Doing Documentary Work

Investigates the nature of documentary work, arguing that the work of an observer is not only to represent, but also to interpret reality, and uses examples from literature and photography to show how the observers' personal frame of reference has influenced his or her work.

Mapping out a diverse journey through documentary distribution, this book is a comprehensive global how-to reference guide, providing insights into the landscape of documentary distribution; targeting the right audiences to expand the reach of your documentary; and building a sustainable career. Detailing how to prepare your documentary, strategies for crowdfunding, working with documentary organizations and online platforms and outlining the channels to consider, The Documentary Distribution Toolkit demystifies the process of distributing your documentary. Featuring case studies and interviews including filmmaker Alice Elliot, representatives from public television stations such as ARTE, ZDF, Al Jazeera, TRT (Turkey), NHK, as well as drawing on author Rachel Gordon’s over 20 years of experience working in documentary distribution. Foregrounding documentaries for non-profit and educational purposes, each chapter gives guidance on how to think locally and globally, on money matters to consider, and personal questions to answer before proceeding to help filmmakers manage their time, money and energy wisely. This book empowers the filmmaker to distribute their documentary in an effective and strategic manner. Providing concrete advice on how to navigate the documentary ecosystem beyond the classroom, this is the ideal book for professional and emerging documentary filmmakers, as well as students who are looking to distribute their documentary films.

This fluent and comprehensive field guide responds to increased interest, across the humanities, in the ways in which digital technologies can disrupt and open up new research and pedagogical avenues. It is designed to help scholars and students engage with their subjects using an audio-visual grammar, and to allow readers to efficiently gain the technical and theoretical skills necessary to create and disseminate their own trans-media projects. Documentary Making for Digital Humanists sets out the fundamentals of filmmaking, explores academic discourse on digital documentaries and online distribution, and considers the place of this discourse in the evolving academic landscape. The book walks its readers through the intellectual and practical processes of creating digital media and documentary projects. It is further equipped with video elements, supplementing specific chapters and providing brief and accessible introductions to the key components of the filmmaking process. This will be a valuable resource to humanist scholars and students seeking to embrace new media production and the digital landscape, and to those researchers interested in using means beyond the written word to disseminate their work. It constitutes a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of digital humanities, as the first practical guide of its kind designed to facilitate humanist interactions with digital filmmaking, and to empower scholars and students alike to create and distribute new media audio-visual artefacts.

Powerfully posing questions of ethics, ideology, authorship and form, documentary film has never been more popular than it is today. Edited by one of the leading British authorities in the field, The Documentary Film Book is an essential guide to current thinking on documentary film. In a series of fascinating essays, key international experts discuss the theory of documentary, outline current understandings of its history (from pre-Flaherty to the post-Griersonian world of digital 'i-Docs'), survey documentary production (from Africa to Europe, and from the Americas to Asia), consider documentaries by marginalised minority communities, and assess its contribution to other disciplines and arts. Brought together here in one volume, these scholars offer compelling evidence as to why, over the last few decades, documentary has come to the centre of screen studies.

Michael Rubbo's groundbreaking work has had a deep and enduring impact on documentary filmmaking worldwide, though his name has remained relatively unknown. In The Documentary Art of Michael Rubbo, author D.B. Jones traces Rubbo's filmmaking from his days as a film student at Stanford, through his twenty years at the National Film Board of Canada, where Rubbo developed his distinct documentary style. Jones then describes Rubbo's post-NFB venture into feature film directing, followed by Rubbo's return to his native Australia, first as an executive with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and later as a director of feature-length documentaries and maker of short, personal films for YouTube. Exploring locales from Montreal to Vietnam, topics as diverse as plastic surgery and French Marxism, and from interviewing Margaret Atwood to documenting a failed attempt to interview Fidel Castro, Rubbo's wide-ranging work establishes his innovative, personal, lyric, and spontaneous documentary style. In The Documentary Art of Michael Rubbo D.B. Jones reveals not only the depth of meaning in Rubbo's films, but also the depth of their influence on filmmaking itself.

This collection of iconic interviews helps demystify the documentary filmmaking process by deconstructing the most relevant and important scenes in some of today's most well-known documentary films. It offers concrete, real-world examples of the situations and decisions that filmmakers navigate. We go behind the scenes with the creators to learn the methodologies and approaches these directors, cinematographers, editors, and sound recordists have taken to bring these amazing documentaries to life. What makes a great scene? Why are they so important in the construction of a great film? The interviews included offer excellent insights from the directors of the award-winning The Truffle Hunters, My Octopus Teacher, Collective, Knock Down the House, Dick Johnson Is Dead, and Trapped; the cinematographer of RBG, Julia, and Fauci; the editor of Time; and sound recordist of Tiger King. Award-winning documentary filmmaker and esteemed Sundance advisor Maxine Trump goes in-depth with each filmmaker, asking about their creative process. Why did these scenes make such a deep impression on both the filmmakers and their audience? Was it the cinematic style, the dynamic dialogue, the magic of observational filmmaking, or a surprising turning point? This technical but creative and accessible resource is suitable for documentary filmmakers, aspiring directors, producers, editors, and cinematographers of non-fiction film. Each interview offers a fresh perspective to the emerging or professional filmmaker and audience alike.

Can comics be documentary, and can documentary take the form of, and thus be, comics? Examining comics as documentary, this book challenges the persistent assumption that ties documentary to recording technologies, and instead engages an understanding of the category in terms of narrative, performativity and witnessing. Through a cluster of early twenty-first century comics, Nina Mickwitz argues that these comics share a documentary ambition to visually narrate and represent aspects and events of the real world.

Documentary Storytelling has reached filmmakers and filmgoers worldwide with its unique focus on the key ingredient for success in the growing global documentary marketplace: storytelling. This practical guide reveals how today’s top filmmakers bring the tools of narrative cinema to the world of nonfiction film and video without sacrificing the rigor and truthfulness that give documentaries their power. The book offers practical advice for producers, directors, editors, cinematographers, writers and others seeking to make ethical and effective films that merge the strengths of visual and aural media with the power of narrative storytelling. In this new, updated edition, Emmy Award-winning author Sheila Curran Bernard offers: New strategies for analyzing documentary work New conversations with filmmakers including Stanley Nelson (The Black Panthers), Kazuhiro Soda (Mental), Orlando von Einsiedel (Virunga), and Cara Mertes (JustFilms) Discussions previously held with Susan Kim (Imaginary Witness), Deborah Scranton (The War Tapes), Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), and James Marsh (Man on Wire).