Acknowledgments

Documentary filmmaking is a collaborative art, so it stands to reason that a book about the topic, especially one with the scope of the current volume, could not have been made without the support and insights of many people.

First and foremost, we are deeply indebted to Mick Hurbis-Cherrier, the author of Voice & Vision: A Creative Approach to Narrative Film and DV Production. This book is a companion to that excellent resource, and we thank Mick for his generosity in coming up with the idea of a companion documentary book, his trust that we had the breadth of vision and expertise to do it, and for his guiding hand and wise feedback throughout. We also owe a special thanks to Gustavo Mercado, who did all the illustrations in the original book. His deep technical knowledge and pedagogical ability are evident in everything he does, and many of his images were inspirations for the illustrations in this book.

We also wish to thank our colleagues in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, for their ongoing support and creative inspiration. In particular, we are grateful for the support we receive from James Roman, Peter Jackson, Renato Tonelli, Andrew Lund, Tami Gold, Stuart Ewen, Shanti Thakur, Michael Gitlin, and Ricardo Miranda.

This book would not be what it is without our students at Hunter College, at the undergraduate level and in the MFA program in Integrated Media Arts, over the past several decades. Their astute questions and observations about documentary have informed our teaching in myriad ways, and that is reflected in this book. Several Hunter students and alumni helped out in the production of this book specifically, including Shaun Persaud, Roberto Mendez, and Christine Chee. The unsung heroine of this book is Julia Main, who stuck with us throughout the process, and without whose organizational skills this book could not have survived past its infancy.

We also want to thank those filmmakers whose support you will find evidence of in our pages. We are indebted to them for providing much of the “meat” on the bones of the book, in the form of interviews we conducted with them. They include Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís, Nathan Fitch, Edin Velez, Jay Rosenstein, Tami Gold, Lynne Sachs, Annie Goldson, Julie Gustafson, Keith Wilson, S. Leo Chiang, David Alvarado, Andrew Lund, Ann Bennett, Iva Radivojevic, JT Takagi, Annukka Lilja, Brian Boyd, and Brian Lerch.

In addition, there were many times we reached out to expand our own knowledge of specific areas. We are more than grateful to Robert Bahar for allowing us to adapt his excellent article on documentary budgeting, first published on the International Documentary Association’s website. Others to whom we owe thanks for sharing their expertise are Gary Griffin, Keith Shapiro at Frame:Runner, Gisburg Smialek at Harvestworks, Jon Miller of Icarus Films, and Basil Tsiokos. Veronique Bernard shared invaluable insight about development, Sabine Hoffman contributed thoughts about editing, and Deirdre Fishel shared her editor’s valuable time and her AVID project. Thank you to Daniel Brooks and Fiona Boneham, and their son Lochlan who plays the trumpet.

We are also appreciative of all the people whose likenesses appear in these pages because they are part of illustrations we use as examples. These include Mariaelena Gonzalez, Harley Spiller, and Justin Hill, as well as countless others who appear in the films represented but remain unacknowledged.

We are grateful to President Jennifer Raab, Provost Vita Rabinowitz, and Dean Andrew Polsky at Hunter College, who supported us with grants for research and editing. We also wish to thank the creative team at Focal Press, particularly Emily McCloskey, Elliana Arons and Tamsyn Hopkins for their patience and quick responses throughout this process.

No acknowledgment would be complete without mentioning Jay Rosenstein, whose thoughtful comments made this book a much better one than it would otherwise have been.

To our families, especially Prudence Hill and Sofia Velez, we offer love and appreciation for their patience as we worked on a book that seemed to have no end.