We’re excited that this year’s Documentary Fundamentals series takes inspiration from the award-winning Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project by Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster—a film where music and sound design play a powerful role in shaping its emotional and poetic impact. In this session, sound mixer Fred Helm will walk us through the sonic architecture of the film, exploring how soundscapes, music, and voice are layered to support narrative flow, evoke time and space, and amplify the soul of the story. Composers Samora Pinderhughes & Chris Pattishall will unfortunately be unable to join us in person, though have pre-recorded a session with Joe & Michèle exploring and discussing their creative relationship and collaboration on this project.

This session is about harnessing the power of music and sound design in your next documentary. How can music underscore emotion or rhythm? What’s the best way to collaborate with a composer or sound mixer? And how does sound design bring scenes to life or connect archival and vérité footage? This session will dig into the creative and technical choices behind building a powerful soundscape during post-production.

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DOCUMENTARY FUNDAMENTALS: A professional development series designed to give the emerging or intermediate documentary filmmaker an inside look at the filmmaking process from pre-production planning to post-production and distribution. Over the past few years, UnionDocs has developed this ongoing program for documentarians that desire a better foundation for navigating the modern landscape of independent filmmaking. This six-part program takes place over the course of one weekend at UnionDocs. Buy a SERIES PASS ($175) or choose to attend individual sessions ($35/each).

Instructors

Fred Helm is a storyteller. Fred made his first film when he was 13yrs old.  He has built a reputation as a sound person in the Indie Film world having worked on over 25 Sundance films. He founded a successful post-production company, Cyclops Pictures and Sound. Fred has taught at UCLA sharing his passion for storytelling through sound. His latest milestone and honor was to create the sound design for the award-winning film, Going to Mars, The Nikki Giovanni Project. Fred used sound to draw in the emotion and tell the story of Niki Giovanni.  Fred has recently expanded his sound storytelling to directing. Currently he is co-directing two films, Showbiz: A Love Story, and the Making of the Musical Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Chris Pattishall is a pianist and composer known for his wide stylistic breadth, meticulous sense of detail, empathy, and an inclination towards the surreal. An in-demand pianist and musical collaborator, Chris has established himself over the last decade as “an expert at using the jazz tradition as a jumping-off point for experimentation” (JazzTimes). Chris is a featured performer on a wide range of recordings, from the GRAMMY-nominated debut album of Jamison Ross to the film scores of Knives Out, Nightmare Alley, and Everything Everywhere All At Once. He has collaborated with artists across multiple disciplines, including Shariffa Ali, Kamilah Long, Michela Marino-Lerman, Simeon Marsalis, Najja Moon and Kambui Olujimi. His 2021 release Zodiac — a reimagining of the Zodiac Suite by pioneering yet under-appreciated pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams — was called “a startling achievement” (NY Times) and “a hell of a debut album” (Stereogum).

Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist known for striking intimacy and carefully crafted, radically honest lyrics alongside high-level musicianship. He is also known for using his music to examine sociopolitical issues and fight for change and works in the tradition of the black surrealists, those who bend word, sound, and image towards the causes of revolution. Pinderhughes is a prison abolitionist and an advocate for process over product. His music is renowned for its emotionality, its honesty about difficult and vulnerable topics, and its careful details in word and sound. As an artist, Pinderhughes’ goal is that people will LIVE DIFFERENTLY after experiencing what he makes—that it will affect how they think, how they act, how they relate to others, how they consider their daily relationships to their country and their world.

Emmy award-winning filmmaker, artist, and author Michèle Stephenson draws from her Haitian and Panamanian heritage and experience as a social justice lawyer to transform non-fiction storytelling. She creates emotionally powerful narratives of resistance and healing that emphasize the lived experiences of communities of color across the Americas and the Black diaspora. Through a Black Atlantic perspective, Stephenson reimagines storytelling to provoke thought and inspire action against systemic oppression, weaving together fiction, immersive, experimental, and hybrid forms. In 2023, her films Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project and Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games were Oscar-shortlisted, with Going To Mars winning the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the prestigious Emmy Award for Outstanding Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. Black Girls Play received significant accolades, including the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Video and Best Short Doc at Tribeca. Her feature American Promise earned three Emmy nominations and won the Jury Prize at Sundance, while Stateless was nominated for a Canadian Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Stephenson co-directed The Changing Same, a magical realist VR trilogy that premiered at Sundance’s New Frontier XR Program, won the Tribeca Grand Jury Prize for Best Immersive Narrative, and was Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Interactive Media. In 2024, she received the NYWIFT Nancy Malone Muse Directing Award and is currently in post-production on a feature on the Black Power movement in Canada. She is a Guggenheim Artist Fellow, Creative Capital Artist, and member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Emmy award-winning filmmaker Joe Brewster is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who applies his medical expertise to explore social issues through his cinematic work. He made his directorial debut with The Keeper (1995), drawing on his experience as a prison psychiatrist at the Brooklyn House of Detention, and the film received numerous awards, including Spirit Award nominations. Over the past three decades, Brewster has directed and produced narrative and documentary films, as well as immersive media. His feature documentary American Promise (2014) earned three Emmy nominations and won the Jury Prize at Sundance. His film Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project was Oscar-shortlisted, won the 2023 Sundance Grand Jury Prize, and received over 30 awards, including two Cinema Eye Awards and the prestigious Emmy for Outstanding Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games (2023) won the Cinema Eye Best Short Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Video, and was also Oscar-shortlisted. Brewster’s groundbreaking room-scale production The Changing Same premiered at Sundance and won the 2021 Tribeca Grand Jury Prize for Best Immersive Experience. His subsequent AR/VR projects include O-Dogg: On Othello, featuring Tariq Trotter, which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Brewster has also produced documentary works for PBS, HBO, Amazon, Al Jazeera, Vice, Sundance Channel, Comcast, Disney, and the World Channel. He has received fellowships and grants from the Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, BAVC, MacArthur Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and has won multiple Emmys.