#45 Creating compelling documentaries with Jake Swantko
We were fortunate to have director of photography and filmmaker Jake Swantko in our studio to share what goes into producing compelling films like Icarus, which won the 2018 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the 2017 Sundance Film Festival Orwell Award for its artful uncovering of an international doping scandal involving one of Russia's top anti-doping scientists.
Demystifying Media at the University of Oregon · Jake Swantko, Damian Radcliffe
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Show Notes
About our guest:
Jake Swantko has worked on a number of films, shooting for the Associated Press, ESPN, HBO, National Geographic, PBS Frontline, Time Magazine, Passion Pictures, and Nike. He is a 2011 graduate of the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.
As director of photography, he has shown three films at Sundance: Entrapped (2016), Icarus (2017), and The Dissident (2020), which explored the story of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
At the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, Icarus received a special jury prize, the first ever "Orwell Award" for revealing "the truth at a time when the truth is no longer a commodity."
Find Jake online:
Website
IMDB page
Q&A with Around the O
Show Notes:
0:04 - Introductions
01:24 - What is The Dissident about?
05:14 - The role of hacking in Jamal Khashoggi's murder
06:20 - Audience takeaways from The Dissident at Sundance
09:22 - What goes into film distribution?
11:14 - The ethics of film distribution
13:48 - A documentarian's sense of duty to the subject
16:38 - The relationship between documentarian and subject
19:41 - Choosing a stopping point/conclusion for a documentary
26:51 - The importance of screening one's work
31:06 - How to please your audience
33:51 - How did you launch your career in documentary?
35:55 - What have you learned that you didn't know when you started in this field?
37:59 - Media recommendations for aspiring documentarians
Read the transcript for this episode
Hear more from our guest:
Video interview with Jake in the studio
Listen to Jake's lecture
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