The college recently announced a new documentary filmmaking grant that students can apply for beginning this year. An information session was held on Feb. 1 at which a few CC alumni showed documentary films that they worked on and answered questions about the grant. At least $20,000 is available to be awarded to students this year, and a total of seven students, faculty, and alumni will sit on the grant selection committee to decide how it will be allocated.
The purpose of the grant is to give students the opportunity to research and to create character-driven documentaries that push them out of their comfort zones and challenge their worldviews. The grant also seeks to connect students with a network of CC alumni in the documentary filmmaking space. As Travis Rummel ’01, a documentary filmmaker and one of the alumni who helped launch the grant, noted, “There is an amazing amount of talent that went to Colorado College, and we want to leverage that.”
Grant amounts will range from $500 to $10,000. The number of grants will depend upon the number of applications and the dollar amounts requested by applicants. As with Venture Grants, students may not use grant money to purchase filmmaking equipment or anything that becomes their property. Rather, expenses such as gear rental, travel, and food costs can be covered using money from the grant. The $20,000 of grant money is provided by an anonymous alumnus of the college who works in documentary film.
While the three alumni who presented their work at the information session—Travis Rummel, Nick Rosen, and Aidan Haley—primarily focus on conservation and sustainability in their films, the grant does not require that students have that same focus in their film proposals. Dylan Nelson, a professor in the Film and Media Studies Department, who is involved with the launch of this grant explained, “We hope all students will feel empowered to bring their perspectives to the program. The subject can be personal, social, environmental, or cultural; what is most important is that the story has strong potential to engage an audience.” The completed film projects will be shown in the Cornerstone Arts Center where grant recipients will introduce their work and comment on the process of making their films.
Applications for the grant are due the first week of April and all students, regardless of major and including graduating seniors, are eligible to apply. Grant recipients will be notified the first week of May. The application requires that students outline an elevator pitch, their qualifications, a synopsis of the project, their topic, their approach, their intended audience, their distribution plan, any collaboration they will do, any alumni they will work with, and all costs associated with their project. This is the first year the grant is being offered and, as such, the people involved are still establishing many of the processes and protocols. This year is also a pilot year for the grant and, if it goes well, Nelson hopes there will be more Documentary Exploration Grants offered in the future.