About Documentary Fundamentals Shooting and Directing:
Documentary filmmakers produce and shoot in a wide variety of locations under many different practical, financial, technical and legal constraints. What kind of equipment do you need? Who do you need on your production team? How do you deal with emergencies during shooting and how do you pick out a camera and DP? Should I be thinking of archival material in advance?
Featured Presenters:
Heidi Ewing Co-owner of New York’s Loki Films, Ewing is a documentary filmmaker that shines lights on the myriad of unseen worlds in our midst. She is the co-director of “Jesus Camp” (2007 Oscar nominee), “The Boys of Baraka” (2005, Emmy nominee) 12th & Delaware (2010, Peabody winner) and DETROPIA (2012, Sundance and Emmy winner). She is currently at work on “The Arrivals,” an innovative scripted/documentary hybrid about two successful gay immigrants in Brooklyn searching for a path to legalization. Heidi is a member of the Directors Guild and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Kirsten Johnson is an award-winning New York-based documentary filmmaker and cinematographer. Her feature film script MY HABIBI was selected for the 2006 Sundance Writer’s Lab and Director’s Lab and is the recipient of an Annenberg grant. Her documentary, DEADLINE, (co-directed with Katy Chevigny), premiered at Sundance in 2004, was broadcast on primetime NBC, and won the Thurgood Marshall Award. As a cinematographer, her film credits include Derrida (2002), a documentary on French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the documentary Darfur Now (2006), and Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2008) which won the Tribeca Film Festival Best Documentary. Her most recent works are The Oath (2010) and Citizenfour (2014), both directed by Laura Poitras. The Oath is about Osama bin Laden’s driver, Abu Jandal, for which Johnson won an award from Sundance. Citizenfour con
About Documentary Fundamentals:
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.
Hosted by the Chai Vasarhelyi of Little Monster Films, Documentary Fundamentals is essential learning for the documentary filmmaker, covering business basics, fundraising and financing, production and post-production strategies, transmedia campaigns, sales and distribution models. Each session features guest speakers sharing tips and secrets of the trade, with an emphasis on real-life case studies and best practices. For 2015, the series will use the feature documentary Meru as a case study. Meru was co-directed by Vasarhelyi and premiered this year in competition at the Sundance Film Festival.
Documentary Fundamentals is designed for beginning or intermediate filmmakers with projects in any stage of development or production (even the daydreaming stage!). Sessions combine formal presentations with extensive time for in-depth discussions with participants.
Registrants completing all six sessions will receive a Certificate of Completion, and will have special opportunities to promote their projects within the UnionDocs network. Specific guests and topics are subject to change. Doors will closed at 7:15 and we will being each session promptly at 7:30pm.
Documentary Fundamentals Full Schedule:
FRI 6/26 – 7:30PM | Planning Your Documentary –
SAT 6/27 – 1:00PM | Financing Your Documentary –
SAT 6/27 – 4:00PM | Directing and Shooting Your Documentary –
SAT 6/27 – 7:00PM | Editing Your Documentary –
SUN 6/28 – 1:00PM | Graphics, Music, and Your Transmedia Campaign –
SUN 6/28 – 4:00PM | Releasing Your Documentary –
Chai Vasarhelyi is an award-winning director and producer. Her first film, A Normal Life, won Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003. Her second film, Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love, was released in theaters in the U.S. and internationally. The film premiered at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals and won numerous awards including the Special Jury Prize at the Middle East International Film Festival in 2008 and a nomination for the Pare Lorentz Award at the 2009 International Documentary Association Awards. Touba, a visceral documentary experience that takes the viewer through each step of the annual Mouride pilgrimage, the Grand Magaal in Touba, Senegal, premiered at SXSW 2013 where it won the Special Jury Prize for Best Cinematography. She returned to Senegal in 2012 to document the heated Presidential elections. Incorruptible (formerly An African Spring), the intense and unflinching story of Senegalese democracy is currently in post-production. She is also currently working on two American stories: The Home Front (formerly Little Troopers), a film about the impact of American soldiers’ deployments on their families left behind; and Father School, a glimpse into the Korean American movement towards becoming more in-touch fathers and husbands. Vasarhelyi has received grants from several foundations including the Sundance Documentary Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, BRITDOC, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the William and Mary Greve Foundation. She was selected as a 2013 Sundance Documentary Film Fellow, named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2005 and received an Achievement Award from Creative Visions foundation in 2008. She has been featured in numerous publications including, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue and New York Magazine. Chai has a B.A. from Princeton University in Comparative Literature.
Workshop Policies:
Registration & Cancellation To register for a workshop, students must pay in full via PayPal. In the event a student must withdraw from a class, he or she may do so any time before the start of the workshop, and will receive a 75% refund of class costs. After this deadline, course fees are not refundable or transferable and any withdrawals or deadlines will result in the full cost of the class being forfeit. There will be no exceptions. To withdraw from a course please email info-at-uniondocs.org.
In the event that a workshop does not receive sufficient enrollment, it may be canceled. Students will be notified at least 48 hours prior to the start of a cancelled workshop and will be refunded within 5 business days. If we reschedule a workshop to another date, students are also entitled to a full refund. UnionDocs reserves the right to change instructors without prior notification, and to change class location and meeting times by up to an hour with 48 hours prior notice.
