Workshops
Hone your skills in the development of compelling long and short form documentaries.
There are no available registration dates at this time.
This one-week workshop is for independent filmmakers, PBS, cable, business and network producers, historians and researchers, who want to improve their skill in developing and making professional long and short documentaries for television, the web and business. The class includes hands on experience in interviewing, lighting, pitching, editing, backdrops, locations and more. We screen and critique a diverse variety of documentary work for style, content, point-of-view, and production values.
The workshop covers funding, producing, directing, editing, copyright, archives, rights, research methods, budgets, story structure, interviewing, music, distribution, and how to position a project for national broadcast, foreign sales and internet distribution. Students have the opportunity to research local stories, shoot interviews, and edit a short segment for presentation and critique. Students may also bring their previously produced work for review.
Image Credit: Amanda Piela, Header Image Credit: Devin Altobello
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Instructor: Lawrence Hott
Lawrence Hott has been producing documentary films since 1978, when he left the practice of law to join Florentine Films. His awards include an Emmy, two Academy Award nominations, a George Foster Peabody Award, the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, the Erik Barnouw Award, five American Film Festival Blue Ribbons, fourteen CINE Golden Eagles, screenings at Telluride and first-place awards from the San Francisco, Chicago, National Educational, and New England Film Festivals. Hott was the Fulbright Fellow in Film and Television in the United Kingdom in 1994. He received the Humanities Achievement Award from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities in 1995; a Massachusetts Cultural Council/Boston Film and Video Foundation Fellowship in 2001; and the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism in 2001. He has been on the board of non-fiction writers at Smith College and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Commission, and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts Sciences. His films for national PBS broadcast include Through Deaf Eyes, American Masters: John James Audubon: Drawn From Nature, Niagara Falls, The Return of the Cuyahoga, Imagining Robert, The War of 1812, The Warrior Tradition, Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America, Rising Voices/ Hótȟaŋiŋpi : The Revitalization of the Lakota Language, SciTech Band: Pride of Springfield, and North America By Design: A Series of Five Short Films for the Library of American Landscape History.
