How can title design and graphics be effectively utilized in documentary? What about my approach to music? What is transmedia and why should documentary filmmakers pay attention to it?  This session will dig in to graphics and music issues that come together during post production. We will also explore broad strokes of how to plan and execute transmedia campaigns.

Featured Presenters:

Teddy Blanks is co-founder of the Brooklyn graphic design studio CHIPS. He has created closeding title sequences for over 25 films. His work for documentaries includes title design for the Academy Award nominated Cutie and the Boxer, and more comprehensive graphic treatments for Matt Wolf’s Teenage, and Broken Heart Land, a forthcoming doc directed by Jeremy and Randy Stulberg for PBS.

T. Griffin is a songwriter, composer and producer working in Brooklyn, New York. Alone and with his band The Quavers he has released four critically acclaimed CDs of songs in a homespun electronic style that’s been described as ‘porch techno’.

A prolific film composer with 30 features , Griffin has scored films for Jesse Moss (Sundance 2014 Special Jury winner The Overnighters), Ross Kaufman and Katy Chevigny (E-Team, Sundance 2014) Tristan Patterson (SXSW Grand Jury winner DragonSlayer, 2011), Liza Johnson (Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight selection, Return, 2011), Marshall Lewy (California Solo, Sundance 2012), Tze Chun (Children of Invention, Sundance 2009), Michael Almereyda (New Orleans, Mon Amour, SXSW 2008), Kim Reed (Telluride sensation Prodigal Sons, 2008), Esther B. Robinson (Berlin Teddy Award Winner, A Walk Into The Sea, 2007) as well as shorts for Peter Sillen and Jem Cohen, Lance Weiler and others. He wrote original songs and a full score for avant-garde theater director Anne Bogart’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and has created and performed live soundtrack shows for Jem Cohen, Brent Green, and international tours with Sam Green and the late Danny Williams’ Warhol Factory films.

As a producer and player he has worked with musical luminaries including Vic Chesnutt, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, DJ/Rupture, Mary Margaret O’Hara and members of godspeed you! black emperor, Fugazi The Dirty Three and The Ex. Griffin was a 2008 fellow at the Sundance Institute Composer’s Lab. He has twice been nominated for CinemaEye Honors for original score, once for Utopia in Four Movements, and once for Dragonslayer.

ZACHARY HEINZERLING is a film director based in Brooklyn, New York. His debut feature, Cutie and the Boxer is currently nominated for a 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Film. The critically acclaimed film won prizes at top film festivals around the world and was featured on many best film lists of 2013, including that of A.O. Scott from the New York Times and Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal. The film received a field leading three 2014 Cinema Eye Honors, for Outstanding Debut Feature, Outstanding Original Score, and Outstanding Visual Effects. Zachary was the winner of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival Directing Award for US Documentary. He was awarded the Charles Guggenheim Emerging Artist award at the 2013 Full Frame Film Festival. He was the recipient of the 2013 International Documentary Association’s Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award, which recognizes the achievements of a filmmaker who has made a significant impact at the beginning of his or her career in documentary film. He was nominated for a 2014 DGA award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a Documentary. He began his career at HBO, where he worked on four consecutive Emmy Award-winning documentaries as a Field Producer and Cinematographer. Most recently he directed a five-part web series with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter entitled “Self-Titled” for her latest album “Beyoncé”.

CUTIE AND THE BOXER

A reflection on love, sacrifice, and the creative spirit, this candid New York documentary explores the chaotic 40-year marriage of renowned “boxing” painter Ushio Shinohara and his artist wife Noriko. As a rowdy, confrontational young artist in Tokyo, Ushio seemed destined for fame, but he is met with little commercial success after he moves to New York City in 1969, seeking international recognition. When 19-year-old Noriko moved to New York to study art, she fell in love with Ushio—abandoning her education to become the unruly artist’s wife and assistant. Over the course of their marriage, their roles shifted. Now 80, Ushio still struggles to establish his artistic legacy, while Noriko is at last being recognized for her own art—a series of drawings entitled “Cutie,” depicting her challenging past with Ushio. Spanning four decades, the film is a moving portrait of a couple wrestling with the eternal themes of sacrifice, disappointment and aging, against a background of lives dedicated to art.

A nuts-and-bolts professional development series designed for the beginning or intermediate documentary filmmaker, Documentary Fundamentals @ UnionDocs is six-week course culminating in a certificate of completion. Registrants can also attend individual sessions. This curriculum developed out of our experience hearing what fundamentals documentarians need to understand to plan, produce, and release an independent documentary today.