It was standing-room-only at the East Village premiere that I attended for The Woman Who Loves Giraffes. The Q&A that followed resembled a celebrity speaking tour: the star in the spotlight was the sparkling 87-year old, Anne Innis Dagg. This Canadian feature combines several of my favorite genres: Archive-based History Wildlife Science Plus a bit …
A SHOT TO SAVE THE WORLD is a special about Jonas Salk’s race to defeat the dreaded polio virus. It captures how strong, unifying leadership and Science-based government can overcome a terrible global epidemic. I became committed as an Executive Producer. Bill Gates kindly agreed to serve as the narrator of our film, and his foundation supported …
A Sundance campaign is a license to lose money. Lots of it! Here’s why: Let’s assume that the average production cost of all 1,774 Sundance submissions for 2020 is $500,000. Actual budgets range from around $200,000 up to $5+ million. $500K is a conservative average for a feature, according to D-Word‘s Doug Block. Production Cost: 1,725 …
A Sundance Film Festival award lags only behind an Oscar nomination as a measure of success for documentarians. But what are the odds that a U.S. or international documentary will earn a slot on the program? Submissions: 1,774 Documentary Features were submitted to the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, which opens on January 23: 840 were from the U.S. …
The Nyoongar Stadium Documentary project is an inspiring story of how new digital screens, multi-platform distribution and an imaginative approach to outreach combined to create a well-funded documentary format. The Challenge: Perth’s state-of-the-art football stadium was being built on a traditionally significant meeting ground of the Aboriginal first nation Nyoongar people. How could West Australia’s …
Greg Boustead is director of Science Sandbox, a portfolio of strategic grantmaking at the Simons Foundation, focused on outreach and engaging new audiences with science. He shared his strategy and grant-making process at Sunny Side of the Doc’s Science-themed Meet The Executive session. We are publishing Greg’s very informative session as a podcast, though without …
POMPEII RISING is an ambitious €1.6 million budget Science / History project from France’s Gedeon Programmes. Coproduction partners include French, German, Japanese and other international public broadcasters, and the online subscription platform CuriosityStream. In this Case Study for Sunny Side of the Doc we capture the development, production, distribution and select deal highlights of POMPEII …
UNITED SKATES is an exceptional feature documentary that combines pure and often hilarious entertainment with a hard-hitting expose of how race and class force their crushing ways into the most innocent American pastimes — even roller-skating. For this case study, which is published with Sunny Side of the Doc, I spoke with the co-producer / …