For our first film, I didn’t realize the importance of the development phase, and didn’t make a strong effort to secure funding for the film, as what was really important to me was just finishing my first documentary. We did do development on kind of an ad-hoc basis, where we thought of a topic and found a participant to be involved in the film, but we didn’t do any formal pitch decks, budgets treatments and the rest.

For my second and third docs, both were client funded that we were approached to produce, so we didn’t need to develop as strong of a deck or pitch materials.

We did go through a pretty comprehensive process of finding our documentary participants for The Will to Change (which I detail in this article), but after that step we were able to go right into preproduction, rather than apply for production funding.

As both of my upcoming documentaries are going through more traditional funding routes, I’ve needed to spend a lot more time in developing my project.

Over the past year, I’ve worked with my mentors and taken several workshops to refine my development process. With this checklist, I want to share the process that I’ve learned with you.

So I hope you get some use out of this checklist, and if you have any questions on any of the steps that you’d like me to go deeper on, leave me a comment or send me an email and I’ll consider it for a future article!