ABOUT DOCUMENTARY FUNDAMENTALS: PLANNING
What are the essential business and legal issues to consider as you plan your documentary film? What can you do now to avoid problems later? Do you need an LLC? What is E&O insurance? This session covers issues of legal rights and clearances, business basics for filmmakers, budgeting, structuring agreements for talent and crew, and more.
Featured Presenters:
Yoruba Richen is founder and president of Promised Land Film, Inc. which in addition to directing and producing independent films, works with companies, governments and non-profit organizations to develop and produce compelling and engaging films for broadcast, digital and theatrical release. Her latest film I Rise features the Grammy-nominated singer Andra Day and her song Rise Up. It is being distributed digitally through 40 million McDonald’s cups and the Shazam App. Yoruba is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been featured on PBS, The New York Times, New York Magazine and The Atlantic. Her last film, The New Black, premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and went on to win Audience Awards at AFI Docs, Philly Q Fest and Frameline LGBT Film Festival. The film also won best documentary at the Urbanworld film festival and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a GLAAD Media Award. The New Black closeded theatrically at New York’s Film Forum and aired on PBS’s Independent Lens in 2014. Yoruba has received numerous grants including from ITVS, The Sundance Documentary Fund, Chicken & Egg Pictures, and the Ford Foundation. She won the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access and was also a Sundance Producers fellow. Yoruba is a featured TED Speaker and a Guggenheim Fellow. She is the 2016 recipient of the Chicken & Egg Breakthrough filmmaker award.
Fernando Ramirez is an attorney at The Law Office of Fernando Ramirez which provides transactional legal services for individual talent and business clients in the entertainment industry. His office represents a range of film, television, music, and book industry artist, media professionals. In the film and television industry, Mr. Ramirez has served as legal counsel on over 70 films including documentaries aired on American Masters, American Experience, DIRECTV, HBO, Independent Lens, LOGO, POV, Showtime, Sundance TV, and various PBS station affiliates, in addition to having served as legal counsel to the PBS/World Channel documentary series AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange and America ReFramed.
ABOUT DOCUMENTARY FUNDAMENTALS:
A nuts-and-bolts professional development series designed for the emerging or intermediate documentary filmmaker, Documentary Fundamentals @ UnionDocs is a six-part program taking place over the course of one weekend. 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 (T)ERROR’s co-director David Felix Sutcliffe and producer Christopher St. John, 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 2016, the series will use the feature documentary (T)ERROR as a case study. (T)ERROR was co-directed by Sutcliffe and Lyric R. Cabral, and produced by Christopher St. John. It premiered in competition at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival where it received the Special Jury Award for Break Out First Feature. The film also screened at Full Frame (Grand Jury Prize), True/False, Tribeca Film Festival, Hot Docs, Human Rights Watch and CPH:DOX, among others. It received grants from the most prestigious granting institutions such as ITVS, Sundance Institute, Chicken & Egg, Tribeca Film Institute, Firelight Media, NYSCA, Pare Lorentz/IDA and Bertha BritDoc, and participated in pitch forums and film labs such as IDFA Pitch Forum, Tribeca All Access (won Creative Promise Award), IFP, and the Sundance editing and producing labs.
Documentary Fundamentals is designed for filmmakers with projects at 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 have special opportunities to promote their projects within the UnionDocs network.
Full guest speaker list to be announced. Specific guests and topics are subject to change.
DOCUMENTARY FUNDAMENTALS FULL SCHEDULE:
FRI 6/24 – 7:30PM | Planning Your Documentary – with attorney Fernando Ramírez (Law Office of Fernando Ramírez), Yoruba Richen (The New Black) and Christopher St. John (T)ERROR)
SAT 6/25 – 11:00AM | Financing Your Documentary – with José Rodríguez (Director of Documentary Programs, Tribeca Film Institute), Elise McCave (Deputy Director of BRITDOC), Tamir Muhammad (Director of Content & Artist Development, Time Warner)
SAT 6/25 – 2:30PM | Directing and Shooting Your Documentary – Malika Zouhali-Worrall (Thank You for Playing, Call Me Kuchu) and David Felix Sutcliffe (T)ERROR)
SAT 6/25 – 5:00PM | Editing Your Documentary – with editor Mona Davis (The Farm: Angola USA) Nyneve Laura Minnear ((T)ERROR, Girl With Black Balloons), and colorist Eric Alvarado ((T)ERROR, Mala, Mala)
SUN 6/26 – 1:00PM |Post: Graphics, Music, Archive – with composer Robert Miller ((T)ERROR, Particle Fever) and Rosemary Rotondi (Citizenfour, Our Nixon), Penny Lane (NUTS!, Our Nixon)
SUN 6/26 – 4:00PM | Releasing Your Documentary – David Reilly (Programmer BAMcinématek) and Merrill Sterritt (Head of Audience Strategies Cinereach) and Dan Berger (President of Oscilloscope Laboratories)
Purchase a full series pass at: http://www.uniondocs.org/documentary-fundamentals-2016/
About the Hosts:
David Felix Sutcliffe is a Sundance award winning documentary filmmaker. In 2013, he was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s annual list of “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” His first film, ADAMA (PBS, 2011), is an hour-long documentary that explores the story of a 16-year-old Muslim girl growing up in Harlem who was arrested by the FBI on suspicion of being a “potential suicide bomber.” (T)ERROR, co-directed with acclaimed photojournalist Lyric R. Cabral, is his feature-length documentary debut, and marks the first time that filmmakers have had access to an active FBI informant in a domestic counterterrorism investigation. (T)ERROR premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival where it won a Special Jury Prize for Break Out First Feature. Along with (T)ERROR co-director Cabral, Sutcliffe was honored by the International Documentary Association with the 2015 Emerging Filmmaker Award. In 2014, he was selected as a fellow for the Sundance Institute’s Edit and Story Lab, as well as their Creative Producing Lab. His work as a filmmaker has been funded by the BBC, the NEA, the Tribeca Film Institute, the Sundance Institute, and the Independent Television Service.
Lyric R. Cabral is a New York-based filmmaker and photojournalist who documents stories seldom seen in mainstream media. In support of her verité work, Cabral has received artist grants from BBC Storyville, the Tribeca Film Institute, the Sundance Institute, the Independent Television Service, NYSCA, the International Documentary Association, and the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund. Cabral recently completed (T)ERROR, her first feature length documentary, co-directed with David Felix Sutcliffe, which premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Prize for Break Out First Feature. Cabral, along with co-director Sutcliffe, was honored by the International Documentary Association with the 2015 Emerging Filmmaker Award. (T)ERROR was also a recipient of the 2013 Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant, awarded by the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. In 2013, Cabral was named by Filmmaker Magazine as one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Her photography has been recently published through Aperture Foundation, National Geographic Channel UK, the Nation, and the Village Voice, and is currently on exhibition with “Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument.”
Christopher St. John (The House I Live In, Reagan, Freakonomics) is a producer and journalist with broad experience in print, broadcast and documentary film. He began his career in production at ABC News, working for Good Morning America before moving to the News Magazine division, where he contributed extensively to 20/20 and Primetime. Prior to producing (T)ERROR, he produced THE HOUSE I LIVE IN (BBC/ITVS, 2012), which won the 2012 Sundance Grand Jury Prize, and received wide theatrical release in the fall of 2012. Christopher also co-produced FREAKONOMICS (Magnolia, 2010) and the Emmy Award winning REAGAN (HBO, 2011). Prior to entering production, he served as a regional correspondent in Southeast Asia for a number of US and international publications.
Workshop Policies:
Registration & Cancellation To register for a workshop, participants must pay in full via PayPal. In the event a participant 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. Participants 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, participants 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.
