Documentary Talk (Michael Apton, 2014) | USA

The most important thing in starting a documentary, is finding a problem that you’re passionate about in the world. Michael Apton did exactly that. He found a problem in a third world country and went out on his great journey in order to find a solution to the problem. Michael Apton grew up in the United States and always loved to read. Reading was and always has been one of his favorite passions in life, even more so than film. He also loved to listen to podcasts. He listened to every podcast he could that interested him. Those two things, reading and podcasts were really his teachers that taught him about knowledge that he needed to know in order to become an effective and successful documentary filmmaker.

During the talk, Mr. Apton said how hard he had to work just to get funding for his project. He got funding for his project by an online website called Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a website where people from all around the world can donate money to your project if they believe in your project. That is how he got the funding for his documentary. Funding, according to him was one of the hardest parts about the entire filming process. That is because it costs a lot of money to travel different countries and to edit and make a film . Especially, if your doing it mostly on your own like he did. Mr. Apton also said that most of the funding that you will get for a film will be through acquaintances, family, and friends. Once you make a couple of films and gain some exposure than people will trust you more in financing you documentary film. Another important aspect of raising funds for documentary films is to find your target audience that care about and feel just as passionately about the problem you are trying to address in your documentary. That is because if someone truly believes in a problem and feels like it needs to be addressed than they are more likely to provide funding for your documentary film project. Also, documentary films are mostly self-funded because it is harder to raise money for them. He even edited his own documentary, it took him an entire year just to edit the film. The entire process took about 3 and a half years between 2009 and 2013. Another invaluable peace of advice that Mr. Apton gave to my class about making films during the talk was that in order to learn how to make films you really have to just go out there and  make films. You can’t just study films and expect to know the intracacies of filmmaking. Mr. Apton said that you should just go out there with a camera and just film something, anything, and edit it. You will learn from doing just that than you will from studying any film. That is because studying something and actually doing something are two very different things. You really have to know just go out there and make mistakes and learn from them in order to bring light to issues around the world. And that is exactly what documentary films do, they are a very emotionally powerful way to help make the world a better place for us all.