Editor’s Note: Welcome to our new column, "Inside Out," in which we ask filmmakers in the field—and in the edit room—What are your essentials tools of the trade, and the essential accessories for doing your best work? In the issues to come, as well as online, we will be spotlighting the worlds inside the bags that help create the stories of our times. To kick off "Inside Out," we turn to esteemed filmmaker/cinematographer Joan Churchill. When shooting the 1973 vérité series An American Family, my crew consisted of a camera assistant, a sound person and me. We needed to have everything with us
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You've no doubt seen these before in a documentary: an interviewee sitting just inches in front of a bookcase, with the individual book titles visible and distracting; a house plant invading the frame; an incandescent desk lamp in the background whispering for attention while the interviewee's eye-line is awkwardly off to the side. Or perhaps you've seen this one: the interviewee engulfed by a high-back sofa, an exposed lav mic stealing our attention, while the hum of a house appliance and the jingle of a busy necklace cause us to squint trying to decipher the subject's words. These are the
The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema by Patricia R. Zimmermann and Scott MacDonald. Published by Indiana University Press, 2017." src="http://www.documentary.org/sites/default/files/images/articles/Sum17_TheFlaherty.jpg" style="width: 250px; float: right; margin: 5px;"> While "Robert enjoyed notoriety both in life and in death," it was his wife, Frances, who "crafted the intellectual infrastructure supporting documentary and independent film at the Flaherty film seminars." In this first detailed account of the history of the famed Flaherty Seminars, we discover that they
I believe I've gone through a half-dozen laptops since 2007, when I first saw Peter Watkins' film Edvard Munch. There's a pair of screenshots captured during that first DVD viewing that I've dragged across all these computers, while discarding so much else along the way. I think I've held onto these artifacts as a set of digital talismans, a desktop reminder of the exhilarating thing that Watkins manages in his unconventional portrait of the Norwegian painter. Namely, capturing the true, varied chaos of life— art-making and the very messy business of living—while simultaneously screaming
The story of Oovra Music, the Los Angeles-based, composer-run music licensing company, began in 2014, after Emmy Award-winning film composer Joel Goodman sold his successful music licensing business to Ole Publishing. Having scored films for almost 20 years by then, Goodman realized that he still owned a lot of his own music. As he began to catalogue his personal library, he realized that there were many other composers out there in the same position. "I had always dreamed of having a jazz label, like Blue Note or ECM," Goodman explains. "You think of those labels as representing a certain
By Steven Beer, Jake Levy and Neil Rosini As attorneys at the New York City-based law firm of Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell & Vassallo, we work extensively with nonfiction filmmakers. In this new column, LEGAL FAQ, we will address legal issues of concern to the documentary community. To kick off this quarterly series, we will focus on music. Why are licenses from both the record label and music publisher needed for each pre-existing musical work used in a film? By Jake Levy A musical recording contains two distinct copyrights: the copyright in the sound recording, indicated by ℗ (which stands for
Dear IDA Community: Indulge me as I go off-script for a moment. For the last decade, I've been volunteering to transform our neighborhood's commercial corridor. Folks have complained about the blight and the need for new businesses for close to 50 years. But despite valiant efforts, the problems persist, and at times it all feels overwhelming and futile. How can we, as a group of committed local activists, change major systemic problems like freeway ramps and traffic safety? Without the buy-in of systems of leadership and power, how do individuals change things they don't have the power to
Dear Readers, Over the past several months, we at IDA have presented a series of master classes by individuals who are at the top of their respective games in the docmaking process. The wisdom they proffered in those sessions proved valuable to filmmakers of every stripe, from novices to veterans. Wherever you are on the professional continuum, it pays to stay curious, refresh the toolkit and fine-tune the craft. We approached two of these mavens to share their secrets with our readers. Adam Irving has learned through shooting and directing—and above all, from watching—what makes for a good
Thirteen years after Wesley Hogan received her doctorate degree in history from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in 2000, she returned to campus as the third director of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) since it was founded at Duke in 1989. An oral historian with an academic focus on the civil rights movement, Hogan was especially drawn to the Center's mission. "I think what really captured it for me was that they wanted to foster respect, break down barriers and illuminate social injustice," she maintains. "I just thought that was a really unusual academic mission."
Animation's history within the realm of documentary is a long and storied one, but to this day its origin is still a matter of contention. Although Winsor McCay's 1918 hand-drawn short, The Sinking of the Lusitania, is often cited as the first example of animation being used for documentary purposes, it could be argued that Eadweard Muybridge's use of stop-motion photography in 1877 to document The Horse in Motion not only heralded the birth of the motion picture, but was also the first instance of using cameras for motion capture, and a harbinger of the animation process to come. Any reader