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MediaRights: Year In Review 2008

Published on December 16, 2008

by Kasmore Rhedrick, MediaRights.org web editor

As we wrap up 2008 and our annual mission to highlight the different ways that filmmakers, social activist and educators are engaging with media to bring about the positive changes they want to witness in the world we thought it would be best to bring your attention to some of the breakout articles of the past year.

Image by James Willamor via Flickr

Kicking off, quite literally, 2008 we published "Three Things Documentary Filmmakers Can Learn from the Super Bowl." This article put a spotlight on the distribution, promotion and community building activities of the NFL's "Big Game" and offered tips that could be used by independent filmmakers to achieve the same winning results associated with America's most popular sporting event.

Production trends and methods were the focus in March and April when we published the Upstream Article, by Shira Golding "Drawing Truth: Animation in Documentary" and Brittany Mayne's "Scoring It Big: Adding Music to Your Film." Both pieces cover the use of emerging technology and online communities to aid in the production of documentary film.

A woman's first time ever seeing herself on video, through an iPod.
Photo by Ryan Golembeske.

Identity politics was also called into question with the wildly popular and often republished - on other blogs and online publications - "Feminism 3.0: Moving Forward by Looking Back," where author Julia Barry discusses how feminists and women mediamakers should return to the original feminist spirit of community building and shared empowerment to foster social change.

Youth activism and the youth audience were covered by Pamela Cohn's "Outreach Journal: Press Play Productions--Bridging the Gap Between the Classroom and Pop Culture," where she interviews Jenna Arnold of Press Play Productions to discover how she raises social awareness via the reality show genre. The Media That Matters Film Festival highlighted films produced by filmmakers under the age of 18 in their "Youth Activism: Take Action Pack" to help us think creatively about how we raise awareness, encourage activism and heighten media literacy skills in our youth audience.

Katy Chevigny, Executive Director of Arts Engine

The role of the documentary film was addressed in Katy Chevigny's "Assessing Success" and Zach Dubinsky's interview "Doc, Doc, Who's There: A Conversation with Thom Powers at TIFF08." The Thom Powers interview discusses the place of documentaries at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival as well as their role in wider culture where as Katy Chevigny's article comments on the increasing popularity of the documentary, particularly those whose subject matter more easily allows for monetization and what is to become of those films that have less commercial appeal but are equally as substantive.

Other elements affecting today's documentary filmmaker include the debate over intellectual property rights -- "Copyleft, Copyright and Everything in Between" and "Some Rights Reserved" -- or unique issues such as "The ABCs of Feeding Your Cast & Crew" and Kathryn Robertson's "Managing Perspective: Wrestling Heavy Issues Without Getting Weighed Down," which deals with the stress associated with working on heartbreaking stories.

We "branched out" this past year to cover social activist issues with pieces like "Resistance is Fertile: It's Time to Start Guerrilla Gardening" and filmmaker and scholar Sabrina McCormick's effort to shift the dialog in breast cancer awareness from treating the symptoms to preventing the illness. Her article "Reframing the Fight: Why Prevention is the Cure for Breast Cancer" argues that our support for genre changing films like Toxic Bust which screened at this year's Breast Fest Film Festival, the world's first film festival dedicated entirely to films about Breast Cancer, and her own film No Family History are important methods to getting the public and our politicians to address the everyday environmental exposures linked to the disease.

Finally, in November, we highlighted the DocuClub selection Made In LA with the article "Outreach Journal: Made in L.A." where we explored the symbiotic relationship between filmmaker and community and unearthed the creative and successful techniques used by Producers Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo to gather the funds and resources to promote and distribute their award-winning film.

2008 was an eventful year for MediaRights and the independent film community at large. I hope you had much pleasure reading over the past twelve months our industry related interviews, feature-length articles and special features: the Upstream column, Outreach Journal and the Shortlist. Please stay tuned in the new year, as we will continue to offer the best and freshest content for the mediamaker, social activist and educator who is concerned about media that matters.

This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.

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