CinemaTech’s Scott Kirsner sent me an email alerting me to a really interesting project he’s done with ITVS.

From his email:

Earlier this year, ITVS asked me to interview a group of documentary filmmakers who were working on the vanguard. Specifically, we wanted to focus on three things:

1. Opening up production in new ways, communicating and collaborating with the audience while a film is still in the works.

2. Distributing in new ways, through avenues like iTunes or downloads on a filmmaker’s own Web site

3. Marketing and cultivating an audience for the work in new ways, and figuring out how to “carry” that audience forward from one project to the next.

Among the folks I spoke to were Tiffany Shlain (“The Tribe”), Katy Chevigny (“Election Day”), Hunter Weeks (“10 MPH” and “10 Yards”), Byron Hurt (“Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes”), and Curt Ellis (“King Corn”). Not everyone is a filmmaker who is funded or supported by ITVS… our sole criterion was to find folks who were experimenting.

The objective with these “Reports from the Field” was to try to share some of the best practices and tough lessons that this group of filmmakers have been learning.

There’s also a list of 15 strategies that doc filmmakers ought to consider:

Scott is also one of the principal organizers of The Conversation, which is taking place in Berkeley this Friday and Saturday. I’ve blogged about this before, and there are no guarantees, but if you’d like to attend you can click this link and possibly snag a 15% discount for being a reader of this blog.