At the Vimeo Festival + Awards last year Morgan Spurlock and Lucy Walker (both Shooting People patrons incidentally) sat down with Shooting People co-founder and BRITDOC head honcho Jess Search to discuss documentaries and social change. You can watch the whole panel here: Documentary: The Agent of Change from Vimeo Festival on Vimeo. By the way, the good people at Vimeo have put up lots of other videos from the festival – worth perusing!

And there’s digital joy in London this weekend too – Digital Bootcamp is coming back to the Frontline Club (where it all started back in 2009 – which is a long time in technology years!) Digital Bootcamp is a master class designed to help you and your film navigate the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Shooting People’s James Mullighan will guide you through a series of case studies and practical examples (with a focus on documentaries) to help you get up…

A huge congratulations to everyone who won last night at the 2010 Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking but more importantly, congratulations to everyone who had a film nominated and to all those who have made and supported docs over the past year. The nominee line-up was pretty darn great and included films I have really loved: Loot, Episode 3 Enjoy Poverty, The Way We Get By and Mugabe and the White African for example. As co-chair AJ Schnack said,…

Filmmakers working on social issue films are often concerned with creating change as well as reaching an audience. This is more often the case for documentaries but it is certainly true of many narrative films too. The trouble is that many filmmakers find it hard enough to get a film funded and then distributed, let alone embark on a costly and time-consuming outreach campaign. However, it is often part and parcel of the reasons for making the film in the…

The catch is you have to contribute some of this info! But check out the DocAgora Webplex website. There’s already a lot of great resources on there for documentary filmmakers and this is the sort of site that will only get stronger as more people use it and contribute to it (it’s early days yet so don’t expect a complete database at this stage). I was talking to a filmmaker at Hot Docs who said that he wished that there…

I’m stuck in an airport hotel in St Louis. Lots of flights have been canceled because of bad weather in NYC but I’m still feeling the happy glow from True/False and a wifi connection is a wifi connection so all is not lost. Saturday and Sunday were jam-packed with great screenings and super-fun parties. More on the films to come but here is the final installment of photos. True/False is on the telly! Buskers before the final screening of The…

I arrived in Columbia, Missouri yesterday and was immediately swallowed up into the documentary joys of True/False (not to mention the excellent cheeseburgers at Booches). I’m about to join the March March parade up Broadway and then see Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public followed by Jamie Jay Johnson’s Sounds Like Teen Spirit. My kind of Friday night! Here are some photos from the last 24 hours. True/False cupcakes in the Ragtag Me in a Jamie Jay Johnson (Director of…

This is the first part of a 2 part post on non-theatrical distribution by Rachel Gordon, a freelance marketing/distribution consultant specializing in the niche and educational usage of documentary films. Disclaimer – This article assumes that you are self-distributing and not working with a distributor.  The narrative below is solely from the perspective of educational, also known as “non-theatrical,” usage of film and does not refer to theatrical or home video distribution. Independent documentary filmmaking continues to rise after several…