Phoebe Hart's lovely book should live on the bookshelves of scholars, artists, and students around the world who adore the documentary form and want to understand the nuanced innerworkings of the craft. This is a contemporary, accessible volume that champions the voices and motivations of creative nonfiction makers as they chart a future path in the global media marketplace.
— Caty Borum, executive director, Center for Media and Social Impact at American University; author of Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change
Phoebe Hart is very well placed to write this book, drawing on her own experiences in industry as well as academia to contextualize what it means to imagine, develop, produce, and distribute a documentary in the contemporary landscape. The focus on meaningful ideas, impactful stories, and innovations in process and form provides an excellent addition to the field. And through interviews with a wide range of practitioners from across the globe, the book really does get to the heart of why documentaries matter.
— Craig Batty, University of South Australia
This volume offers unexpected insights to the documentary filmmaking process through accounts of an array of different makers. It is a fascinating read which makes an important contribution to documentary film studies as well as the emerging discipline of creative practice research. Highly recommended.
— Agnieszka Piotrowska, filmmaker and scholar; author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film
Crafting Contemporary Documentaries and Docuseries for Global Screens: Docu-mania by Phoebe Hart offers a rich and insightful contribution in documentary or factual film studies and pedagogies,
making it a must-read for anyone interested in these fields. The book stands out with its unique approach. It comprises six chapters that exemplify John T. Caldwell's 'industrial reflexivity metaphors' (2008; 2024), used in the book title and chapters. For Hart, "crafting" in documentary film production involves assembling and shaping raw footage into a cohesive and impactful narrative. This involves selecting the most compelling scenes, arranging them in logical sequences, and often adding supplementary materials such as interviews, voiceovers, and music to enhance the storytelling. Thus, crafting is a crucial stage in documentary filmmaking, allowing filmmakers to document and convey their intended message and engage the audience effectively.
— Journal of Media Practice and Education