The Art of Film Funding

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Helen Hall is an award-winning producer, director, and composer whose work explores the intersection of art, science, and energy. With more than 30 years of experience, she creates films that combine original research with cinematic storytelling to explore complex and unusual subjects

She is currently completing the feature documentary Pictures of Infinity, based on more than two decades of research into Nikola Tesla’s long-hidden blueprint for a sustainable energy future. The film has received major honors, including the Roy W. Dean Award and the Carole Dorothy Joyce Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking.

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Christine La Monte, producer/director/writer and former film marketing executive at Universal, Disney, and Orion is the founder/president of La Monte Productions where current projects include VIVA VERDI! the feature documentary Shortlisted for Best Song, where she serves as producer, writer and executive producer. Also on the awards circuit, AI WEIWEI’S TURANDOT, a co-production with Italy’s Incipit Film and La Monte Productions

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Scott Billups is an award-winning cinematographer and visual effects creator who has worked on over fifty motion pictures. As a world leader in the creation of virtual characters for movies and games, Scott went back to school in his forties to study AI as a way to breathe life into his inanimate creations. Armed with an entirely new tool set, Scott was Apple’s first evangelist to Hollywood, co-founder of the AFI Media Lab, CTO of the game industry’s leading supplier of AI (Rival Theory, which became a subsidiary of Google), founder of an AI healthcare company that created the first personified virtual clinician on the IBM Watson health platform, and developer of an AI-robotic eldercare pilot program for the National Institutes of Health. Billups currently resides in Port Hueneme, California.

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Our special guest this week is the award-winning filmmaker Ondi Timoner. Timoner founded Interloper Films and is known for movies about visionaries challenging the status quo and personal documentaries that reveal the bittersweet side of facing seemingly impossible challenges. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and the Television Academy and chairs the Nonfiction Subcommittee for Special Projects at the DGA. Timoner is the only director to win Sundance's Grand Jury Prize twice—for DIG! and WE LIVE IN PUBLIC. Both films are in MoMA's permanent collection. Her numerous credits include her 2022 documentary LAST FLIGHT HOME, about her father's end-of-life journey. It was Oscar-shortlisted, Emmy-nominated, and earned her the Visionary Award for Observational Filmmaking as well as the Humanitas Prize. Today we’ll discuss her recent documentary, ALL THE WALLS CAME DOWN, about the historic LA fires that took her home and town of Altadena. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival.

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Spade Robinson is an award- winning screenwriter and director, with experience that spans feature film, documentary, television, commercial and theater.  Spade is the owner of full service production company, Spade Ink Media, producing and developing a slate of film, television and podcast projects.  Spade is also the owner of Atlanta Film Project, a screenplay and documentary consulting firm, helping storytellers and companies to tell the most compelling version of their stories.

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Description:  We’re joined by Bri Castellini, one of the top crowdfunding experts in the indie film world. While at Seed&Spark, Bri helped filmmakers raise over $25 million—achieving an incredible 85% success rate. Bri is an independent film and screenwriting consultant and a subject matter expert in arts crowdfunding, indie filmmaking, film festivals, podcasting, romance novels, and the USA television show Burn Notice. As a filmmaker herself she's known for her short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 160k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcast Breaking Out of Breaking In. She personally helped launch over $25 million dollars in crowdfunding campaigns with an 85% success rate while she was the Manager of Creator Success at the artist crowdfunding platform Seed&Spark, and she’s spoken at over 200 events and festivals virtually and in person on the subjects previously mentioned. Her full work history can be found on her website BriCastellini.com. And find her at https://www.instagram.com/castellinifilmschool/.

In this powerful conversation, Bri reveals what most filmmakers get wrong about crowdfunding, why going viral is not the goal, and how to fund your film by simply telling your story with heart.

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A master storyteller shares decades of lessons and his newest book.

Description - : Paul Chitlik has written for all the major networks and studios in English and in Spanish.  He was story editor for MGM/UA'S "The New Twilight Zone," and staff writer for Showtime's sitcom "Brothers."  He directed episodes and was coordinating producer for “Real Stories of the Highway Patrol” and “U.S. Customs Classified.”  He wrote and produced “Alien Abduction” for UPN.  He wrote, produced, and directed “Ringling Brothers Revealed” a special for The Travel Channel.  (He had been a roustabout for Circus Vargas years earlier.)  He wrote, produced and directed “The Wedding Dress,” for Amazon Prime.  He received a Writers Guild of America award nomination for "The Twilight Zone" and a GLAAD Media Award nomination for "Los Beltrán,” for Telemundo.  He won a Genesis Award for a Showtime Family movie. 

He taught in the MFA programs of UCLA, and many prestigious universities around the world.  His book, “Rewrite,” is available in English, Chinese, and Korean.  His latest novel is “Lies, All Lies.”  His latest screenwriting book is “The Screenwriting Sensei.” And we will cover that book today.

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Our special guest this week is the award-winning documentary filmmaker Jeremy Workman, whose work has been Emmy Nominated and Oscar short-listed. His films include LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD (Discovery), DECIDING VOTE (The New Yorker), THE WORLD BEFORE YOUR FEET (Greenwich Entertainment / Kino Lorber), MAGICAL UNIVERSE (IFC Films), and most recently SECRET MALL APARTMENT. Secret Mall Apartment premiered at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival and went on to win 9 major film festival awards. It was released theatrically in over 250 cities in March 2025, becoming the fourth-highest grossing documentary since 2020 (excluding music concert films). Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, Secret Mall Apartment was even parodied on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Executive Produced by actor Jesse Eisenberg, the film is now being developed as both a stage play and a scripted movie. Today we’ll discuss the film and Jeremy’s success making movies that take us deep inside extraordinary worlds.

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Today our special guests are Elliot Kirschner and Heather Kinlaw Lofthouse. Elliot Kirschner is a New York Times best-selling author and an Emmy Award-winning news and documentary producer. Elliot began his career at CBS News, reporting and producing for 60 Minutes, Sunday Morning, and The Evening News. Elliot now authors the Through the Fog newsletter. Heather Kinlaw Lofthouse is the Executive Director of Inequality Media and Inequality Media Civic Action and the founder of CoffeeKlatch Productions. She is also the co-host of “The Coffee Klatch,” a conversational podcast about the news of the week, with her longtime collaborator Robert Reich. Today we’ll discuss The Last Class, a documentary feature produced by Heather and directed by Elliot about Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich.

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Carole Dean is Founder and President of From the Heart Productions Inc, a 501(c)3 Non-Profit. From the Heart’s mission is to help indie filmmakers and creatives, with unique projects that contribute to society, get funding.  From the Heart accomplishes this through five Roy W. Dean Film Grants a year, fiscal sponsorship, education, mentorship, and free resources.  Since 1993, From the Heart has assisted thousands of documentaries, features, short films, and web series in getting their films funded. From the Heart has helped filmmakers raise over $70,000,000 for their films.