Filmmaking Articles and Advice from Film Consultant Peter D. Marshall
Posted in Documentary Filmmaking on Oct 7th, 2009
“For renowned movie director and critic Thom Anderson, documentary films are the most powerful medium revealing the lives and cultures of other people.
Anderson, the head judge of the EBS International Documentary Festival (EIDF), says he enjoys watching and making documentaries because of their very nature.
There was a certain period when people didn’t like the word [...]
Posted in Documentary Filmmaking on Oct 1st, 2009
“A new report issued by American University’s Center for Social Media finds that documentary filmmakers routinely grapple with ethics challenges, yet the craft lacks any sort of broad standards in ethics practices. The Center for Social Media is noted for its codes of best practices in fair use, the most longstanding of which is the [...]
Posted in Documentary Filmmaking on Aug 24th, 2009
“Celebrated Singaporean filmmaker Siok Siok Tan began work several months ago on a “Twittamentary” about the popular micro-blogging service, Twitter and the idea is soon to come to life. Twittamentary is live now. If you wonder what it is all about, it is about how Twitter has changed someone’s life. If you have a story [...]
Posted in Documentary Filmmaking on Aug 13th, 2009
“Documentary films, the traditional kind that the average person simply ignores, have long since given way to the popular faux documentary. These films, unlike their parent genre, have been and continue to be wildly successful. In fact, they are now so tightly woven into our culture that we truly forget what they are.
Christopher Guest’s films [...]
Posted in Documentary Filmmaking on Jul 13th, 2009
“Rich, successful Latino-American lawyer takes on a big corporation on behalf of downtrodden, third-world workers and wins. It makes for a great “David versus Goliath” story of melodramatic Erin Brockovich proportions — but what if the David of the story ends up being accused of fraud, causing not only that case but others to be [...]
Posted in Documentary Filmmaking on May 20th, 2009
Read this article from CMD Media.
“First Person Arts is going across to the nation to find the best videos, photographs and stories that describe how individuals, families, and communities are managing during these hard times.
The contest, First Person America: In These Hard Times, invites artists and everyday people to document how this generation of Americans [...]
Posted in Documentary Filmmaking on May 13th, 2009
Read this article from Ron Steinman.
“I start shooting a new documentary in May. The subject is mental health, but this essay is not about that film as a film but how I still will make films in what I call “the old-fashioned way.” The way I know best. By film I mean any motion picture [...]
Posted in Documentary Filmmaking on May 1st, 2009
Read this article from
“The idea of a documentary film tends to evoke a certain perception that what we’re seeing on-screen is purely non-fiction, a “document of the truth.” But is it possible to say that any documentary encapsulates some objective idea of “truth,” as opposed to the story the filmmaker seeks to tell, albeit through [...]
Posted in Documentary Filmmaking on Apr 25th, 2009
Read this article from Baltimore Sun.
“Are media workers driving stakes into their own hearts by embracing shorter and shorter forms of digital storytelling – thereby helping create even shorter attention spans among young audience members?
That’s one of the questions posed by Leo Eaton, the Maryland-based producer of such high-end PBS and BBC documentaries as Michael Wood’s The Story of India, [...]
Posted in Documentary Filmmaking on Apr 14th, 2009
Read this article from Cause Global.
“Upheavals in the news business have created a shortage of people telling deep and complex stories about critical issues in society, says Cara Mertes, director of the Sundance documentary film program, and that gap is giving rise to a new trend, what Mertes calls “self-designated storytelling”—amateur filmmakers stepping in to [...]
Think Outside the Box Office is about connecting filmmakers with audiences and it is the ultimate guide to film distribution & movie marketing for the digital age.
