Day 3: In Between & In Conclusion

Kate Beverly and Miranda Edmonds love their AIDC Book.

Well, I’m almost near the end of Day 3 and so I will wind up with a smorgasbord of impressions. Here are some of the folk I met between the sessions.

Day 3: A Man Called Joost

Okay, yesterday I called NORM BOLEN ubiquitous, but even higher up the ubiquity ladder is the Conference Director JOOST DEN HARTOG. He was everywhere at once. And no, there’s no such thing as a ubiquity ladder, I made it up.

Day 3: The MeetMarket

Martina, Dale and David – The MeetMarket Team

For those who didn’t necessarily want the public pressure of the DOCUmart there was another way to connect with buyers at the MeetMarket. I spoke with MeetMarket manager, the AFC’s DALE FAIRBAIRN. She explained that a call for pitches from filmmakers had been made in October. Fifty-five applications were received. These were written and filmed pitches that were made available to an international panel of buyers on the MeetMarket website. If a buyer thought a project sounded interesting they registered that interest online. From here the fifty-five projects were culled down to twenty that were invited to the AIDC in Perth.

Day 3: Greenaway

Hail Documentarians,

We were all a little excited and starstruck, director PETER GREENAWAY, the most painterly of all filmmakers was the keynote speaker of the conference. If you’re a Generation X-er like myself, then you’ll remember Greenaway making ground-breaking films like The Draughtsman Contract (1982), A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987) The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). And no, not a documentary among them.

Day 2: Web Slingers

NORM BOLEN was everywhere. On page 34 of your invaluable AIDC brochure, it outlines his years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Alliance Atlantis Communications. So, Day 2, he was being ubiquitous. There he was moderating a number of DOCUmart sessions and now here he was in the Yellow Room talking about Making Money on the Web.

“If you want to be part of the digital future,” he said, “You have to future proof”. As is often the case at in conference world, a speaker was employing the rhetorical device of saying that a particular cycle, genre, format or model of business was at an end. Code Blue! Crash cart – stat!

Day 2: No Business Like Shoe Business

Martin Potter talking shoes and Katerina Cizek

Between sessions whilst trying something faddish called a ‘vegetarian’ (I think) baguette, I met MARTIN POTTER, Manager of Development and programs from the Media Resource Centre in Adelaide. Martin was asking ALAN CARTER from Alley Kat Productions where he got his neo Dunlop Volleys from. Shoes. Bringing the world together.

We discussed the world from a Screen Resources Organisation point of view. When not blogging the AIDC, I work at the Film and Television Institute in Fremantle. So there was the interest of hearing where certain things were similar and others were different in this very particular sector of the Australian filmmaking landscape.

Martin also wanted to make mention of a Q&A session he had done with filmmaker Katerina Cizek, the day before. She had been satellite linked from Canada. Click here to find out more about Cizek’s work as a filmmaker in residence.

The contents of this Blog are the sole opinions of the author Phil Jeng Kane, and it does not represent the views of ScreenWest or the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC).

Day 2: Follow The Story

Friends and colleagues had told me that the DOCUmart part of AIDC was quite compelling, even if you weren’t part of the main action. At this DOCUmart, 16 projects were being pitched before the panel of national and international buyers.

I walked into the big room and saw a rectangular formation of tables. On one of the rectangle’s short sides the Moderators sat. Opposite, on the other short side, sat the pitching team. On the remaining long sides, sat the buyers. Wherever the audience sat in the room, you could see the action on two large screens.

The teams came up, sat down and began their pitch, sometimes with an accompanying clip or powerpoint presentation. Those of us in the audience had a detailed folder to read from, giving an outline of the project, budget summary and team CV details. If you’ve never pitched in this kind of environment, you could not sit here and not learn something.

Day 2: Show Me The Money

Hail Documentarians,

Day 2 of the conference dawned. I drank coffee and flipped through the FFC’s facts guide to the Producer Offset. Or the Producer Upset, as SANDY GEORGE had called it the day before. On page 3 of FFC’s graphically dramatic A-5 pamphlet it says, “The Producer Offset is 40% of Qualifying Australian Production Expenditure incurred on feature film and 20% of Qualifying Australian Production Expenditure incurred on projects that are not feature films.”

I mention this, not because I have any idea of the practicalities of this, but more by way of observing that understanding how a policy plays out in the real world is meat and drink for Producers, Funding Body types and Broadcasters. The market place side of a conference like the AIDC is where ALL the action is for probably a majority of the delegates at the conference.

Day 1: But Wait, There’s More…

So,

By the afternoon I was getting the hang of all this conferencing. It helped that I ate none of the muffins, biscuits, cookies or friands on offer. In fact, I barely noticed them, because I was concentrating on the concepts that some very committed doco people were getting across in the sessions. And not eating the free baked goods.

First, in the session What’s Cooking In The World of Australian Documentary?, DAVID TILEY, editor of Screen Hub presented an elegant overview of Australian documentary world; although, a number of his insights also applied to drama equally as well.

Day 1: The 700

AIDC Volunteers Jaclyn Hewer and Janine Boreland

So, I went to a session, in the Yellow Room, entitled The Doc is Dead – Long Live The Doc. Moderator SIMON NASHT explained that there is always a session at every doc conference with a name like this one.

The panel was heavy with Commissioning Editors current and past. Their consensus was that the one-off doco had fallen out of favour with broadcasters and that series were very much in favour because of their ability to build audience through promotion. DENISE ERIKSEN of SBS and ABC’s DASHA ROSS discussed looking for a documentary that could get a 700 audience. We noobs were told that this meant a national audience of 700 000.