Get Close: Lean Team Documentary Filmmaking
by Rustin Thompson
Now available from Oxford University Press
In this book, I encourage new and veteran filmmakers to make artistically rewarding documentaries at a fraction of the runaway costs of making these films today. The book helps you learn the skills to take creative risks, to find your authorial voice, and to spend less time making each film so you can make more films. This book emboldens you to pursue documentary filmmaking for the joy of it.
Debra Zimmerman, Executive Director, Women Make Movies
Lean Team Pro Tips
Lean Team Pro Tip #7: Evaluating Your Project’s Story-Part Three
The next step in evaluating your project is to think about who (or what) your main character or characters will be. As I wrote in Lean Team Pro Tip #5, a character doesn’t always have [...]
Lean Team Pro Tip #6: Evaluating Your Project’s Story–Part Two
I ended Pro Tip #5 with a question from filmmaker and teacher Barry Hampe (Making Documentary Films and Videos), who asks if your film is posing a question or making an assertion: “A question leads [...]
Lean Team Pro Tip #5: Evaluating Your Project’s Story-Part One
You have eliminated the fat from your team, stripped your camera package down to its essentials, and defined your film. Now you need to evaluate whether or not you can make your movie by adhering [...]
Docs in Review
Aquarela
Aquarela Director/ Viktor Kossakovsky Watched in Theaters Rating 2.5/5 With Aquarela, director Viktor Kossakovsky may have invented a brand-new documentary genre: climate chaos porn. With its diamond hard icebergs, its velvety black bodies of [...]
American Factory
American Factory Directors/ Julia Reichert, Steven Bognar Watched on Netflix Rating 4/5 American Factory is both a straightforward chronicle of the fall, rise, and near fall again of a Dayton, Ohio manufacturing company, and [...]
Angels Are Made of Light
Angels Are Made of Light Director/ James Longley Watched in theaters Rating 2.5/5 Three school-age brothers are the main characters in James Longley’s Angels Are Made of Light, but you wouldn’t know they are [...]