I started making films at a time when hand-held, sync sound documentary equipment was new - just two years after Leacock and Pennybaker produced the first hand-held documentary film on President Kennedy. I've been making national television specials and series, doc style feature films, educational films, and short subjects ever since.
I have mostly been a one-man band, often functioning as producer, director, cameraperson, sound person, writer, editor, and postproduction supervisor. Today, I work with miniDV equipment, and create, produce, write, edit, tape, and complete my programs myself, using Avid DV Express and my Mac G4. I have always been a filmmaker who is fascinated by real people stories, and by dramatizing those stories using real people as opposed to actors. I have become known as a filmmaker fascinated by what I call extraordinary/ordinary people. I have made some programs with or about famous people but most of my programs are about people you never heard of — people who I feel are dramatic enough, entertaining enough, powerful enough, and articulate enough, to be worthy of a long form documentary about them.
Music is one of my specialties, as I was a professional musician (an oboist) before I began my filmmaking career.
I have also developed a specialty making programs about the activities of the U.S. military, especially aviation related shows.
I have won many awards. At one time or another, my programs have won top awards at every major film festival in the world.
Today, working with miniDV and Avid DV Express, I continue to develop projects and make programs. Currently I am working on a program involving the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), another on Jim Key - a famous horse from the early 20th-century who was considered the most intelligent (non-human) animal in the world, a series on the history of sound recording and its effect on society, and a special on security issues involving America's global supply chain and how it could be damaged by terrorists if we do not make it more secure.
The current spate of reality television shows have taken the documentary to a new level—staged reality with real people. I find the programs uniquely entertaining, and although often they are not in my style, I am a regular viewer of many of them.
My collection of programs, like the collection of any veteran documentary filmmaker, is the result of the work that people paid me to create. Not being independently wealthy, I made the programs I could get funding for—and then set about making them as entertaining, dramatic, and meaningful to audiences as I could.
I make programs using a set of communications principles that I developed:
- Every program, regardless of length, purpose or target audience, should tell a story.
- The most convincing communicators are real people expressing genuine, deeply felt emotions.
- Real people that can credibly tell a story need to be properly cast and then directed.
- Television and video are better at eliciting emotion and compassion from an audience, than at delivering information. Print is better for information.
To see David's currently available programs, click here.