Chapter 36
From School to Film Industry
Looking Ahead While You’re in Film School
By thinking ahead during your schooling, you can amass the necessary experience, sample work, and survival skills that you’ll need once you graduate. Early in your schooling, decide what sort of films you can make with passion and which festivals to aim for, then work to assemble the associates you need to make your films, and work with them so they make theirs. If your school has a producing track, make an aspiring producer into one of your partners.
Internships as a Senior
Well-established schools have an internship office that places senior students, when they have demonstrated their competency, with local media employers. At my school, senior students get work as a grip, assistant editor, production assistant, or camera assistant, and a great many other positions. Via these internships an employer can, at low risk, try people out in places where they can’t do much harm. An internship may turn into a graduate’s first paid work, and even if it doesn’t, it can provide the all-important professional reference when you need it. Albert Maysles is actively involved with passing on his experience and skills, and the Maysles Institute actually offers internships with a small stipend (see www.mayslesfilms.com and look under “Internships”). Maybe take his example and approach a local documentarian you respect who works in your vicinity. Suggest that he or she consider you for a similar learning internship.
Graduation is on the horizon, and the scary prospect of supporting yourself is hurtling closer. How to go from film student to paid worker in the medium? You will need a well-developed craft in addition to your directing skills and aspirations.
On Graduating
Let’s fast-forward to a point where you have knowledge and some experience in filmmaking. First-rate skills in one or more of the following will help you earn a living:
- Camera operating, lighting, or gaffer skills
- Sound recordist, microphone operator, or sound design
- Editor, sound editor
- Producer, production manager, production secretary, or assistant director
Enter your best work in a number of festivals, and perhaps you’ll win some awards. These are the very best résumé credentials.
Make your production skills tangible by leaving school with a respectable demo reel (see page 546) on a DVD. It serves as a portfolio of your work as well as that done for others. With your craft skills and networking through all the contacts you made in film school, you should be able to earn short-term money at crewing while you deploy a longer term plan to gradually establish yourself as a director.
Aspiring directors seldom find work awaiting them; they have to make jobs for themselves.
Making a Job for Yourself
The film and television industries are downsizing permanent staffs and employing freelancers, so in principle there are more opportunities for small, self-starter companies, but work goes to those with a track record of accomplishment, which is a catch-22 for the beginner. The films you made at school or have made since at your own expense are your investment in your future. If you have a passion for some special subject, then you must show this as your area of expertise embodied in short film work. That area might be anything—ornithology, teaching science, the politics of water supply in Third World countries, or the subculture of bicycle messengers. Now you can use the work you’ve done to seek commissions from individuals or organizations whose work is in your subject area and who will quickly recognize one of their own. Sometimes, before you know it, you’re in another country doing the kind of useful work you dreamed of. Maybe you’re doing it unpaid, but you’re racking up demonstrable experience for your demo reel, which is what counts.
If you do get commissioned directing straight out of school, it will probably be sporadic and ill paid for some time.
While you pursue further directing you will need crewing work so you can pay your bills, consolidate your skills, and build up your r é sum é with film-related jobs.
To gain acceptance in the film industry, you need professional-level skills, professional discipline, and good references. Initially the latter will come from your teachers.
Entering the Film Industry
At an internship, a temporary (and usually unpaid) position may turn into your first paying job. My college has an extension in the CBS studios and thus many connections in Los Angeles, where a great many documentary series are made. Our students find internships in Hollywood as well as in Chicago and other places. Similar arrangements exist in most established film schools, and it’s something to look for in any school you’re considering. If job channels don’t materialize through interning, then you will need other approaches.
Networking
The film industry, of which making documentaries is a part, is a set of linked villages. You get work by networking through personal connections with friends, associates, and any professional contacts acquired during your schooling and internships. Established film schools have alumni associations or other, less formalized networks in the major film centers. Through warm recommendations by your teachers you should be able to use these networks to get interviews and advice.
Your degree means little in the production world; it is your awards, production work, and recommendations that count.
Craft Worker
Though there are regional and national differences in the film and television industries, developing a track record as a freelancer is similar everywhere. For quite a long time your work will probably be fulfilling mundane commercial needs; that is, you will be expending lots of imagination and effort crewing for industrial, training, or medical films or shooting conferences, graduations, and weddings. Learning to do this reliably, inventively, and to high standards will teach you a great deal. A similar training served Robert Altman and many another director well.
Do good work with a friendly and positive spirit and stay on schedule and budget, and your reputation as an okay person will slowly percolate through the grapevine. In the meantime, aim to stay solvent and invest your spare time in making films with those contemporaries who are also struggling to gain experience and recognition.
This emphasis on becoming known and fitting in may seem like the slipway to compromise, but it need not be. Each new level of accomplishment brings recognition, and this equips you and your group to eventually seek more interesting and demanding work. Once you and your associates have concrete, proven results, you really do have something to offer an employer, fund, or sponsor.
The long time it takes to gain professional acceptance excludes the immature personality impatient for recognition. The top of film school leads to the bottom of the working world. So be open to any kind of (legal) work, and do it reliably and with a good heart. Aim to be in good standing when “something opens up.” Something always does.
Some interesting facts emerged in a colloquium given by former students at my institution. All were now working in various capacities in the film industry. It transpired that everyone:
- Took about the same (long) time to get established and to begin earning reasonable money
- Had moved up the ladder of responsibility at roughly the same (slow) pace
- Found that greater responsibility came suddenly and without warning
- Was scared stiff when it came, feeling they were conning their way into an area beyond their competence
- Grew into their new levels of responsibility
- Loved their job and felt privileged to have work in such an important area of public life
The change and democratization in filmmaking is producing more filmmakers and a glut of unsold product. Your films must be better than other people’s; the keys to this are scattered throughout this book.
The Search for Subjects and a Market
Documentary markets are evolving, and audience appreciation for the genre is growing. Television networks now show independently produced documentaries but increasingly rely on international coproductions to spread the high cost of “big” series meant for worldwide audiences. To enter the race at any level, you must find subjects and treatments that call to a sizable audience.
Documentaries ***that Cross Boundaries and Buck Trends
Finding large audiences means aiming to make films whose subject, treatment, or thematic intensity carries them across national and linguistic borders. Unlike fiction films and novels, few documentaries achieve this, and few films travel beyond the parochial, linguistic, or cultural enclosure of their makers. This is something to think about long and hard. It’s not necessarily a matter of budget, but more of tapping into universal themes and interests.
Films that transcend boundaries are often made by those who, voluntarily or otherwise, have migrated to another country or culture and ingested larger ideas about humanity.
Getting the audience to notice fragile and transient moments in obscure lives is not easy or common in films, yet should be more common in documentary. The uncertainty about meriting an audience’s attention makes documentarians play it safe by resorting to exotic or sensational subjects. War, murderers, family violence, urban problems, eccentrics, deviants, demonstrations, revolts, and confrontations all promise something reliably heightened. Less often do documentaries penetrate the heart of everyday subjects with the ease and precision of literature. For the minutia of small-town life or the anguish in a middle-class family, we look instinctively to fiction rather than the documentary. This is not inevitable, as you see in such notable American examples as Ira Wohl’s Best Boy (discussed in Chapter 5, Documentary Language) or David Sutherland’s The Farmer’s Wife (discussed in Chapter 18, Dramatic Development, Time, and Structure). Sutherland’s films result from the kind of long and close involvement that brought Flaherty his first fame; you can read about his methods at www.davidsutherland.com/bio.html. Of similar intensity, and arising from a similar immersion, is Doug Block’s film about his parents’ half century of unsatisfactory marriage, 51 Birch Street (discussed in Chapter 18), and Deborah Hoffmann’s bittersweet Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter (Chapter 18), which chronicles her reactions while her mother declines gently into Alzheimer’s disease. Documentarians wanting to buck the trends, as these films do, will always face difficulties getting access to their subjects and will have difficulty raising money for a film about subjects considered minor. Yet, their intensity of regard, passion, and courageous truthfulness makes the more average documentary look shallow and perfunctory.
Filmmaking is a market commodity that thrives or dies according to audience figures. Complaining about this is futile and unproductive because there are plenty of other obstacles to discourage the fainthearted. Luckily, making a small-canvas documentary no longer requires much of a budget, so now—if you can sustain life by other means—you can simply make a film you believe in rather than trying to get airborne with written proposals.
Creative form is probably more important than finding unique content, which gets more difficult as more films explore more areas of life. How a film sees is as important and significant as what it sees. Find out where you stand by pitching possible subjects to filmmaking colleagues; argue them out and discover all their possibilities, depths, and difficulties. Pitch to non-film-makers, too; they need only be the kind of person who’s interested by human life and endeavors. Pitching speeds up the evolution of your projects and ideas and doesn’t cost a dime.
The best way to locate original subjects and approaches (pardon my refrain) is to pursue what you are passionate about and to shun everything stereotypical.
Go through Netflix ® and distributors’ Web sites to check out your areas of special interest. Make a study to see where holes exist in the existing commercial structure, holes that you might fill and where you could show an audience is waiting. See everything you can.
Using Festivals
How do filmmakers present themselves at festivals, and what do TV networks and distributors seem interested in buying among your kind of films? The Independent Feature Project Web site is a mine of information on all aspects of producing as an indie (www.ifp.org), especially the financial aspects. It even advertises job openings and requests for partnerships.
Find out what others are producing by attending festivals and conferences. You’ll find it energizing to be among aficionados.
At pitching sessions, such as those that the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA; www.idfa.nl/iprof_home.asp) holds annually, hopeful producers pitch ideas and are publicly grilled by a panel of commissioning editors, who may or may not buy into the project. You will see a separation between producers and buyers/backers akin to that between authors and publishers. Newcomers can only expect funds from a distributor if they already have a commercially mar ketable product, and that’s hard to prove without a visible track record. Because you are unlikely to get distributors’ or television money for a film in the planning stages, you may want to make a superb first five minutes as a demonstration. If you have cornered the rights to a hot subject, you might get offers of partnership from established concerns, which can be a good deal. Be careful not to get swallowed up.
Competition is high, yet most prospective filmmakers represent themselves poorly in writing. Many even overlook aspects of the fund’s guidelines. If you were a fund, would you give money to someone who can’t follow a few simple rules?
Documentary Proposals
You are what you write, so study the sections of this book on writing proposals. Draft and redraft proposals until they are your very best, then try your luck and keep trying, seeking all the critical feedback you can get. Grantwriting is an art all on its own. Volunteer to read and critique other people’s proposals—you’ll be astonished at how much you learn. Read everything you can lay hands on concerning grants, funds, and grantwriting. Think of applying for grants not as begging but as rehearsals for communicating your vision and originality. Really good proposals are rare, and they do get recognized with funding. Top-notch proposals don’t just happen by luck—the people who make them have practiced heart and soul.
Funds and Foundations
There is a lot written by filmmakers about funding, but documentary funding conforms to no set pattern. Read about their serpentine paths, and maybe you’ll learn something useful. Everyone wants to know the “secret of how you got the money” to make the film, but all the secrets are different, particular to the seeker and the project, and are unlikely to unlock your particular problem. It takes originality to make exceptional films, and the same originality to find resources. When funding organizations do make an award, they usually grant no more than 50% of the budget. The proposal has to be well written, businesslike, and focused on the special area that the fund or foundation supports.
The Demo Reel
When you apply for a job or submit a grant application, prepare an edited demonstration reel of around 5 minutes maximum. From your bank of the best and most applicable work you’ve done, custom build DVDs for different application purposes and include a descriptive outline to help users navigate. Make sure each copy plays faultlessly from beginning to end. The demo reel evidences what you can do and who you are. It might contain three 30-second quotations from your camera-work and three of your directing. If you are applying to fund a documentary idea, the demo reel is a trailer that shows material already shot. If your proposed film has great landscapes or a gritty industrial setting, then include a montage of the best shots. If it is character driven, assemble material to establish in a minute or so how attractively interesting and unusual your central character is. A really professional reel argues powerfully and briefly for your proficiency and can clinch a jury decision in your favor. The long-established Independent Feature Project (IFP) has good funding ideas and information on its Web site (www.ifp.org).
Funds
The United States has a complex and shifting system of federal, state, and private funding agencies. Each has guidelines and a track record in funding some special area. As a rule, private grant foundations prefer to give completion money to films that are self-evidently good, while government agencies are a little more likely to fund research and preproduction. They may, however, stipulate that you work with a board of academics. This may or may not be productive, so protect yourself by writing this on your cuff: A camel is a horse designed by a committee.
Usually only local organizations will fund local student work or first films. Fund money is good money because you don’t usually have to repay it.
If your track record is slender (perhaps a short film that has won some festival awards), and you are seeking preproduction, production, or completion money, investigate your state or city arts council. Each state in the United States has a state humanities committee that works in association with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This agency works to fund groups of accredited individuals (usually academics) producing work in the humanities. National guidelines can be obtained from The National Endowment for the Humanities, 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, Rm. 406, Washington, D.C. 20506. (www.neh.gov). The Web site is a mine of information on state humanity and other funds.
Many states and big cities have a film commission or film bureau that exists to encourage and facilitate filmmaking (because it’s good business). These offices (see www.studio1productions.com/Articles/FilmCommission.htm) develop formal and informal relationships with the whole local filmmaking community and can be an excellent source of information on all aspects of local production. A full list of those in the United States, as well as a wealth of other documentary-related information, used to be published in the invaluable International Documentary Association (IDA) Membership Directory and Survival Guide, and its successor is expected to arise soon, phoenix-like, on IDA’s Web site (www.documentary.org).
Congress proposed $400M in 2009 to budget the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which redistributes the money to a number of funds, including the Independent Television Service (ITVS; www.itvs.org). See how the CPB money has been used at the Web site of the newly revived Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF; www.aivf.org), an organization dedicated to the independent filmmaker. Additionally, you can always use online searches to dredge up large quantities of information on the Internet. Simply enter the words you want associated together, such as documentary, fund, festival, pitching, proposal, investors, etc.
A couple of survey organizations exist to help you find the appropriate private fund or charity to approach. Chicago has the Donors Forum, a clearing-house that periodically publishes local information (www.donorsforum.org). New York has the Foundation Center (http://foundationcenter.org), a source for nationwide reference collections for those wishing to approach donors and donor organizations. As you might expect, many people compete for funding, so the hoops you must jump through almost amount to a new career.
For funding about subjects pertaining to Latin America, many countries of which now have thriving documentary-making cultures themselves, there are foundations such as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (www.macfound.org/programs/index.htm), which underwrites projects on subjects they wish to see covered, such as human and community development and global security and development.
Journals and Associations
The International Documentary Association (www.documentary.org), mentioned above, is based in Los Angeles and has a strong program of local events. It publishes International Documentary, an important quarterly journal with featured articles on new films, filmmakers, trends, festivals, and technology. In the back pages is an updated directory of festivals and competitions; funding; jobs and opportunities; classes, seminars, and workshops; distributors looking for new films; new publications; and classifieds. In Europe, the English language documentary maker’s journal, published in Copenhagen, is Dox (www.dox.dk). It’s the journal of the European Documentary Network (www.edn.dk), whose Web site is a mine of information on funds, festivals, workshops, and recent films.
Another good move is to take out a subscription to American Cinematographer, a monthly publication mainly for feature fiction workers but which publishes occasional articles on documentaries. It will help you keep abreast of the latest digital methods and technical innovations, especially in lighting. The journal includes news, interviews, and a lot of “who’s doing what” information (see www.theasc.com). Like many such organizations, they also send out material online.
Videomaker is an excellent monthly magazine that reviews new equipment in the prosumer range (i.e., high-end consumer, low-end professional). It is particularly good for accessible explanations of techniques and technical principles, and it lists conferences and workshops (see www.videomaker.com).
Digital Video, or DV as it calls itself, is the journal for tools and technique for the independent professional and contains a wealth of information and reviews (see www.dv.com).
Job Information
The Internet makes a good labor exchange, and an example of a film job search site is www.media-match.com. Such sites exist to make money for their organizers and aren’t necessarily a sure passport to employment, but you may be the only filmmaking vulcanologist or mining safety expert in your area and have skills that get you work. Tim Curran’s FAQ, which speaks autobiographically, may be helpful (www.timcurran.com). I found it, and a great deal else, by entering documentary and career in Google ®. Most film career guides focus on Hollywood, but there is information about the general structure and expectations for independents in www.ifp.org/jobs. The Salt Institute, which specializes in documentary stills and sound work for sociologists, lists useful documentary links at www.salt.edu/alumni/jobs_resources.html. You may also find that some of the diary and blog items stimulate your ideas.
What should hearten you is that broadcast organizations now recognize that they have more demand than supply and are soliciting films or ideas for films (Figure 36-1). They are not short of documentaries but are short of different documentaries that reach beyond the norms. You can see what the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) or the BBC and British television expects of producers by going to:
- PBS, www.pbs.org/producers
- BBC, www.close-upfilm.com/features/Filmmaking/documentary.htm
- Interdoc, www.initialize-films.co.uk/what-we-do.htm
If you find the term “business plan” intimidating, now is the time to hunt down the information to educate yourself. PBS has become far more open to independent production—see their application form for Independent Lens, a program that consistently puts on interesting shorter material.
FIGURE 36-1 The well-respected PBS documentary series POV puts out an annual call for entries. Countless festivals worldwide do the same.
Whomever you plan to approach, learn all you can about the individual, business, or organization that you aspire to join. People who deal with job seekers distinguish rapidly between the hardworking realist and the dreamer floating in alien waters. They make this judgment not on who you are but on how you present yourself—on paper and in person. You will do this well by resourceful reading and lots of networking.
When you send your r é sum é to an individual or company, send a brief, carefully composed, individual cover letter describing your goals and how you might be an asset to the company. Call after a few days to ask if you can have a brief chat with someone just in case something opens up in the future. If you are called for that chat, or better, for a formal interview:
- Dress conservatively.
- Be punctual.
- Know what you want and show you are willing to do any kind of work to get there.
- Let the interviewer ask the questions.
- Be brief and to the point when you reply.
- Say concisely what skills and qualities you have to offer. This is where you can demonstrate your knowledge of (and therefore commitment to) the interviewer’s business.
- Never inflate your abilities or experience.
- Leave an up-to-date r é sum é and demo reel.
Interviewers often finish by asking if you have any questions, so have two or three good ones ready so you can again demonstrate your knowledge of the company or group.
If shyness holds you back, do something about it. Get assertiveness training or join a theater group and force yourself to act, preferably in improvisational material. Only you can liberate your abilities. Almost all human problems boil down to a matter of courage. Courage, like power, is not given—it’s taken.
Documentary as a Preparation for Directing Fiction
Taking the relatively small British cinema as an example, it’s instructive to see who first worked in documentary before moving to fiction: Lindsay Anderson, Michael Apted, John Boorman, Ken Loach, Karel Reisz, Sally Potter, Tony Richardson, and John Schlesinger. Is this a stellar list by chance? Now add those coming from painting, theater, and music or who espouse improvisational methods, and further distinguished names appear, such as Maureen Blackwood, Mike Figgis, Peter Greenaway, Mike Leigh, Sharon Maguire, and Anthony Minghella. Not all are household names, but they do suggest that vibrant fiction cinema often has someone from a documentary background at the helm.
In this book’s sister volume, Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics, 4th ed., (2008, Focal Press, pp. 62 – 63), I advocate the value to aspiring fiction directors of making documentaries. If this is you, know that documentary experience can give you:
- Rapid, voluminous training in finding and telling screen stories.
- Confidence in your ability to use the screen spontaneously and adaptively.
- A proving ground for your intuitive judgments.
- An eye for a focused and truthful human presence.
- A workout in a genre that requires great narrative compression and poses the same narrative problems as fiction.
- A chance to show real characters in action as they struggle with real obstacles.
- Experience seeing how a person’s identity is constructed through interactions and that it’s not a fixed commodity functioning similarly under varying circumstances.
- A laboratory for character-driven drama (character is fate!).
- A benchmark for when people are simply being rather than acting.
- Experience at catalyzing truth from participants in preparation to do the same with actors.
- Exposure to shooting in real time, thinking on your feet, and plucking drama from life.
- The risk, confrontation, and chemistry of the moment, which are central to both documentary and improvisational fiction.
A Personal Message
Documentary is an evolving field in which the levels of inventiveness, humor, courage, and productivity are all going up. As I said in Chapter 1, documentary people are remarkable for their conviviality and helpfulness, and you’ll experience this right away at your first conference or festival. They have chosen documentary film—be it ecological, political, humanitarian, or historical—as the work that matters most to them in all the world. I hope that you, dear reader, join this community and use the wonderful art of the screen to help make a better world.
Thank you most sincerely for using this book, and if you have any comments that can help make the next edition better, write me via e-mail at [email protected]. I will try to reply. Please don’t send unsolicited proposals or films—I simply don’t have time to review them (or to do lots of other good things).
May you have good luck, good filming, and good friends.