Archive for September, 2011

Betting The Farm is headed to Oakland!

Posted on: September 30th, 2011 by jason No Comments

We’ve been lucky enough to get the support of many organizations and individuals for our first feature documentary, Betting The Farm, from Sundance to LEF to Chicken & Egg to, of course, our parents. But the latest is among the coolest: We’ve been invited to be one of seven film projects in Reel Food, a residential workshop organized by the folks at Chicken & Egg Pictures, Working Films, and Fledgling Fund.

Reel Food: Films Seeding Change

Reel Food is a residential workshop that will bring together nonfiction media-makers who are telling powerful stories about food and agriculture with non-profit organizations that are working for healthy, just and sustainable communities. The intention of Reel Food is to hone filmmakers’ audience-engagement plans, seed collaboration and cross-promotion, and generate concrete partnerships between the documentary projects and NGOs.

After several years of filming (and intensive editing in recent months), we’re excited to have an opportunity to develop our outreach plans for the film. It’s exciting to imagine building a larger audience for this film with the help of some innovative organizations. Best of all, we get to meet and work with some amazing filmmakers. Can’t wait.

A Crash Course in Producing

Posted on: September 20th, 2011 by jason No Comments

At the end of July, Cecily and I were lucky enough to be invited, along with four other grantees from Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program, to go to Utah for the Creative Producer’s Lab & Summit. It was a whirlwind trip—a chance to spend a week talking about our projects with the awesome Sundance staff and three stellar advisors: Joslyn Barnes, Bonni Cohen, and Nancy Willen.

If those names aren’t familiar, consider this: Josyln is a co-producer of Sundance 2011 hit Black Power Mixtape; Bonni’s film, The Island President, just won the People’s Choice Award for Documentary at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, and one of Nancy’s recent clients, Senna, just smashed box office records in the UK. These women are real pros.

The focus of the lab, which we attended along with talented filmmakers Alison Klayman, Alastair Siddons, Kavita Pillay, and Lisa Remington, was on producing our film. After years of shooting and cutting and applying for grants and shooting some more, it was a much-needed crash course on all the other aspects of bringing a film into the world: financing, distribution, marketing, festivals. We left Utah with a much longer to-do list, but a real sense that the challenges we’re facing are not unique to us. And we left feeling lucky to have such talented and generous folks in our corner. Back to the edit shed!