Get Close: Lean Team Documentary Filmmaking
by Rustin Thompson
Forthcoming from Oxford University Press in early 2019
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.
Lean Team Pro Tips
Lean Team Pro Tip #1: Learn and practice, learn and practice
I shot my first film, 30 Frames A Second, in 5 days. I then spent a few more days writing a script, and edited the doc in 7 days (I’d rented an edit suite and [...]
Lean Team Pro Tip #2: Eliminate Barriers, Get Close
It seems obvious, doesn’t it? Getting close in documentary filmmaking literally means putting your body and your camera as close to what you’re filming as possible. But it also means getting emotionally close to your [...]
Lean Team Pro Tip #3: Visualize Your Film
First you'll visualize the kind of film you want to make, and then you'll be tempted to define it. Where does it fit within the myriad of sub-genres of the documentary form? There are environmental [...]
Docs in Review
Untitled
Directors: Michael Glawogger, Monika Willi, Watched on: MUBI and Filmatique, Rating: 5/5. Michael Glawogger once said that “imagery is the essence of the art of cinema–and language, sound and story are the legs on which [...]
Minding the Gap
Director: Bing Lui, Watched at: Hot Docs 2018, Rating: 3/5. Minding the Gap opens with an exuberant sequence of skateboarders coasting through vacant parking lots, cruising empty urban streets, and jumping curbs with a youthful [...]
The Sea Stares At Us From Afar
Director: Manuel Muńoz Rivas, Watched on: MUBI, Rating: 4/5. The aesthetic gulf between American and European documentary cinema becomes more dramatically evident after viewing Manuel Muńoz Rivas' The Sea Stares at Us from Afar, a meditative [...]