I realize it’s not great form to start a blog and then promptly go silent for a week but I have a good excuse: filmmakers! I have been going to so many amazing master classes, panels and talks over the past week or so that I haven’t really had time to sit down and process it all. Hooray for New York is all I can say. It’s a festival even when it’s not. It makes me feel a lot less bitter about missing out on Cannes too!

We had our inaugural masterclass with DCTV on Friday. Sam Pollard was our first brave master and he was wonderful: inspiring, funny and really happy to engage with the audience. He has had an amazing career as an editor, from Style Wars, to 4 Little Girls, to When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. We’ll have a podcast from the event up on the Shooting People site very soon.

Shooting People’s Jesse Epstein with Sam Pollard - photo by Jay Sterrenberg

Sam Pollard talks to the audience - photo by Jay Sterrenberg

And while we’re on the subject of podcasts, I learned a really valuable lesson at the Sam Pollard event! Docs That Inspire blogger Joel Heller gave me a great lesson in podcasting and took me to B+H to buy a fancy new Zoom H4 to record audio but I hadn’t really tried it out properly and this is what I learned: BUY A BIG MEMORY CARD AND DON’T ACCIDENTALLY RECORD AT 96kHz! I managed to record oh about 3 minutes in total (of really crisp audio!!!) before the 128MB memory card was completely full. Thank god the wonderful DCTV folk were also recording it on HD. Our next masterclass is on June 8th with Mad Hot Ballroom’s Amy Sewell and includes a copy of her new book ‘The Mad Hot Adventures of an Unlikely Filmmaker.’ Get your tickets early because the Pollard event sold out well in advance. You can buy tickets here.

The following day I went to the Goethe Institut to hear Werner Herzog talk about his new film, Encounters at the End of the World. I’ll say more on this later but New Yorkers should check out the Herzog (Non) Fiction series at the Film Forum. It includes many Herzog classics as well as documentaries that he loves, from Gates of Heaven, and Darwin’s Nightmare, to Animal Love, of which he says “I have never looked so directly into hell in the cinema.”

Then yesterday I went to an IFP Industry Connect Event: Making Your Doc Matter: Can Documentary Make a Difference? It was a really interesting panel on social-issue filmmaking and outreach possibilities so I’ll include some notes here.

The panelists were:

Matisse Bustos from WITNESS
Anne del Castillo from P.O.V
Shira Golding from Arts Engine
Annie Sundberg - co-director of The Devil Came on Horseback
Marco Williams - director of Banished

Shira moderated the event and explained a bit about the different elements of Arts Engine, including the Media That Matters Film Festival and MediaRights, a community that helps filmmakers connect with librarians, educators and audiences.

Arts Engine acted as a fiscal sponsor for Annie Sundberg’s films The Trials of Darryl Hunt and The Devil Came on Horseback. With regards to The Devil Came on Horseback, Annie explained that after Brian Steidle published his photographs of the genocide in Darfur in The New York Times and appeared on news interviews he was really frustrated at the lack of response to his advocacy efforts. This is why Annie believes documentaries are so important: they can reach deeper and have a longer impact than daily news. They are distributing Devil themselves, working with the International Film Circuit who were also involved with the distribution of Darwin’s Nightmare. They will also use house parties and collaborations with MoveOn and similar organizations in their home video strategy.

Matisse Bustos explained how WITNESS evolved out of the handicam revolution and is now adapting to the Web 2.0 revolution. They are creating a user generated content site for human rights related media called The Hub. YouTube and Google Video are useful in terms of getting people to see your film. They were not set up to create a conversation around issues, however, so the impact can be diffused. This is why she believes that niche sites, even if they are not destination sites, are vital in terms of facilitating conversation around a certain issue. Matisse also underlined the crucial point that many of the people they are trying to reach do not have access to electricity and clean water, let alone a broadband internet connection. She showed us a clip from a film about how an organization in the Democratic Republic of Congo have to travel from village to village to refugee camp with a generator to show a film about child soldiers, made in collaboration with WITNESS, to the communities there who continue to be affected by the problem.

Marco Williams talked about how festivals and theatrical release can be very good for the ego but that TV broadcasts can reach far more people (although I would add that festivals and theatrical can be vital for creating buzz and press around your film - which then hopefully feeds through to broadcast and beyond). His dilemma is how you then create a sustained impact beyond this broadcast. His approach is to organize a strategic summit where he invites grass roots organizations and policy makers to let him know how they could use his film. He points out that you need to ask yourself how your film could be one more tool in their toolbox. This also means that you don’t have to do all the work organizing screenings etc. yourself because these organizations can take this on and do it for you. Annie pointed out that other organizations really need your film as they don’t have the time or money to provide these tools themselves so it’s great symbiotic relationship. She also gave away copies of Devil to politicians during debates over divestment in Darfur and points out that you should think about including giveaways in your budget.

Anne del Castillo pointed out that it is hard to quantify how exactly docs do make a difference and that there is now a shift in philanthropy towards a marketing model where they are really interested in how this can measured. What are the metrics of social change?

Annie said that you can use films as part of a larger cycle of activism and in this case you may actually be able to measure the results. For example Devil was used to generate funding for a solar cooker project in refugee camps in Chad so that women would not be raped when they had to go out to gather firewood. Medecins Sans Frontieres have shown that rape statistics have declined as a result of this campaign.

Anne del Castillo gave a quick rundown on P.O.V - there are 16-20 programing slots available each year and they screen over 1000 films from festivals and submissions in order to choose these few films. Initially they were acquisition-only but now they are getting involved earlier in co-productions on a few projects. Services for artists are key to their strategy. They give media training, utilize advisory groups (librarians and educators for example), and help co-ordinate theatrical and home video distribution. She points out that P.O.V. cannot do advocacy work but that the filmmakers can and what P.O.V. can offer is the ability to bring groups of people together who would not ordinarily talk to each other. She agreed with Matisse that putting your work on YouTube is not enough. You should think strategically about online outreach just as you would offline. For P.O.V., aggregating content around a certain issue can be useful, as can partnering with other online organizations. For example they are partnering with Eyespot to promote Refugee All Stars.

Marco admitted that there can be a tension between your 90 minute theatrical doc and the needs of educational institutions, website downloads etc. who might need something much shorter. As he points out, you can make different length cuts but who is going to pay for this? He also illustrated the dilemma that emerges when it comes to home video strategy. How can you sell your film for hundreds of dollars through educational distribution when it is also available on Netflix and you are giving it away for free in your outreach campaign?

Anne mentioned Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media, an organization educating funders as to why it is so important to fund film projects. She also said that PBS only covers the licencing fees for P.O.V. so they have to find funding for everything else.

So money and resources are a problem for everybody. Given this, it is important to be very strategic in your outreach campaign, and to budget for this BEFORE you start making your film. In other words you have to think about the life your film will have after it is made, not just about getting the damn thing finished!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Documentary, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.