Documentaries are hot now, and here’s why: technology has become available in such a way that, armed with a decent camera and a laptop, anyone with a good sense of story-telling and the patience to shoot and edit it well can make a decent documentary film that could go national. (Not so true of yr blockbuster adventure film.)

Third quarter film project is a documentary, 3 to 10 minutes long, that tells a story, rich with visual information, about

• an event

• an issue

• a place

• a person

• a process

• a phenomenon

Takes a lot of planning, so start thinking right away of what you want to make and how you’d go about doing it.

Meanwhile, you might try watching a lot of documentaries and reading about them to get yourselves some ideas. True films is a good place to look, at Kevin Kelly’s website. By the way, this year’s Oscar nominations for best feature doc are:

• Exit through the Gift Shop, Banksy and Jaimie D’Cruz
• Gasland, Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic
• Inside Job, Charles Ferguson and Audrey Marrs
• Restrepo, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger
• Waste Land, Lucy Walker and Angus Aynsley