Bay Bottom News

Bay Bottom News  produced Jump at the Sun, a documentary on the life of anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston, in conjunction with PBS’ American Masters series.

Bay Bottom News, has created many highly-acclaimed films for local, state, and national distribution. A long time resident of Tampa-St. Pete , Producer-Writer Kristy Andersen takes special interest in productions that concern Florida’s environment, history, and culture.

Please visit our Credits page for a list of other people whose work and talent infused the documentary, and for a list of the funders and co-producers for the film.

The Elevator Pitch

A good elevator pitch should last no longer than a short elevator ride of 30 seconds to 3 minutes, hence the name.  

You should practice your elevator pitch, regardless of whether you will be able to pitch to someone at your favorite movie studio or art gallery. It will help you to encapsulate your ideas and to bring brevity to your vision. It will boost your confidence! It will help you resolve questions of continuity. It will get you past that awkward stumble when someone asks you what you are working on.

Do you remember the elevator movie scene in Pulp Fiction?John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson discuss a foot massage gratuitously given to the wife of a drug dealer. The drug dealer was so incensed that he murdered the massager. The low-angle two-shot pulls you into their conversation. While their conservative suits and ties belay their mission – to intimidate a client to pay for his drugs – their conversation is more deliberate and guttural. You get the pitch. You feel the tension that will lead to the next scene, in which Jackson shoots up the apartment.

The elevator scenes in Mad Men were often devoid of conversation. While you had to be in on the narrative to know what was occurring, the silent elevator scene is as memorable as the one in Pulp Fiction.

The Interview

Today I had an interview scheduled. I worked hard to get it. The interviewee has two jobs and a rough life. It is hard for him to find the time to give me.

He seems fragile and reticent and I know how important what I say to him is. Every word resonates, he remembers me saying things I had forgotten saying. When I tell him he is a very likable person and I know he will get that job he wants, I say it because it is true. But I realize he has a low self concept and does not think of himself as a likable person. He later repeats my words, reminding me that he got the job because they liked him, just like I said. He really got the job not because of what I said but because of who he is. He needs to own that.

I told him I’d call before I made the long trip from St. Pete to North Tampa where he lives. My plan was to have him set up – through the interview – footage we had shot earlier of him taking his driving test. I needed the viewer to understand the significance of a rite of passage that is increasingly mundane, the older we become. But for him, that test was life affirming and represented the biggest freedom he had ever had. The freedom to get a job and gain independence from a family that looked down on him.

I had my gear ready. I charged my batteries. I had one half-empty and one empty memory card. I made a release for him to sign. I had everything on a chair, ready to take to the car.

I called. When he answered I thought he had been asleep, his voice sounded rough and deep. Then I realized he was crying. He could not do it that day, he said. His aunt had died. He was grief stricken. I felt the depth of his struggles. I thought of my own family, too.

Every interview for a filmmaker represents a milestone in a documentary film. One more voice to round out the narrative. But while I wished I could have filmed the interview in order to push the film along, I had gotten to know him intimately and I knew this was not the only death he had experienced. I felt a deepness in my throat.

I can’t get his voice out of my head. I hear his tears.

There will be another day for my interviewee. My friend.

The Inner You

You have a project and you have found a grant that fits the project. You have looked at the grant specifications and you have created a mental timeline of the process you will have to go through to hit the deadline. So now how do you convince a funder that your project has merit?  

The documents that are attached to the project – your resume and your work sample, for instance – are critical and important. For most grants, you also need a track record. And you need to be able to show a past sample of your craft, your talent, your art.

But you also need to find your voice. You need to write your grant with the passion that you have inside of you for your work. That doesn’t mean that you should plead for your grant but rather you should be able to explain what is compelling about your work, or from where it comes from within you.

If you are an artist, use words that evoke the feelings you are trying to capture in your art.

If you’re a filmmaker, you need to find a narrative arc in your work that you can state briefly, that will describe a storyline. For instance, here is a brief synopsis of my film about Jack Kerouac.

SNOWBIRD will span Jack Kerouac’s eleven years in Florida. He departs Greenwich Village just as the Sexual Revolution takes hold, and arrives in Florida as the John’s Committee begins its relentless search for gays in academia. Only months before On The Road is published, the shy poet is launched into un-wanted celebrity and is unable to adapt. He dies an alcoholic in St. Petersburg in 1969.

Embrace your subject and compel the grant reader into a story. There are many ways to find your inner voice.

Practice this process to help tighten your own understanding of your work: 

– First Exercise: write an analysis of your work or a storyline on a single sheet of paper – called a One Sheet. Try to keep it double or single spaced, a one-inch margin all sides, and 12 point font.

– Second Exercise: reduce your One Sheet to a 150 word paragraph.

– Third, reduce it further to a one-to-two sentence “log line,” similar to what you would find in TV Guide.

This process can help you to understand and verbalize what you are trying to accomplish in your work. It can help you to find your voice.

One Stop Shopping

I recently found out about The Documentary Core application. If you are interested in applying for film grants, this should make your life easier.

There are quite a few film grants out there that all basically ask for the same things. Sundance and the IDA (International Documentary Association) have joined forces to create a common funding application that is being adopted by a growing number of film foundations.

While they are not yet there on the common funding application, they have been able to reach agreement on the pieces of your application. Each grant will want you to fine tune to their specifications, but you can take the grant elements that you create and drop them into the respective grants.

This should save filmmakers countless hours of tweaking and turning words from one application to another. Good luck!

Here is the link to info: https://www.documentary.org/funding/documentary-core-application-project