Documentaries can be as visually inventive as an Errol Morris film or as evocative as the slow zooms and pans across Ken Burn’s daguerreotype tin plates and pin-hole battle photographs. Nevertheless, the sound of the documentary—particularly the spoken word—is essential to convey and communicate the story. Location sound recording for documentaries can present quite a few challenges. As a production sound mixer I troubleshoot sound problems everyday. Typically, documentary audio problems are the result of insufficient planning and selection of audio equipment. Just as you schedule your shoot
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Dear IDA Members: Thanks very much to all the members who have heaped such praise for the work done by the Documentary Credits Coalition. The details of the entire story are set forth elsewhere in this issue. Let me use this space to put the accomplishments in their proper perspective. The Discovery Networks and IDA have enjoyed a long and close relationship. Discovery is, after all, one of the largest buyers of documentary programming in the world. Given its 11 different channels—plus a radio channel—Discovery is unsurpassed in variety and quality of documentaries. One part of IDA’s mission
Dear Readers: Looking back connotes reflection, contemplation, remembrance. In this issue, we don’t so much look back on September 11—it’s all around us, every day—as look forward, while looking back, on that indelible tragedy. Over the past year, the documentary community has responded as it always responds: with the right mix of moxie, ingenuity, circumspection, and responsibility. We’ve delved beneath the collective shroud of uber-patriotism and uncovered hundreds of stories from hundreds of communities. We’ve learned a lot—about faith and religion, about power, about terror, about war
One night, when I was about 16, living in suburban Long Island, The Weavers: Wasn't That A Time, a 1982 documentary film about the radical folk singing quartet, beamed out of my family’s black-and-white TV set, and wrapped itself around my heart. Pete Seeger, banjo in hand, was talking about what it meant to be part of a group of young, up-and-coming “blacklisted” troubadours whose self-appointed job was to protest injustice in Cold War America. “We sang for unions and left-wing groups,” he related. “We sang songs of hope. We thought if we sang long enough and loud and hopeful enough we could
Last March, when Los Angeles Media & Education Center (LAMEC) celebrated the IDA's 20th anniversary, Linda Grinberg, one of IDA’s founders, was too ill to attend the festivities. She was in our thoughts, but I failed that night to communicate the one thing about Linda that I most immediately recalled some months later, when I first heard about her death. I had failed to talk about her indomitable spirit, her unfailing courage and her ability to invoke in others an unlimited reservoir of optimism and hope that helped keep the IDA alive during those perilous days of creation. In thinking about
It’s been said that from thought to expression lasts a lifetime, but in a mere year and a half, a corps of commissioning editors, broadcasters, funders, filmmakers and activists from Scandinavia, Southern Africa, Europe, Australia, Canada and the US worked together to create a package of some 40 documentaries, PSAs, experimental films and music videos that address the AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa. The project, Steps for the Future, takes a bold leap forward in the notion of international co-productions and activist media making. The genesis for Steps for the Future came from Finland, in
The Center for Social Media was launched last fall at the American University School of Communication in Washington, DC, which is, of course, a hotbed for political discourse, social activism, public sector policy making—and documentary making. With PBS, Discovery Networks, National Geographic and C-Span all clustered in the general area of the Potomac, along with such major distributors/producers as Devillier Donegan Enterprises, the Beltway affords abundant opportunities for media making. But it’s not just the producers and broadcasters here; nonprofit and non-governmental organizations and
While donning my other hat as Associate Director of the Film Program at HBO’s Comedy Arts Festival, I was faced with an interesting conundrum. I have a personal commitment to programming documentaries and getting them out to wider audiences, yet labeling a documentary a comedy has several inherent problems, such as the possibility of implying disrespect towards one’s subject matter. While many serious docs use moments of humor to draw in their audiences, achieving tonal balance can be tricky when juxtaposing weighty issues with moments of lightness. Additionally, those docs that deal with
Dear IDA Members: I report from the Cannes Film Festival, which this year has to be the best I’ve ever attended. For the first time in 46 years, a documentary was in the main competition. Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine was the talk of the festival. Moore has outdone himself. He has never communicated more clearly and more directly about the social issues that are troubling him than in his new film. The massacre at Columbine High School is the launching pad for a discussion of gun control, our national violence—both on an individual domestic basis and as a matter of public policy—and our
The life of the documentary, we all hope, extends well beyond the final cut, festival circuit, theatrical run, television broadcast and nontheatrical distribution. Documentaries can, and do, have the power to change policies, attitudes, opinions—and lives. It takes a well-conceived strategy and a strong infrastructure of filmmakers, advisors, distributors and film subjects who are willing and able to take their documentaries to targeted audiences—wherever they may be—and generate discussion and dialogue. In this issue, we look at a few recent examples of projects that were conceived and