Filmmakers

Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein have become chroniclers of the Iraq war-era America. (They bring some distance to the subject; she is German and he spent 12 years in Berlin.) Their documentaries—Gunner Palace, The Prisoner, or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, Bulletproof Salesman, and now How to Fold a Flag—carry us from 2003 to today. Their latest film follows four of the soldiers they met in Gunner Palace back into the lives they left behind.

Laura Waters Hinson is a filmmaker and photographer based in Washington, DC. She is the founder of Image Bearer Pictures and recently launched the Living Bricks Campaign, a multi-media viewer project to support reconciliation efforts in Rwanda. Laura received a master of fine arts degree in filmmaking from American University, and was the winner of a Student Academy Award for Best Documentary for her film As We Forgive, a film about the reconciliation efforts between the victims and perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. I interviewed her before a screening of her film at American University.

Our 21/2-year multi-media project, Saving The Sierra: Voices of Conservation in Action, is now over. The digital files are all tucked into a nice big hard drive and we've recycled all but the most important papers. But before we head off our next adventure in independent, social issue media making, we'd like to share a few lessons learned along the way that any producer could use in planning a national multiplatform documentary special.