Looking for inspiration and advice? A few good reads for the week that have come across the desks of the IDA's Editorial Staff...
Over on DocumentaryInsider, Stephanie Hubbard interviews Kirby Dick about funding, how to choose subjects and the value of screening works-in-progress.
Zach Levy (Strongman) airs his thoughts on DIY distribution in a web exclusive article for Filmmaker Magazine. Levy says:
For more and more of us then, having already taken the lion’s share of the risk during production and now doing the basic distribution groundwork anyhow, taking that step towards full DIY begins to look exactly like a logical step forward and not some crazy blind leap off a cliff. Yes, we have reached a potential tipping point between traditional distribution and the DIY models, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
In the piece, he goes over the pros and cons of going the hybrid route, and puts forth the idea that if filmmakers are doing more of the work, they should reap not on the the financial rewards, but also increased creative opportunities.
Long-time Los Angeles City College professor Tom Stempel goes into detail on his teaching methods and the syllabus of films he uses for his class on the history of documentaries. He begins with a reel of early actuality films from the late 1890s and the early 1900s, and ends with films about the Iraq War, such as Gunner Palace (2004) or Baghdad ER (2006). In between, he covers everything from Capra's The Negro Soldier (1944) to Walt Disney documentaries from the late forties and early fifties such as Seal Island. Lots of choices for the Netflix queue...