Grant writing

My friend Jess and I have spent the last 2 days writing a grant for a documentary about the Vancouver Pride Community. We still have a long way to go with budgeting and writing about artistic merit towards the project. I find that every time I start writing a grant I need a dictionary to decipher what fluffy words the application asks for. With all our research done we now have to focus on writing our narrative for this documentary, which is the hardest part. How do you write something you don't think you can predict. But the truth is you can. About 75% of what's on screen in documentaries is written ahead of time. I mean we are still in pre production but we can at least break up our doc into points and begin there.

Since we are "co-directing" this doc it's been easier to bounce ideas off each other, from the visual look to the educational and historical facts. It also helps because we have different strengths which does not conflict on our priorities we can divide the tasks at hand. I'll be doing the budget and she will be focusing on the "detailed description". Then we'll meet up, give our input and finalize the rest. This grant is due in October so we don't have much time left.