One of Documentary Edge Festival’s pioneering features throughout their tenure is the industry work done to develop new documentaries, upskill filmmakers and its advocacy work as the leading documentary body in New Zealand.

One of Documentary Edge Festival’s pioneering features throughout their tenure is the industry work done to develop new documentaries, upskill filmmakers and its advocacy work as the leading documentary body in New Zealand.

Previously known as the DOCNZ Summit and Pitching Forum, the Documentary Edge Forum is joined this year with the exciting new Doc Lab. Both will encourage the creation of new ideas and platforms for documentary filmmaking.

Doc Lab is Documentary Edge Festival’s latest initiative that is looking to future proof the documentary industry. By seeking to embrace and meet the challenges of new technology and different media platforms, Doc Lab will foster innovations to conventions as to what defines documentary and how it is delivered to the public.

The two day lab, taking place the 27th and 28th of February at Auckland University of Technology's (AUT) COLAB, teams will take documentary ideas and implement them into technology such as 3G/streaming mobile phone media, social networking, internet delivery, animation, podcasts, gaming and online worlds (such as Second Life, or perhaps even MMPORPG's such as World of Warcraft).

Facilitated by leading US expert Wendy Levy (Bay Area Video Coalition Producer's Institute) together with an international team of mentors from USA, UK, Australia and NZ, there is an emphasis for teams to recognize the urgency to develop works for these new platforms and the possibilities of different, new prototypes for content creation and delivery, acting overall as an incubator enabling the presenters the opportunity to further develop their projects by sharing ideas alongside a mentorship programme based on feedback and interactive participation.

An annual industry event, bringing together local and international filmmakers and industry types to share their knowledge and skills as well as to bounce ideas amongst each other, Documentary Edge Forum also aims to facilitate local film makers to pitch ideas to local and overseas funders, buyers, broadcasters and festival programmers, adding in an element of business within the event.

Held from the 1st to the 3rd of March at AUT, previous events have been attended by Australian broadcasters (ABC and SBS), US broadcasters (PBS and ITVS), Asian broadcasters (NHK and  Al Jazeera International0, international festival programmers, sales agents and distributors  as well as leading award winning filmmakers; ready discover this year’s hotbed of documentary talent from these shores.

The Forum also helps to provide solutions to problems documentary filmmakers may be presented with by presenting workshops dealing with topics such as writing for documentaries, documentary series and the more complex issues of proposal writing, budgets and creating recreations/docu-dramas. Sessions this year include discussing the future of documentary, the introduction of selected DOCNZ Lab 2010 projects, s.92A Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act may affect creative freedoms and the New Zealand Film Commission’s recently announced documentary funding strategy and how the criteria will be interpreted.

More information:
 
For more information on Documentary Edge Forum 2010 or the films on show at this year’s festival, visit www.documentaryedge.org.nz