Working with brands might not be for every filmmaker, but for those looking for additional sources of income or who have a project whose topic and goals naturally align with the interests of a company, it can be a synergistic opportunity.
Getting Real
Filmmakers perpetually face challenges from fundraising to pairing up with solid partners, managing post-production details and legal requirements, and launching and promoting their final work, not to mention simple job security in a world of contract work.
Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is flooding our world with a dizzying amount of generated material and is beginning to change every aspect of producing films. The documentary industry does not yet have guidelines in place for how filmmakers can ethically incorporate these new tools.
Access is one of the cornerstones of documentary production that allows a filmmaker to tell urgent stories. Access may imply risk for the filmmakers or for the protagonists, or it might mean complicity with power to be able to make one’s film.
Jean-Marie Teno is Africa’s preeminent documentary filmmaker. For almost four decades, he has been producing and directing films about the inheritance of a colonial system in Cameroon and the wider African continent.
There has been an alarming increase in threats to filmmaker freedom of speech in the past year, from the loss of funding and distribution of work to the loss of residencies and teaching positions and the reality of being publicly targeted for actions as small as signing petitions and liking social media posts.
In her keynote address, Jemma Desai will question the role of integrity in the documentary field. James Baldwin understood the integrity of artists as an analogue for the integrity of being human.
Never in human history has the global circulation of images happened at the speed and scale it is now. When cameras were invented over 200 years ago, they required people to operate them. Besides machine-operated surveillance cameras and drones, we now see images that are generated by AI in the absence of both human bodies and minds.
Thanks for getting real with us at our sixth biennial Getting Real conference! 1500+ documentary practitioners attended in person in Los Angeles and virtually from 40+ countries.
Whether we are unemployed creatives, overwhelmed freelancers, or underpaid employees, it can often seem like everyone else has figured it out. Social media is a constant stream of people announcing new jobs, festival screenings, and prestigious grants and awards. Yet more often than not, the filmmaker who had the big premiere, received all the accolades, and even successfully sold their film is still struggling to get by, just like the rest of us. So how are filmmakers actually making a living?