Crowd-Funding your Doc

Recently I responded with a donation to a fundraising project on Kickstarter. The project was an independent film based on the book Blue Like Jazz. It was the first time I'd heard about this relatively new fund raising platform but I was immediately taken with its potential to help budding filmmakers connect with potential donors. If you've got a great idea for a film, documentary or otherwise, and need some startup cash to get you to the next level, Kickstarter may be just the thing you need.
A search for "documentary" returns more than 300 projects currently underway or recently funded by Kickstarter. Go ahead and visit the link above to see some of the projects, and to screen short promotional clips. You'll notice that varying levels of participation earn increasing levels of rewards for "investors" who  commit to contributing funds if the goal is reached by a predetermined deadline. This protects contributors and creators from unnecessary risk.
Independent filmmaker Nathaniel Hansen has a Vimeo channel where you can see his Kickstarter promo clip, and several teasers for his upcoming documentary The Elders.
The DocumentaryTech website has some interesting thoughts about raising funds in this age of social media. Another great article, from a UK perspective, can be found here. Also, Distribution U, "a one-day crash course on the new rules of crowd funding, audience building, and distribution" is being held this month in NY and LA. Tickets and more info is available at their website.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, I got a T-shirt, poster, a call from the director, and a few other items related to the film, including an Associate Producer credit, for my contribution. I think I'll add that AP credit to my résumé now!

Race to Space will be Televised

If you are interested in space travel, or thinking about spending a cool $200K to make the trip yourself, you may want to watch the Nat Geo listing for upcoming docs about the Virgin Galactic project. See the NYT for more info.

Frederick Wiseman awarded Lifetime Achievement Award

The National Academy for Television Arts & Sciences awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award to Frederick Wiseman, one of the great pioneers of direct cinema and director of such notable films as Titlcut Follies, High School, Aspen, and Primate. Frederick Wiseman has produced, directed and edited 38 films on a wide range of topics. With shooting ratios that have exceeded 100:1, Wiseman gained entrance into institutions and organizations that, at first, merely tolerated his presence. But the longer he stayed, his hosts grew to see him as one of their own...thus providing an opportunity for Wiseman to film life as it happened. Wiseman has described his films as “biased, prejudiced, condensed, but fair.” Wiseman did not tolerate narration, interviews, or reenactments. Because of this his films can feel rather raw and unpolished, but that is also their beauty.
According to the National Academy for Television Arts & Sciences,

While Wiseman’s documentaries are based on completely un-staged events and contain no interviews or voiceover narration, they are less an objective portrait of reality than an accurate portrayal of the filmmaker’s interpretation of the subject, tempered by a deeply held obligation to be fair to the people who pass before his camera. Wiseman typically does little research before shooting, describing the shooting as the research and the finished film as a report on what he has learned. In between lies up to a year of rigorous and painstaking editing, resulting in documentaries that are equal to the best fiction films.

 Wiseman's first film, Titicut Follies, is about a hospital for the criminally insane. Banned for decades by a Massachusetts court citing concerns about patients' privacy and dignity, the film was finally allowed a national airing on PBS in the early 1990s.
According to Wiseman's website, his latest project, Boxing Gym, is scheduled for release later this month.

More new docs on the docket

In addition to Waiting for Superman coming to theaters, Ken Burns' returns to baseball on PBS tomorrow and Wed with The Tenth Inning, this time focusing on the steroid abuse scandal. His original PBS documentary series about baseball was the highest rated documentary in PBS' history. You can watch a clip including an interview with Ken Burns on Hulu.

A new HBO documentary, Teenage Paparazzo, begins airing tonight. You can see a clip here.

'Waiting for Superman' out this Friday

A new documentary from the director of An Inconvenient Truth is opening in limited release this Friday. Waiting for Superman explores another slowly unfolding tragedy...public education. I haven't seen the film, but I hear that it will kick-start the conversation about how our public schools are failing the next generation. After I've had a chance to see the film I'll weigh-in with my thoughts.
See the preview here.

I'm Still Here exposed as a Mockumentary

Frauds and fakes are usually not rewarded when they try to pass themselves off as journalists or documentarians. However, the documentary tradition does have a soft spot for spoofs, often referred to as mockumentaries. This is Spinal Tap is a classic and others include Best in Show and Borat. One of the all-time great hoaxes was Orsen Wells' radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds...a Halloween joke that caused panic and mass hysteria which led to congressional hearings.
When Joaquin Pheonix appeared on The Late Show in 2009 confused fans and viewers wondered if he had lost touch with reality. As it turns out, he was simply acting in character as the subject of the mocumentary film, I'm Still Here. According to the New York Times, the director of I'm Still Here called Phoenix' performance the best of his career.

“It’s a terrific performance, it’s the performance of his career,” Mr. Affleck said. He was speaking of Mr. Phoenix’s two-year portrayal of himself — on screen and off — as a bearded, drug-addled aspiring rap star, who, as Mr. Affleck tells it, put his professional life on the line to star in a bit of “gonzo filmmaking” modeled on the reality-bending journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.

 Time will tell if this really is the "performance of his career." But his appearance on Late Night for next Wednesday (the 22nd) may be telling and it could be interesting hearing his explanation of things.

Review of I'm Still Here.

Producing in HD? Get the FAQ!

If you're planning to shoot and edit in high definition, you want to make sure that you're on the right track from day one. There are pre-production decisions that will affect production and post-production workflows, and by then it is too late to make changes. You can find a useful resource by [ITVS] at their website. It is the HD FAQ and you can find it at http://www.itvs.org/funding/resources/hd-faq

Eyeborg: Direct Cinema to the Extreme

What's a documentarian who lost his eye to do? Well, how about a prosthetic eye that doubles as a video camera! Rob Spence of Toronto is planning to use his video eye to shoot a documentary about, what else, the global spread of surveillance cameras. Imagine being interviewed by someone who does not appear to have a video camera, and then be told that the camera was his EYE?! It brings a whole new dimension to ethical debates about hidden cameras.

The idea of cyborgs (half human, half machine) has been around in sci-fi for some time, and the Six Million Dollar Man had augmented vision...but now it appears that reality is catching up to fantasy.

Read more at his blog, or watch the videos on his Vimeo channel. If you're not too squeamish, the Eye In and Out video is classic!