All about creative documentary
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Numbers don't speak for themselves
Posted by Sonja Henrici · May 19, 2015 1:26 AM
Journeying into ideas about accounting and governance
"The unknown and the unknowable" — sounds like documentary making. But I'm talking about accounting.
Last year, almost by fluke, but not by coincidence, I joined the Human Business Group at University of Edinburgh, established by Professor Paolo Quattrone (@PaoloQuattrone) - the University's new Chair in Accounting, Governance and Social Innovation. After spending five years on the production of Future My Love, I'd become very interested in the junction of humanity and business: how we govern our affairs, how we count things, and how we represent them outside monetary terms. Paolo is a prolific scholar, originally from Palermo, who has studied and taught worldwide, including at Oxford and Madrid, before joining Edinburgh.
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Even Variety is inspired by Good Things Await
Posted by Ben Kempas · April 29, 2015 3:39 PM
Another addition to Moving Docs, Good Things Await by Phie Ambo, has even managed to inspire the oft-cynical Variety magazine. This is from their review:
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NAE PASARAN - Kickstarter Campaign
Posted by rebecca Day · April 20, 2015 11:07 AM
We’re just over half way through our very first Kickstarter campaign for feature-length documentary Nae Pasaran. The film began life as a Bridging the Gap in 2013, directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra and screened to great acclaim in festivals worldwide. Ultimately, it opened the doors to a much bigger story, one that takes us from Scotland to Chile and back again.
It comes with some surprise that we haven't run our own crowd-funding campaign in the past. We've written extensively about it on our blog, we've supported several and we recognise that for some projects, it's become an essential way for filmmakers to not only raise funding, but perhaps more importantly, to engage with their audiences early on. Here's how it came about for us:
Shorts being turned into features is less frequent than you might think but this story has an endless capacity to keep giving. The tale of the Scottish workers defying Pinochet is courageous and playfully told, and the relevance of their action couldn't be more poignant today. It quickly became clear that this story is a piece of the bigger picture that makes up Chile's recent history, a history that sent out ripples internationally and is still fresh in people's mind. -
We've got the Sugar Blues
Posted by Ben Kempas · April 02, 2015 3:24 PM
Sugar Blues tells the story of one mother's fight against the global sugar mafia, and has just been added to the line-up for Moving Docs, coming to a European screen near you later this year.
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The Forecaster confirmed for Moving Docs
Posted by Ben Kempas · April 02, 2015 2:29 PM
We're happy to announce that The Forecaster has been confirmed for participation in Moving Docs.
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Bikes vs Cars first-ever film to tour Europe as part of Moving Docs
Posted by Ben Kempas · March 02, 2015 4:16 PM
BIKES VS CARS by Swedish Filmmaker Fredrik Gertten (of BANANAS!* fame) has been selected as the first film to tour Europe as part of the new Moving Docs initiative.
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Libyan Stories: What’s up at the border today?
Posted by Noe Mendelle · February 04, 2015 4:05 PM
Throughout 2014 we’ve been working with sixteen graduates from the Tripoli Art Academy to produce 4 x 3’ and 4 x 10’ films for our latest set of short stories, this time from Tripoli, Libya. The core idea of the workshop was to introduce young filmmakers to a new form of storytelling that is less news based, encouraging them to develop a love for creative documentary. The majority of them already had knowledge of the industry and brought with them their technical skills and experience of working for local Libyan broadcasters. The training would enable them to explore the chaos of their country through creative documentary and to connect their artistic voices to the rest of the world.
The delivery of the workshop was due to take place over a period of seventeen weeks, from February to June. However, we faced many delays due to the unsettled political situation in Tripoli and only just reached the finish line in December. It has been a real challenge for the participants to keep going through moments of complete isolation, without any contact to us, and often to each other. With so much violence and chaos around them, it is sometimes hard to find the motivation to keep going, especially when creating short films.
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Tea Time at IDFA
Posted by Noe Mendelle · November 28, 2014 12:55 PM
This week IDFA announced that Maite Alberdi received The Alliance of Women Film Journalists' EDA Award for Best Female-Directed Documentary for Tea Time (Chile). Noe Mendelle, director of Scottish Documentary Institute, has just arrived back from Amsterdam and writes about the film and why it deserves every bit of praise it receives.
Maite and her producer Clara, might be young looking and petite in size, but they're already giants in the world of documentary. Their first film The Lifeguard also premiered at IDFA (2011) and won many awards. As a director Maite has developed a highly particular style that creates an intimate portrayal of the characters she works with, through everyday stories in small-scale worlds with big close ups and a very gentle pace.
I was delighted to be involved in the development stage of their latest film Tea Time, when they took part in my documentary workshops at DocMontevideo forum three years ago.
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Moving Docs announced
Posted by Ben Kempas · November 20, 2014 4:12 PM
May 2015 to March 2016, around Europe
Moving Docs is a new EDN initiative supported by Creative Europe. Its aim is to create innovative outreach strategies and provide opportunities for urban and rural European audiences to enjoy regular screenings of documentary films through a wide variety of media and platforms.
Moving Docs is a partnership founded for the simultaneous distribution of documentaries across Europe. Through the joint action of eight pioneering and successful partners across Europe including: CineDoc (Greece), DocLounge (Sweden), DocsBarcelona-The Documentary of the Month 40 (Spain and South America), APORDOC (Portugal), DocIt (Italy), Lemessos International Documentary Festival (Cyprus), Planete Doc (Poland) and the Scottish Documentary Institute (UK), Moving Docs will create a common marketing and distribution strategy to enable and facilitate the pan-European release of documentaries.
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A Different Kind of Campaign
Posted by Scott Harris · November 10, 2014 5:05 PM
Scott Harris is an Edinburgh based documentary filmmaker who has taken part in SDI’s Bridging The Gap and Interdoc schemes. Last year he wrote two guest posts about the online release of his first film, Being Ginger, and he’s back with a case study about the crowdfunding campaign of his newest project, An American Ginger In Paris.
For the last year I’ve been planning to do a crowdfunding campaign for my second film. The biggest issue I had was trying to figure out a reasonable goal. Every campaign is different but I tried to talk to filmmakers who had raised $30,000 and $50,000 to see how big their mailing list was at the start, how much of their money came from that list, and how much came from people who were new to them. Unfortunately I found it difficult to get accurate information.
The only advice I got came from an Indiegogo presentation at Hot Docs where they suggested I figure out how much I could expect to raise from friends and family and set my goal at three times that number. But I had 2,500 people on my mailing list. I hoped I could get considerably more than that.
Last month I finished a Kickstarter campaign for my second film, An American Ginger In Paris (AAGIP), bringing in $15,788 towards a goal of $15k. I spent last week looking over the numbers to see where the money came from and thought it might interest a few others.