The ITVS Indies Roundup

A curated list of indie news and recommendations from ITVS’s Rebecca Huval.

This trailer for a suspenseful thriller proves that fine-tuned video editing and the right music can transform raw footage into any mood. The source material for this nail-biter is Dumb & Dumber. If you’re worried about losing TV viewers to online streaming, you can breathe a sigh of relief. A recent media consortium test tracked an audience that drifts from tablet videos to phone to TV and back. The good news? “The growing viewership of video online and on mobile devices is not diminishing the appetite for watching television,” according to The New York Times.

This six-minute time-lapsed video of gorgeous sites from around the world took six years to film. Think about that the next time you’re self-conscious about your time-spent-filming-to-documentary-length ratio. Are you a Mad Men fanatic going through withdrawal? The Daily Beast put together a summer reading list just for you. It includes such classics as Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, which Don Draper recites in season two. 

Documentary advice to the rescue! Courtesy of Raindance, here are five common mistakes that doc makers make. Geek out over urban design by perusing Atlantic Cities’ list of the 11 best documentaries about cities now streaming on Netflix, including two ITVS-funded films: The Parking Lot Movie and Waste Land. While we wait for the hover skateboard from Back to the Future Part II to become a reality, here are five tech breakthroughs that were actually predicted by the silver screen. Networking opportunities abound: If you want to meet up with fellow documentary filmmakers, the Documentary Summit is taking place this summer and fall in San Francisco, Boston, and London. Check it out.