LINE ITEMS

Positive First Impressions

Documentary filmmaker Farihah Zaman shares the secrets of the Good Pitch.

hen I learned that Remote Area Medical, the lm I am co-directing with my husband, Jeff Reichert, was accepted into the 2012 Good Pitch San Francisco, I was honored but not entirely sure why. The event is such a new phenomenon, such a twist on the traditional public pitch forum, that it takes time to fully wrap ones mind around it. For each Good Pitch event, six to eight documentary lms with strong, social-issue components are selected to participate in a single-day pitch forum where lmmakers have seven minutes to pitch their lms and show clips or trailers. Representatives from various NGOs, foundations, philanthropies, brands and media, whose institutional goals dovetail with lms from the lineup, then discuss the documentaries with the lmmakers at public roundtables, while 200 to 400 more representatives watch from the audience. The lms are selected by BRITDOC and the Sundance Institute. BRITDOCs Chief Executive Jess Search and Foundation Directors Beadie Finzi and Maxyne Franklin created Good Pitch in response to narrowing distribution and funding opportunities within the industry, with the Sundance In-

stitute getting involved early on as a North American partner. Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program Director Cara Mertes told me in an interview, This is a forum for lms that want to affect change, lms that want to have some kind of social or political impact, which not every lm wants to do. Its not meant to serve the entire contemporary documentary eld, and thats a choice that weve made because we do see more resources, partnerships and, in a way, imperative around this set [of lms]. Good Pitchs simple but radical idea is that, rather than go to the same handful of lm industry funders, participants are trained to conceive of a far wider variety of sources for not only funding but also screening and outreach support. These are sources that havent been inundated by hundreds of lm pitches a year and who have as much to gain by partnering with a lm relevant to their causes as the lmmakers do. For invited lmmakers, the process begins three months in advance of the event with several conversations with Good Pitch Outreach Director Sandi DuBowski, who pioneered inventive engagement campaigns for his own lms (Trembling Before G-d, A Jihad For Love)

Good Pitch San Francisco 2012

long before engagement became the buzzword it is today. With palpable enthusiasm, he starts the process by brainstorming a list of organizations that can be invited to sit at the lmmakers roundtable and, ideally, make a commitment the day of the pitch. Our lm, Remote Area Medical, explores the state of the American health care system by documenting a free pop-up clinic built for just one April weekend on the ineld of a NASCAR motor speedway in Bristol, Tenn. Given our subject, the benet of being introduced to public health organizations around the country was clear. But not only did DuBowski turn our vague ideas about building relationships in the medical community into a tangible list of Good Pitch prospects, he also helped us tease out less obvious thematic strands in the lm in order to identify other partnership opportunities. These themes included volunteerism, which led to us inviting VolunteerMatch to our table. Lucy Walker, who attended Good Pitch with her latest feature documentary The Crash Reel, said of the process, No matter how coy or anxious you might be feeling about reaching out to new partners, [Sandi will] nd ways to encourage, or indeed force, you to get over any shyness or reluctance and reach out. Leading up to the actual pitch day, we had months of gentle and not-so-gentle pressure, which has netted us some remarkably exciting partnerships and laid the groundwork for a thrilling and hugely impactful campaign. Some of the organizations we approached with DuBowski had never participated in a lm event before, or ever considered doing so, and had to be convinced of the Good Pitch philosophy, which insists that documentary lms can be powerful tools for any organization. Patrick Creadon, director of participating lm Studio H, said, by the time we headed off to San Francisco, I thought we might be joining a cult, with this passionate and ery leader named Sandi DuBowski. Hes very demanding of participants, in a good way. He expects you to show up having done

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PHOTO BY IAN DAVIS; COURTESY OF GOOD PITCH

your homework and to have really bought into what Good Pitch is and what it can be. After nishing the process of prepping with DuBowski and populating our roundtable, Jeff and I focused on the demands of the pitch day itself, only to realize we had given little thought to the campaign development workshop beforehand. As it turns out, like the submerged portion of the iceberg, the intensive prep (two days followed by a day of rest before the pitch, though most of the lmmakers used this time to continue rening their pitch on their own) is the most signicant part of the Good Pitch experience. Many pitch forums and conferences will do brief sessions on how to pitch, but few events workshop how a lm is presented with such rigor and focus. As we settled into a circle around a conference room at the Bay Area Video Coalition, Dubowski announced that he was literally jumping out of his skin with excitement. He introduced the rest of the team, and then we started by giving the pub version of our pitch, talking about the lm the way we might to a friend at a party. A lot of the new material that Jeff and I wound up adding to our pitch came from this seemingly humble warm-up, from details that we thought too idiosyncratic or slight to be part of a formal pitch, but that others found incredibly memorable. Examples include the use of the word pop-up, sharing how the 20 members of our crew all stayed in a house together, and the perspective I gained on Americas health care crisis coming from Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. Then there was a cycle of formally pitching to the room, receiving feedback, and returning to the hotel to lick our wounds and rewrite for the next round. The advice from the lmmakers and organizers involved everything from making basic concepts clearer to wording and order of ideas to what personal elements to include in the pitch and how to craft certain phrases so they catch the attention of particular funders. Some of our lmmaker colleagues even recut their trailer or feverishly created new animation over the course of the prep days. The result of this two-day session was that we talked and even thought about our lm differently and more effectively. Anthony Arnove, who is producing the highly anticipated drone strike expos Dirty Wars with Brenda Coughlin, said of the peerto-peer process, There were a number of

Good Pitchs Jess Search and Sandi DuBowski

Good Pitch revolves around a belief system. A belief that film can change the world, in the power of small details to create big ripples.
times when [fellow lmmakers] said something better than we had said it ourselves, and we incorporated it into our general way of talking about the lm. Indeed, while having mentors like DuBowski, Search and Mertes in the room was an incredible opportunity, it was the lmmaker powwow that really made these sessions special. There is no reason why someone who doesnt have the opportunity to go to Good Pitch couldnt recreate that at home with a group of likeminded fellow lmmakers. Jeff and I had pitched Remote Area Medical at three other events over the past year (at the Sundance Documentary Fellows Program, Sundance Creative Producers Summit and IFPs Independent Film Week) in one-on-one sessions, to some degree of success, but many of the issues that came up in the Good Pitch workshop we had never considered. There are things that make for a good pitch in any context, and then there are things that make for a good Good Pitch pitch. First, personal information is far more crucial to a room full of nonlmies. Ive been under the impression that while people like to know what brought lmmakers to a project, that personal note shouldnt be dwelled upon. But at Good Pitch, where many organizations dont customarily review lm projects, that information is of particular value. It makes it clear to them why you are the right person to tell the story youre presenting. Seeing your personal investment, your dedication, makes them condent in your ability to follow through. Things that I tend to mention in passing the fact that we volunteered at a clinic before deciding to make the lm, or my background in distribution were now the things that people commented on at the reception following the main event. By the same token, some of the techniques Ive learned about pitching in oneon-one or small group sessions needed to be thrown out the window in a public pitch environment, particularly one with time constraints as stringent as Good Pitch. For example, I considered the ability to adapt a pitch based on reactions to read the room a strength. Is the exec at the other
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PHOTO COURTESY OF GOOD PITCH

Farihah Zaman and Jeff Reicherts Remote Area Medical

end of the table not that interested in the description of your lm as predominantly vrit? No problem, delve into the fact that it is character-driven instead. At Good Pitch, however, consistency was far more important than adaptability. These ideas of being personal and being rehearsed speak to the theatricality of the event; the Good Pitch team has considered every single detail in terms of organization and production, from the theater-in-theround design of the room (the architecture of collaboration as DuBowski calls it), to the inclusion of break times when people can connect. While we lmmakers agonized over our pitches, the stunningly charismatic Search, who served as emcee of the event, and DuBowski strategized about things like

TOP 10 PITCHING TIPS FROM THE 2012 GOOD PITCH SAN FRANCISCO CREW:
1 Invest yourself as much as possible during the workshop in the other lms, lmmaking teams and pitches. You are all in this together and can really help each other make the most out of Good Pitch. Gillian Caldwell, producer/engagement strategist, Citizen Koch. Caldwell has a more in-depth list of tips available at the Good Pitch website 2 Make it personal and real. Try not to sound scripted. Suzan Beraza, director, Uranium Drive-In 3 Be fun, pithy, memorable, and above all clear and specic. Cut out every single boring word. Present all your basic information in a clear way. Practice about 10 times more than you think you need to. Lucy Walker, director, The Crash Reel 4 Pitch it to your teammates and then pitch it to people who dont know anything about you, and listen to the questions that those people ask you. Patrick Creadon, director, Studio H) 5 Personal connection is so important. Potential partners in the room have to understand why to invest in a lmmaker or in a campaign. They have to feel the passion for the story and for the work that the lmmaker and their team will do with their project in the world. We have to feel the impact. Why will this lm make a difference? Sandi DuBowski, Outreach Director, Good Pitch 6 Telling the story in the rst person, living your story as youre telling it theres nothing more powerful than seeing your certitude and your belief and your passion; your commitment to the story and your knowledge about the story. Cara Mertes, director, Sundance Institute Documentary Fellowship Program 7 Dont forget that youre able to show clips from your lm. Letting your lm speak for itself is important. Youre there in service of your lm, and the burden isnt just on you making a really compelling presentation. Understanding that your lm can do a lot of the work for you takes a little bit of the pressure off and also takes you back to the space of why youre doing the work youre doing in the rst place. Anthony Arnove, producer, Dirty Wars 8 Make sure your trailer is clear and emotive, but it doesnt have to tell the whole story. It just has to get people interested in hearing the whole story. Cara Mertes 9 Consider approaching one of your donors that will be joining you at the table and asking them to make a challenge grant from the table at Good Pitch with a time-limited duration to spur additional giving from the audience. Apprise the Good Pitch team about the pledge in advance, and ask them not to announce any matches made right away so as to maximize donor possibilities throughout the day. Gillian Caldwell 10 It is about being very clear about needs. We encourage lmmakers to just articulate what they need. Be clear about money, be exact about money. And think big. Sandi DuBowski
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PHOTO COURTESY OF FARIHAH ZAMAN

placing sympathetic audience members near a oor mic to encourage them to speak up, or calling on an already-committed advocate at the table before a newcomer so that the latter would be convinced by the groundswell of support accumulating around the project. Occasionally Search and Dubowski would know about a recent development in a lms situation and ask that it be publicly announced for the rst time during a pitch in order to heighten the sense of drama and urgency. While we had been privately informed in advance of the event that we had been given a Pare Lorentz grant from the International Documentary Association, Good Pitch invited a representative from IDA to sit at our table and announce then and there that they were committing to supporting Remote Area Medical. Search announced midway through The Yes Mens pitch that the Kickstarter campaign for The Yes Men are Revolting had gone live and stats suggest that lms that receive a certain amount in donations within the rst 24 hours are extremely likely to reach their overall goal. This prompted a urry of audience members to donate to the campaign on their smartphones, then announce they had done so to the room and via social media, creating a delicious feedback loop of buzz. It should be noted that The Yes Men did, in fact, raise nearly 50 percent more than their goal of $100,000. More than at other pitch events, the lmmakers are the entertainment here. This means they can and should do things like bring the subject of their lm, as Walker did when she introduced snowboarder Kevin Pierce to an audience of people still tearful over seeing him suffer a devastating accident in her trailer. It also means that sometimes pitch suggestions are made that self-conscious types might nd gimmicky. For instance, Casey Nay, co-editor and coproducer of Uranium Drive-In, was cajoled by Dubowski and Search into wearing a cowboy hat from his very real days doing rodeo so that the audience could visualize his connection to the lm, which is about the debate surrounding the opening of a mine in a tiny, struggling rural town not far from the one he grew up in. Nay said, I actually loved wearing my rodeo clothes. The businessman in me didnt want to wear my hat at rst.Sandi and Jess won out though, as soon as it was decided that we should include my story. It was almost like an extension of the lm because people dont see that culture

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Good Pitch is ultimately like a great first date for filmmakers, but you have to work on the relationship if you want it to turn into something more than that.
up close every day. Andy Bichlbaum, one half of The Yes Men, struggled to determine whether he should pitch as his Yes Men persona or as himself, or some combination of the two. In the end he gave a straight pitch in a hilarious survival pod from a previous performance piece, allowing him to both take the pitch seriously and show the audience his team knows how to address an issue with playful humor. Documentary lmmakers are not necessarily used to being the entertainment, and nervousness among the Good Pitch teams was palpable on the day of the event. Before our pitch, I rocked back and forth in a corner, rehearsing it to myself in a slightly unhinged fashion. As a rst-time lmmaker, being sandwiched in the schedule between Lucy Walker, Academy Award-nominated lmmaker and pitching pro, and The Yes Men, who have spent the entirety of their careers perfecting how to be both funny and thought-provoking via public performance, did nothing to calm my nerves. At least I knew people were unlikely to leave. But in many ways, Good Pitch is a far friendlier room than other pitch events because participants are made to anticipate both an inspiring show and a brave new venture for their business or organization. Unlike some lm funders, they are not there thinking, how am I going to eliminate projects from this list of promising lms so I can make my see page 108
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can independent films. They do a lot of Latin American movies and French movies. We were at New Directors/New Films and Marian Masone introduced me to [head of sales and acquisitions] Eric [Schnedecker] at a brunch before our movie was about to screen. I was like, Just go see it. Heres two tickets. And he was like, I want to watch Mad Men all day. I said, Go see the movie. [Afterwards he said], I love this movie. We dont really do independent American movies, but that could help. We can say to film festivals and international distributors, You know us, we dont normally do films like this. This isnt just an indie hipster movie. Theres something really exciting and fresh about it. And youve had good sales? Weve had good sales. We have this great French distribution deal with Diaphana, and its coming out Jan. 2. We have a great U.K. deal with Soda Pictures. Have there been surprises, things you didnt plan on during this process? I didnt plan on a French distributor flying me out to Paris three times to do press and to have it come out on 40 screens in France. What about the process of filmmaking? What did you learn? What it confirmed for me, which I already knew, is that I do not produce. I dont know what is wrong with you guys, [laughs] but I love directing so much. And I hope this doesnt sound pretentious, but, obviously, I believe in myself. You dont do this if you dont believe in yourself. I really thought I could do it. Im nowhere near a master craftsman. But I think theres no doubt Im a much better filmmaker now than I was a year and a half ago. I do not, however, think that Im a better filmmaker because of Cannes or because of an Independent Spirit Award [nomination]. Its through the process of making the film that I learned so many things. I read interviews with filmmakers, whether they are Robert Altman or even Steven Spielberg, who say that they are always learning. They learn something from every project. And thats one of the things I really love about it.

ALL AT SEA
from page 87 the action would be accompanied by a gasping sound recorded on the sync soundtrack. In another auspicious and thoroughly bizarre instance of accidental sound/image occurrences, Karel noticed that in one par108 FILMMAKER WINTER 2013

ticular shot, as a seagull crosses in front of the moon, the mic recorded a sizzle as if the bird was momentarily immolating. While most sound designers might have discarded the compromised GoPro sync soundtracks, Karel instead sought to maximize their expressive potential, bringing out the resonant frequencies and keeping the accidental sound artifacts. (The purest example of this occurs at the very end of Leviathan during a two-and-a-half-minute shot of seagulls disappearing into blackness, which is the one piece of music composed for the lm.) However, even after Karels nuanced mix, the soundtrack remained abrasive. According to Ribicoff, the lmmakers questioned how much assault the audience could realistically take, especially given that the soundtrack is primarily abstract. At what point would the audience lose the sense that they were on a ship? Ribicoffs work focused on keeping the audience in the present moment by building out a robust sonic landscape and pumping up the horror elements to dramatic effect. He added sound effects in nearly every scene (including some limited foley for water sounds), enhancing textures and isolating specic sound events. (If you are alert, you may catch the one sly musical reference, which appears diegetic but was added in post.) Ribicoff, taking full advantage of the 5.1 mix, sculpted dynamic sonic arcs that key into the dramatic arcs of each scene. Just as the cameras continually move through space, the lms sound continually moves around the theater, giving a palpable sense of dimensionality to the soundtrack. The lm, which is set for a March U.S. release from Cinema Guild, is about to take on new life at this years Berlinale, where the lmmakers will unveil three versions of the lm to be exhibited as installations. The main piece, provisionally titled Abyssal Loss, will screen once daily for the duration of the festival as a six-hour version of the lm without sound in which we view the lm at one frame per second. During the process of editing Leviathan, the lmmakers discovered spectral gures appearing in single frames, primarily in the underwater shots. These apparitions may be the visual analog to the mysterious resonances that is, digital artifacts recorded on the cameras sensor. But just as the lm is seemingly haunted by forces that remain just out of view, we can take comfort in the fact that not knowing may be much more useful than knowing.

POSITIVE FIRST IMPRESSIONS

from page 97 limited grant budget count? At one point, when my partner was sharing the story of how our unconventional distribution strategy for Gerrymandering, his rst lm, helped overturn unjust redistricting practices in the state of California, people actually applauded. For a moment, I was stupidly perplexed. I didnt understand that they were clapping for us. I thought, There are places in the world where people applaud you en masse for making a dent in an arcane and confusing piece of legislation? And in what parallel universe are distinctly unfamous lmmakers, like myself, essentially bum rushed after a presentation, so eager are people in very powerful positions to talk with us about our lm? There was no better evidence of the success of the Good Pitch method of approaching and preparing an audience than the enthusiasm of the audience throughout the day. Amped-up participants aside, however, I know the incredible reception of our pitch was due also to the workshopping process. A few points of the Remote Area Medical pitch have been around since the beginning, like the succinct statement that this is a lm about people, not politics, and that it is as much about shedding a light on the ignored communities of rural America as it is about health care. We have been lucky enough to have a strong trailer that boasts all the benets of a sound mix and color correct, thanks to the funding of the Cinelan/GE partnership Focus Forward, which commissioned a three-minute Remote Area Medical short (available on the Focus Forward website). Many of our most effective points, however, were brand new. Although elements of the pitchs content were geared toward a more politically charged audience, and elements of its delivery dont seem appropriate for an audience of two rather than two hundred, the presentation of Remote Area Medical that emerged from Good Pitch San Francisco is basically how we now pitch the lm in situations ranging from casual conversations to lm festival applications. Jeff and I went from starting off with an explanation of what the organization Remote Area Medical does, a pitch more for the group than for the lm, to the more provocative statement, Everything you need to know about health care in America can be learned by attending just one free medical clinic. We went into the fact that we de-