Hello Driven fans.
A few bits of exciting news for you.
1. We just found out that we have won the Reelisor pitch award! Reelisor is an online documentary film community that fosters support for new documentary films in development. Driven was selected among many other projects by a jury made up of Iikka Vehkalahti, Karolina Lidin and Margret Jónasdóttir.
While winning the pitch award doesn't provide us with any of the much needed funding we're seeking to finish the film, it is a great vote of confidence in the film, great exposure for the project, and gives us access to the talented Charlie Phillips for mentoring. Charlie is the Marketplace Director at the Sheffield Doc/Fest.
2. We just completed a radio interview with The Butcher's Apron, where our Director Jonathan Howells and cinematograper Rollo Hollins talked about the challenges (and joys) of shooting Driven all across America with Alfred, Niels, Jakobine and Rusty.
The show will air on the 29th of April at 2:00 GMT (9:00am EST) so tune in and give a listen.
3. We've had some very promising recent reactions to our new "script" or "paper edit" of the film, from a few high profile commissioning editors, so fingers crossed. The paper edit is essentially the whole film made, but on paper - word for word, scene for scene, moment for moment. This will be the starting point for the actual edit, when we start it in the coming months.
The script makes very good use of material collected from a recent trip back to Oneida, NY to visit Jakobine and Rusty, one more time. The photo below is Jakobine during that visit. A big thanks goes out to Sarah Holm, a Danish, New York based journalist who helped us with the interviews. She did an amazing job, and Jakobine really opened up discussing a lot of things she hadn't before.
We've set a deadline for ourselves to finish the film - we want to complete it for the submissions deadline at Sundance Film Festival this year. That's October so we've only got 6 months to go. So please spread the word. In the next week or so we'll be initiating a new online fund raising drive, and we'll look to you, our fans, to help us spread the word. Speak to you then.
