Mark Samels' experience working in "just about every capacity of the business," including as a producer, director, cameraman, editor and sound recordist, has helped shape his decade-long tenure as executive producer of the PBS history series American Experience. Under Samels, who first joined the series as a senior producer in 1997 before being named executive producer in 2003, American Experience has been honored with Oscar nominations, Audience and Grand Jury Awards at the Sundance Film Festival, multiple Primetime Emmy, Peabody and duPont-Columbia Awards and several IDA Documentary Awards
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A review of 'First Cut 2: More Conversations with Film Editors,' by Gabriella Oldham.
Just as the Internet has changed the way we get news and information, plan vacations, communicate with friends and purchase goods, so, too, is it changing the way documentary makers reach and influence audiences. When the words "Web" and "documentary" are joined together the first image that often comes to mind is a linear film or video playing over the Internet on the computer screen. However, the multimedia, interactive characteristics of the Internet provide documentary makers with a unique medium to create nonlinear Web productions that combine photography, text, audio, video, animation
Dear IDA Community, A few weeks ago, I decided to write this issue's column about inspiration. But now, as my deadline approaches and I'm facing an empty page, I find it hard to reconnect with that inspiration. Where did the clarity, which felt so tangible in the moment, go? Inspiration is a tricky thing. When we are lucky enough to have a taste of it, it's the most powerful, intoxicating and consuming drug. And then, just as quickly, it evaporates. But often, a small dose can be all we need to push forward. Let's be honest. We all know that there's not much that is glamorous about being a
I first saw Heddy Honigmann's film Crazy at a retrospective of her work at New York's Museum of Modern Art. I went into the screening expecting a war film, and instead found a deeply affecting meditation on music and memory. Most of us can relate to hearing a certain song that takes us back to a seminal moment in our lives. Honigmann uses this universal experience to peer into the psyche of soldiers. In the film, she asks Dutch United Nations peacekeeping veterans to talk about a piece of music that they relied upon to maintain their sanity in horrific circumstances. Using music to trigger
The Slamdance Film Festival runs concurrently with the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. As difficult as it may be for a Slamdance staffer to admit, it's safe to say that most of the thousands who converge on Park City over that week are there for two reasons: the Sundance Film Festival and the skiing. Slamdance gets its audience from its scrappy filmmakers hitting the not-so-scrappy streets (and slopes) of the mountain town and hustling people into their screenings. Just being at the top of Main Street is not enough. Empty screenings for mediocre and unfinished movies is not alluring
On the morning of Thursday, January 10, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced their nominees for Oscars 2013. The IDA is proud to highlight our strong relationship with several films in the running, including nominees in both the Documentary Feature and Documentary Short categories. In the Feature category, Kirby Dick's The Invisible War is one of the five films to receive this much anticipated nomination. A groundbreaking investigative documentary about the epidemic of rape within the U.S. military, The Invisible War is a participant in IDA's Fiscal Sponsorship Program, a
A review of 'Playing to the Camera: Musicians and Musical Performance in Documentary Cinema.'
A review of 'A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers.'