"This is a place where you can breathe deeply," advised Cara Mertes, director of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and Fund, during the
Producing
I have been producing projects with director Dylan Sires since 2017. Our latest project, 'ChiefsAholic: A Wolf in Chiefs Clothing' (2024), is an Amazon Original documentary about Kansas City Chiefs superfan Xaviar Babudar, aka “ChiefsAholic,” who rose to fame with his social media antics. But a secret life came to light when he was arrested, unraveling a series of unsolved bank robberies committed across the Midwest. ChiefsAholic was the first time we were given money to develop something—US$60,000, in fact. That only covered two weeks to capture enough of the story that we could use to sell. It was naive of us to think that having a budget made things any easier. At the time of writing, 'ChiefsAholic' carried a U.S. number one position on Amazon Prime for four days and generated a wild response from true crime fanatics and Chiefs Kingdom.
In 2008 and 2019, in Documentary magazine, I published documentary budgeting articles and budget templates that have been read and used widely all over the world. I’m thrilled to return with a big update that includes: (1) a fully revised budget template that has been updated for 4K and streamer deliveries; (2) for the first time, a schedule template; (3) numerous new budget line items related to accessibility for film crews, participants, and audiences; and (4) a bigger reorganization to make the template more flexible and universal. The article has also been expanded and extensively rewritten.
Fundraising for films is notoriously time-consuming and opaque. It can often seem like the dull but necessary part of making a film, a chore that some
Since Pedro and I first started filming unseen in May 2016, I’ve always told him that my main audience for our film is no one else but him. After all, unseen is about his life and his decade-long journey to become a social worker. What makes the pursuit of this goal not so straightforward is the fact that Pedro is blind. If Pedro is truly my main audience, how can I make a film (arguably a primarily visual medium) not only accessible for him but, more so, enjoyable?
'Hard to Swallow' is an independent docuseries fronted by Tunde Wey, a chef and writer known for projects addressing race and class inequity. I’ve been producing 'Hard to Swallow' with Tunde for more than four years, and this diary recounts incredible highs, devastating lows, and our tumultuous relationship with the television industry. 'Hard to Swallow' is funded by the Ford Foundation and Pop Culture Collaborative, and supported by IFP (now the Gotham) and SFFILM. At the time of publication, we are editing the fourth of twelve episodes and planning a screening tour for 2024.
In August 2021, in my work as Director of Film Impact and Innovation at Peace is Loud, I had a conversation with Fork Films’ former Chief Creative
The last few years have been deemed by many as the Golden Age of Documentaries, but for the majority working in the nonfiction landscape, it’s a
Over three years ago, I wrote in this magazine about my entry into the documentary film industry, some funding strategies I'd employed, and key
Can there be upsides in a global pandemic? COVID-19 has decimated huge swaths of the entertainment industry and led to massive unemployment, food