I was in DC last week for the annual Making Your Media Matter conference hosted by AU's Center for Social Media. It was my first experience sitting in an audience of hundreds of people with laptops open, all surfing the web, emailing, and tweeting reports about the conference as it happened.George Stoney (above), 87 years old and still making films, spoke on ethics in social issue film. It was also great hearing from Alice Myatt from Grantmakers in Film & Electronic Media about their amazing online database to help connect film projects with funders.
Most of the talk was about outreach for social documentaries. Ages ago, filmmakers would make a film THEN think about its audience. In the past ten years or so, we've learned that it's good to start your outreach as you are making the film. But one of the big messages of this conference was that now you should start building the audience for your film before you even shoot a frame. Facebook, Twitter, and Blog away!