Archival producers spend their days immersed in history – cultural, political, or personal, depending on the project. Yet, historically, their specialized work has often been overlooked, even though it’s key to the Ken Burns canon and other great documentaries like Man on Wire, 13th, The Fog of War, Apollo 11, How to Survive a Plague, They Shall Not Grow Old, and so many others.
The recently formed Archival Producers Alliance is helping to address this fundamental lack of understanding of what archival producers do and how they do it.
And it’s also alerting the doc community to foundational challenges posed by the rapid emergence of AI. In the latest episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, we speak with Debra McClutchy, a member of the APA who earned an Oscar nomination for co-directing the archive-driven short film The Martha Mitchell Effect.
She discusses where archival producers find the rarities that make a historically focused film stand out – and the potential threat and potential opportunity posed by artificial intelligence.
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