The hardest part of getting a documentary made isn’t shooting it — it’s surviving development. The pitch decks, the lookbooks, the casting boards, the budget napkins, the trailers that convince someone to say yes before a single frame exists.
This hands-on workshop explores how documentary filmmakers are using AI tools to work faster, pitch smarter, and move projects through the development gauntlet — without touching the film itself. We will show how these tools can be used in your work right now.
Through live demonstrations and real project case studies, filmmakers Amy Hobby and Avi Zev Weider (FILMS NOT MADE) will show how AI can help you build a compelling pitch deck in an afternoon, generate a visual look book or mood board that captures your film’s world, prototype a teaser or concept trailer to take into a funding conversation, and sharpen your logline, treatment, and development materials — before you’ve spent a dollar on production.
This is not about AI-generated footage or replacing the filmmaker’s voice, but rather about extending the filmmaker’s creative toolkit. It’s about what happens before the camera rolls: the development and ideation phase.
The session closes with an open conversation about where these tools belong in documentary — and where they don’t. Credit, authorship, taste, and labor are all on the table.
Amy Hobby is an Academy Award-nominated film producer and co-founder of the collective Distribution Advocates. She co-hosts the podcast FILMS NOT MADE and produces music films under the label Record Breaker Films+. She is a former nonprofit executive who loves designing new programs and tools to grow a thriving art and cinema culture in the U.S. and beyond.
Avi Weider is the co-creator of FILMS NOT MADE, a show about the movies that almost happened — and what their absence reveals about the industry, the era, and the people who tried to make them. He is also a filmmaker whose work includes I REMEMBER, which premiered at Sundance; AMERICAN SANTA, featured in the Los Angeles Times; and WELCOME TO THE MACHINE, which premiered at SXSW.
A Sundance Lab alum, Weider also explores AI-assisted creative work and often builds many of the tools he uses in the process. At DC/DOX, he will appear live onstage for a special edition of FILMS NOT MADE.