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Workshop

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Getting Started

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PT

  • A woman with short brown curly hair sits at a table in a blue short sleeve short. She holds one hand on her face and one hand on the counter.
    Gabriella Ortega Ricketts, Speaker
  • A woman with long, shiny black hair smiles at the camera, her arms crossed. The image is black and white and she wears a patterned cardigan.
    Maria Santos, Speaker
  • A person sits in a director's chair at a festival, holding a microphone.
    Abby Sun, Speaker

Registration for the workshop is now closed. 

How much does it actually cost to make and finish a film? How do I find co-conspirators to make and finish films with? How do I fundraise? What materials, access, and ideas do I need before I get started? How do I describe my film? What can I do to jump start my documentary project besides sitting down to write a long grant application? And when my film is finished, how will audiences find it? The honest answer to all of these questions is that every project is unique. As a filmmaker, you must understand your own goals to know how to best move forward for your own project, which is the objective of this new three-part seminar series.

“Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Getting Started” will guide you through identifying how to position your filmmaking practices and projects for a potential documentary market. The first two interactive sessions provide a holistic basis for you to better understand the steps toward making and completing a documentary project. If you attend or watch the recordings of the first two sessions, you can apply to workshop your projects and ideas in the third session with experienced members of IDA’s artist programming teams. Even if you don’t have a project to workshop, you are encouraged to attend to learn from the community.

During the workshop, attendees were given worksheets and resource handouts that cover the following topics:

  • Types of Nonfiction Films (Glossary)
  • Budget Template
  • Where to Go for Funding
  • Mental Health Support Resources
  • List of labs, incubators, and other development programs

You can find those resources here.

Dates and times are as follows: 

  • Part one: August 29, 10am - 11:30am PT. Watch the recording here.

  • Part two: August 30, 10am - 11:30am PT. Watch the recording here.

  • Workshop: September 20, 10am - 12:00pm PT.

After these sessions, you will:

  • Gain language for describing your position in the independent film landscape, and context for how other projects are presented
  • Be able to define most of the terms that are used in the documentary industry
  • Better understand how to develop a film from an idea to its fruition
  • Feel more confident navigating often-confusing and opaque film industry spaces, even if your background comes from outside conventional access to documentary pipelines  

Event Participants

    A woman with short brown curly hair sits at a table in a blue short sleeve short. She holds one hand on her face and one hand on the counter.

    Gabriella Ortega Ricketts

    Gabriella Ortega Ricketts (she/her) is a Colombian-American actress, multidisciplinary artist, and producer living in Los Angeles with her partner and their three cats, Archie, Hank, and Duke. Born and raised in Los Angeles, with a stint in Bogotá, Colombia, she feels a lot of hometown pride and will argue with anyone who disparages the culture, landscape, and historic architecture of our fair city (criticisms about cops and the city council are encouraged, however). She graduated from Bard College in 2014 with a BA in Languages & Literature: as a result of which she is very good at copy-editing and speaks French, Italian, and Spanish halfway. At IDA, she is the manager of artist programs and proud to be one of the co-leads of the union Documentary Workers United. Her archival producing credits include Rebel Hearts (Sundance 2021), The Andy Warhol Diaries (Netflix 2022), and Aum: The Cult at the End of the World (Sundance 2023). Gabriella was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 2013, and strives to be loudly chronically ill in the hopes of shedding more light on the lives of those with invisible illnesses.

    A woman with long, shiny black hair smiles at the camera, her arms crossed. The image is black and white and she wears a patterned cardigan.

    Maria Santos

    Maria Santos joined the International Documentary Association as the Funds Program Officer in September 2022. She oversees all of the funding grants and provides year-round creative and strategic support to all IDA grantees. Previously, she was the Manager of Labs and Artist Support at the Sundance Documentary Film Program, since September 2020. During her time there, she was the lead on working with International Artists, primarily in Central and South America. Originally from Peru, Maria is an independent film producer who has worked in distribution as well as artist development at organizations including ARRAY and Cinereach.  In 2018, she was selected as a Film Society Industry Academy member and became a Third World Newsreel Production fellow. 

    A person sits in a director's chair at a festival, holding a microphone.

    Abby Sun

    Abby Sun (she/her) is IDA's Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary magazine. Before joining IDA, Abby was the Curator of the DocYard and co-curated My Sight is Lined with Visions: 1990s Asian American Film & Video with Keisha Knight. As a graduate student researcher in the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Abby edited Immerse. She has bylines in Film Comment, Filmmaker Magazine, Film Quarterly, MUBI Notebook, Sight & Sound, and other publications. Abby has served on festival juries for festivals like Hot Docs, Dokufest, Palm Springs, and CAAMfest, as well as nominating committees for the Gotham Awards and Cinema Eye. Abby has reviewed projects for grants and markets such as IDFA Forum, BGDM, NEA, SFFILM, LEF Foundation, Sundance Catalyst, and spoken on and facilitated panels at Locarno, IFFR, TIFF, NYFF, and other film festivals. Along with Keisha, Abby received a fall 2022 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship. She produced Shared Resources and, with Jordan Lord, received a 2022 American Stories Documentary Fellowship for the upcoming The Voice of Democracy. Her hometown is Columbia, Missouri, US.