Mapping out a diverse journey through documentary distribution, this book is a comprehensive global how-to reference guide, providing insights into the landscape of documentary distribution; targeting the right audiences to expand the reach of your documentary; and building a sustainable career. Detailing how to prepare your documentary, strategies for crowdfunding, working with documentary organizations and online platforms and outlining the channels to consider, The Documentary Distribution Toolkit demystifies the process of distributing your documentary. Featuring case studies and interviews including filmmaker Alice Elliot, representatives from public television stations such as ARTE, ZDF, Al Jazeera, TRT (Turkey), NHK, as well as drawing on author Rachel Gordon’s over 20 years of experience working in documentary distribution. Foregrounding documentaries for non-profit and educational purposes, each chapter gives guidance on how to think locally and globally, on money matters to consider, and personal questions to answer before proceeding to help filmmakers manage their time, money and energy wisely. This book empowers the filmmaker to distribute their documentary in an effective and strategic manner. Providing concrete advice on how to navigate the documentary ecosystem beyond the classroom, this is the ideal book for professional and emerging documentary filmmakers, as well as students who are looking to distribute their documentary films.

Can the documentary be useful? Can a film change how its viewers think about the world and their potential role in it? In Kill the Documentary, the award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking. She critiques documentary films from Nanook of the North to the recent Ken Burns/Lynn Novick series The Vietnam War. Tethered to what Godmilow calls the “pedigree of the real” and the “pornography of the real,” they fail to activate their viewers’ engagement with historical or present-day problems. Whether depicting the hardships of poverty or the horrors of war, conventional documentaries produce an “us-watching-them” mode that ultimately reinforces self-satisfaction and self-absorption. In place of the conventional documentary, Godmilow advocates for a “postrealist” cinema. Instead of offering the faux empathy and sentimental spectacle of mainstream documentaries, postrealist nonfiction films are acts of resistance. They are experimental, interventionist, performative, and transformative. Godmilow demonstrates how a film can produce meaningful, useful experience by forcefully challenging ways of knowing and how viewers come to understand the world. She considers her own career as a filmmaker as well as the formal and political strategies of artists such as Luis Buñuel, Georges Franju, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rithy Panh, and other directors. Both manifesto and guidebook, Kill the Documentary proposes provocative new ways of making and watching films.

Open Space New Media Documentary examines an emerging and significant area of documentary practice in the twenty-first century: community-based new media documentary projects that move across platforms and utilize participatory modalities. The book offers an innovative theorization of these collaborative and collective new media practices, which the authors term "open space," gesturing towards a more contextual critical nexus of technology, form, histories, community, convenings, collaborations, and mobilities. It looks at a variety of low cost, sustainable and scalable documentary projects from across the globe, where new technologies meet places and people in Argentina, Canada, India, Indonesia, Peru, South Africa, Ukraine, and the USA.

Learn the creative and technical essentials of documentary filmmaking with Documentary Voice & Vision. This comprehensive work combines clear, up-to-date technical information, production techniques and gear descriptions with an understanding of how technical choices can create meaning and serve a director’s creative vision. Drawing on the authors’ years of experience as documentary filmmakers, and on interviews with a range of working professionals in the field, the book offers concrete and thoughtful guidance through all stages of production, from finding and researching ideas to production, editing and distribution. Documentary Voice & Vision will help students and aspiring filmmakers think though research and story structure, ethics, legal issues and aesthetics, as well as techniques from camera handling to lighting, sound recording and editing. The book explores a full range of production styles, from expository to impressionistic to observational, and provides an overview of contemporary distribution options. Documentary Voice & Vision is a companion text to Mick Hurbis-Cherrier’s Voice & Vision: A Creative Approach to Narrative Film and DV Production, and employs a similar style and approach to that classic text. This text is written from the perspective of documentary filmmakers, and includes myriad examples from the world of non-fiction filmmaking. A robust companion website featuring additional resources and interactive figures accompanies the book.

In a digital moment where both the democratizing and totalitarian possibilities of media are unprecedented, the need for complex, ethical, and imaginative documentary media—for you, the reader of this book to think, question, and create—is vital. Whether you are an aspiring or seasoned practitioner, an activist or community leader, a student or scholar, or simply a curious audience member, author Broderick Fox opens up documentary media, its changing forms, and diversifying social functions to readers in a manner that is at once rigorous, absorbing, and practical. This new edition updates and further explores the various histories, ideas, and cultural debates that surround and shape documentary practice today. Each chapter engages readers by challenging traditional assumptions, posing critical and creative questions, and offering up innovative historical and contemporary examples. Additionally, each chapter closes with an "Into Practice" section that provides analysis and development exercises and hands-on projects that will assist you in generating a full project prospectus, promotional trailer, and web presence for your own documentary.

If a story is going to fail, it will do so first at the premise level. Anatomy of a Premise Line: How to Master Premise and Story Development for Writing Success is the only book of its kind to identify a seven-step development process that can be repeated and applied to any story idea. This process will save you time, money, and potentially months of wasted writing. So whether you are trying to write a feature screenplay, develop a television pilot, or just trying to figure out your next story move as a writer, this book gives you the tools you need to know which ideas are worth pursuing. In addition to the 7-step premise development tool, Anatomy of a Premise Line also presents a premise and idea testing methodology that can be used to test any developed premise line. Customized exercises and worksheets are included to facilitate knowledge transfer, so that by the end of the book, you will have a fully developed premise line, log line, tagline, and a completed premise-testing checklist. Here is some of what you will learn inside: Ways to determine whether or not your story is a good fit for print or screen Case studies and hands-on worksheets to help you learn by participating in the process Tips on how to effectively work through writer’s block A companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/lyons) with additional worksheets, videos, and interactive tools to help you learn the basics of perfecting a killer premise line