Boyd Estus is a director of photography and producer/director in the motion picture industry whose credits include the Academy Award-winning The Flight of the Gossamer Condor , the Academy Award-nominated Eight Minutes to Midnight , and many Emmy-winning television programs. He has worked on location around the world shooting and directing feature films and documentaries.
Boyd Estus has extensive experience in the production of film documentaries dealing with history, music, and science. An innovator in the development of technique of "docu-drama" for compelling storytelling, Estus is known for making his subjects vivid and understandable to a broad audience.
Boyd Estus has received numerous awards including the CINE Golden Eagle (Where the Galaxies Are, Arthur Fiedler--Just Call Me Maestro, Flight of the Gossamer Condor), Melbourne International Film Festival Kino Award (So Many Galaxies...So Little Time), the Peabody Award (NOVA, Tender Places), the Cindy, Emmy, Telly, Hugo Award, and many others.
In addition to making films for the BBC and other overseas broadcasters, Estus has made many films for American broadcast television including the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and PBS television where he was a founding member of the film unit at WGBH Boston.
Nova is an American popular science television program produced by WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts, since 1974. It is broadcast on PBS in the United States, and in more than 100 other countries. The program has won many major television awards.
Horizon is an ongoing and long-running British documentary television series on BBC Two that covers science and philosophy.
Mark Frost is an American novelist, screenwriter, film and television producer and director. He is the co-creator of the mystery television series Twin Peaks and was a writer and executive story editor of Hill Street Blues (1982–1985).
Tina Chen is a Chinese-American stage, film, and television actress, director, and producer, who starred in the films Alice's Restaurant, Three Days of the Condor, and The Hawaiians. She has been nominated for Golden Globe, Emmy, and Drama Desk awards.
Paul Atkins, ASC, is an American cinematographer and director specializing in natural history films. Atkins is known for the footage of killer whales preying on seal pups in the BBC's The Trials of Life (1990), for which he won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award. Atkins also was the director of photography for the Cape Horn unit for the feature film Master and Commander, which won an Academy Award for Cinematography by Russell Boyd. Atkins has been nominated for an Emmy award numerous times, winning it for his work in Great White Shark (1995) (Cinematography), and Hawaii: Strangers in Paradise (1991). Recently he has formed a partnership with Terrence Malick, serving as a second-unit director for The Tree of Life (2011), and as director of photography for Malick's eighth feature Voyage of Time (2016).
Ben Shedd is an American director, producer, and writer of film and video. He shared the 1978 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film.
Juan José Campanella is an Argentine television and film director, writer and producer. He achieved worldwide attention with the release of The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), for which he was awarded the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
David Belton is a director, writer, and film producer. His experiences as a BBC reporter covering the 1994 Rwandan genocide led him to write the original story and produce the film Shooting Dogs, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, which dramatizes the events at the Ecole Technique Officielle. It was retitled Beyond the Gates for its 2007 U.S. release. He has directed documentaries and drama-documentaries and documentaries for PBS and dramas for the BBC. His book, When the Hills Ask for Your Blood was published in January 2014 by Doubleday.
National Geographic Explorer is an American documentary television series that originally premiered on Nickelodeon on April 7, 1985, after having been produced as a less costly and intensive alternative to PBS's National Geographic Specials by Pittsburgh station WQED. The first episode was produced by WQED and featured long-time Explorer cameraman Mark Knobil, who is the few staff members with the franchise during all 24 seasons. The program is the longest-running documentary television series on cable television. Presented every Sunday from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm, the original series was three hours in length, containing five to ten short films. Although the National Geographic Society had been producing specials for television for 20 years prior to Explorer, the premiere of the series required an increase in production from 4 hours of programming a year to 156 hours. Tim Cowling and Tim Kelly were the executive producers for the series during this transition.
Lionel Friedberg is a documentary film director, producer and writer who has written or produced films for, among others, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, PBS, the History Channel and National Geographic. He has 18 credits as Director of Photography on feature motion pictures, and has worked all over the world on both dramatic and nonfiction productions.
Joshua Seftel is an Academy Award-nominated film director. Seftel began his career in documentaries at age 22 with his Emmy-nominated film, Lost and Found, about Romania's orphaned children. He followed this with several films including Stranger at the Gate, an Oscar-nominated short documentary executively produced by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai. His political campaign film Taking on the Kennedys was selected by Time Magazine as one of the “ten best of the year." Seftel also directed the underdog sports film The Home Team which premiered at SXSW, and a film about the Broadway revival of the musical Annie, It's the Hard Knock Life.
Michael Bacon is an American singer-songwriter, musician and film score composer. He is the older brother of actor Kevin Bacon. He is a faculty member in music at Lehman College.
Philip J Day is a British film producer, screenwriter, showrunner and author.
Edge West is an American film and television development and production company founded by Peabody Award and Emmy Award winning producer/director/writer, Philip J Day.
Sławomir Grünberg is a Polish-born naturalized American documentary producer, director and cameraman.
Marion "Muffie" Meyer is an American director, whose productions include documentaries, theatrical features, television series and children’s films. Films that she directed are the recipients of two Emmy Awards, CINE Golden Eagles, the Japan Prize, Christopher Awards, the Freddie Award, the Columbia-DuPont, and the Peabody Awards. Her work has been selected for festivals in Japan, Greece, London, Edinburgh, Cannes, Toronto, Chicago and New York, and she has been twice nominated by the Directors Guild of America.
Bernard MacMahon is an Irish-British filmmaker. His American Epic films are widely considered as the definitive portrait of a musical era, and one of the best music documentaries ever made.
Jon Shenk is an Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary film director and director of photography, known for his films Lead Me HomeAthlete A, An Inconvenient Sequel, Audrie & Daisy,The Island President, Lost Boys of Sudan. He is the co-founder, with his wife Bonni Cohen, of Actual Films, a documentary film company based in San Francisco, CA. He co-directed and photographed Lead Me Home which premiered in 2021 at the Telluride Film Festival, was acquired by Netflix, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2022.