OK, so we talked in Tip # 10 about not submitting at the final deadline.  Part of not waiting to submit late is about planning. Filmmakers are expected to spend a lot of time in planning their documentaries - from researching and planning what you want to film to how you are going to raise funds for it to your shooting schedule and shot list to logs and transcripts to your editing script or EDL to your added materials like music and archival. Often less time is planned for how the film is actually going to get out there. The plan often consists of "Get into Sundance. Get it into theaters. Sell it to a broadcaster. Move on to Next Film."  But even the minority of filmmakers who are lucky, talented, and savvy enough to actually follow through on this plan don't do so without a lot of research and planning.

Yes Silverdocs is here and so am I, but the Docs Insider blog has remained relatively silent.  I was stunned last night at the festival's industry lounge to have a fairly influential person from the documentary broadcast world asking me where my blog was.  Aside from being stunned that said person even read this blog -- as infrequent as it has become -- I also felt stunned that I am able to cobble together any words at all tonight to meet this surprising demand.

In this instant-gratification-60-character-status-update age, it may seem a little odd to be writing up my reflections on a film festival which ended three weeks ago.  But it has taken me that long to collect my thoughts and impressions of the 2009 SilverDocs Documentary Film Festival.  And, although I have attended the festival every year since it began in  2003, this year was a bit different.  For it was the first year where I would be attending as someone with a foot fully in the documentary world, not as a sideline project.   It might seem like attending this year as the full-time Executive Director of Docs In Progress would create a different set of expectations for me.  But in reality, I had few expectations.  Mostly because I had so little time to create them.