As it's election season, the political fights have started to pop up on screens large and small. FrontRunners, a high-stakes high school election drama, opens October 15 in New York City through Oscilloscope Pictures, and will roll out to cities across the country October 24. Filmmaker Caroline Suh was drawn to New York's Stuyvesant High School's student council presidential campaign after discovering that President Bill Clinton's political guru, Dick Morris, a