The Documentary Life | Filmmaking | Documentary Films | Documentary Filmmaking | How to Make a Documentary Film | Chris Parkhurst

For today’s episode of TDL I’m going to do something a little different. Today, I’m going to be asking you, my fellow #doclifer, some questions. I’d like to discover a little bit more about who...

In this increasingly growing world of content creators, but ever shrinking world of actual distributors who allow you to retain at least some rights to your work, how can the independent documentary filmmaker best work...

Your First Documentary Grant Getting your first documentary grant can be akin to getting into your first documentary film festival.  That is, it is often the first one that is the most difficult one to...

Shooting Great B-roll One of the often overlooked elements to a documentary filmmaker’s footage is their B-roll.  And the biggest reason that I have to make this assumption is the copious amounts of really really...

As a documentary filmmaker, often the idea of having to wrangle talent releases, location releases, crew deal memos, music rights, all seems like a world that is not really ours. That’s for the feature film...

Documentary Film School The idea that one must go to school for documentary filmmaking in order to become a good documentary filmmaker is a fairly hollow assumption.  There are plenty great doc films made by...

Your Film Score I would like to talk to you about Peter Broderick.  No, not that Peter Broderick, the independent film distribution guru.  But another Peter Broderick.  Who makes music.  Really really amazing music.  The kind...

First Documentary Film Over the past few months I’ve received a number of requests for a show dedicated to how one goes about making their first documentary film. And the truth is, I could probably...

Professional actor, writer, director, and documentary filmmaker, Jeremy Xido, initially set out to do research for a documentary film about Chinese railway construction workers in Angola.  What he ended up with was a film about...

Shooting Behind-the-Scenes Shooting BTS (behind-the-scenes), or EPK (electronic press kit) as it’s known in the film industry, can be a great and a rather appropriate way for a documentary filmmaker to make some additional income....

Documentary Scriptwriting One of the more over-looked aspects of making your documentary film is the scriptwriting process. If your intention is to just shoot, shoot, shoot, and then go through your footage and knock something...

The War Correspondent History wouldn’t be quite the same without the tireless and sometimes incredibly dangerous work of the war correspondent or doc filmmaker.  Ever since I could pick up a camera, I found myself...

Debt can be a crippling thing for anyone, and documentary filmmakers are no exception.  In fact, it’s we independent filmmakers who are often hit in particular with the ugly debt stick.  The kids’ daycare, medical...

New Weekly Show Welcome to the first episode of The Documentary Life‘s new weekly format!  Contained within this initial release I’ll start off by detailing how the new format will work from this point forward....

Documentary Film Festival, Part Two Welcome to part two of a very special two-part series that explores the mysterious world of the documentary film festival from the perspective of the filmmaker as well as the...