Documentary Articles

Here is a good site for articles about docs with some links at the bottom for trailers and doc distribution companies. This comes from Mark Freeman, head of the documentary working group for the University Film and Video Association.

http://documentaries.about.com/od/documentarydirectors/a/

Free Docs Online

I've entered YCC in Amsterdam's International Documentary Film Festival, which is in November. While exploring their Web site I discovered they have an online TV Channel with free docs like this one about Haiti:

http://www.idfa.nl/industry/idfa-tv/films/worldwide/film.aspx?id=8846a4f9-fdcb-4c03-9fb4-139f002231d7

Spring Success

Whew! It has been a busy spring! I've had a blast screening The Young Composers Challenge at the Florida Film Festival and picking up the "best long form doc" award at BEA. Now the wait continues to see what other festivals may accept the film. I'm especially interested in a new festival in Park City, Utah that features "films about music." We shall see. I've also entered the film in another academic competition. The University Film and Video Association will have its national conference at Champlain College in Vermont in August.

I've also finished a new short film with my Honors Documentary Workshop class. Dr. Robert Cassanello from the History Department is the co-director and producer of this film about the only married couple slain together for their work in civil rights. Aaron Hose did a masterful job in editing the film, and you can watch it on his Vimeo site: http://vimeo.com/11268452 This film screened at the Harry and Harriette Moore Festival in Mims, Florida back in mid April. We will be submitting this to the Global Peace Film Festival. I was pleased that UCF President John Hitt watched the film online and sent me a nice note about it.

This summer I intend to get to work on a new short, The Circle Closes and finish my feature, Wally's Way to the Moon. I'll also be taking my Foundations of Story large lecture course up on the Web so that it will be offered fully online this coming fall. Looks like a busy summer!

Thank you Chris Ramsey

Here is a link from Chris Ramsey's blog that I want to share:
http://www.indiewire.com/article/good_advice_documentary_dos_and_donts_from_a_vet_programmer/

Chris, thanks for finding this treasure and sharing it with us!

Student documentaries

I keep thinking that things will calm down, slow down, I'll be less stressed and overwhelmed. This never seems to happen. It feels like every term it just gets worse.

Then, there are the days when I get to watch my students' films. I don't know how it happens (because I believe it has very little to do with me) but every spring at this time I start to see their films take shape and I am amazed... amazed at the courage, the skill, the depth and the hard work that the documentary students put into their films. They are the ones that make all of this crazy running around and going to meetings and everything else worth it. Just those 2-3 hours each week I get to spend with them in class talking about their films. They are my sanity.

Cool tripod trick

Last night my van broke down on the way back from Mims. I had it towed to the Firestone place in Sanford, but in all the darkness and confusion of shifting gear from one car to another, lost track of my camera tripod plate.

I discovered this as I set up for an important interview today, but luckily, my friend Aaron Hose was there (he's documenting the Honors student project for his TV program, "Gallery.") Aaron took his own tripod and lined it up with mine. We balanced the front of the camera on one tripod and the back end of the camera on the other tripod. It worked beautifully. Of course we were limited in the framing of the interview, but once we got it all set up, balanced, etc. the shot looked great.

THANK YOU AARON, for teaching me something new and being just damned determined to find a way to get something done with what we had. That... to me... is what film making is really all about.

New film I'm working on

Dr. Robert Cassanello (history) and I are teaching a pilot honors class this spring in which we make an historical documentary as a service learning project. We chose the Harry T. and Harriett V. Cultural Complex in Mims because we believe this special place has great potential... and the folks leading it are so nice. We've been out shooting with the students on Saturdays since early January and we've amassed about 25 tapes of interviews. We still need to shoot more b-roll, but I think we can start putting this together now. We have a shoot today in Sanford with an elderly man who was a boy when Harry and Harriett were rushed to the Colored Hospital there. He taught literature at Bethune Cookman College until retiring. We'll have him read the Langston Hughes poem "The Ballad of Harry T. Moore" and talk about what he remembers about hearing the Moores had been murdered.