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Robert Gardner
Over a career that spans thirty years, documentary film producer, director
and writer Robert Gardner has been nominated for an Academy Award, won
three National Emmy Awards, four regional Emmys, a duPont Columbia award
from Columbia University for excellence in broadcast journalism and a
variety of special awards. His production company, Gardner Films has served
both commercial and public television for fifteen years. He is a member
of the Director's Guild and the Writer's Guild of America.
Gardner's best
work celebrates the great variety emerging now in documentary storytelling
in science, history, adventure or human issues. He is never limited
by form, but continues to experiment as the documentary continues to evolve.
"The exciting
thing about documentary production is the challenge to be new," Gardner
says. "Our most recent production Islam: Empire of Faith is a real
effort to push beyond the conventional historical documentary, to borrow
from the visual vocabulary of feature films and even music videos to create
an authentic and truly evocative portal through which the audience can
experience the deep past. It requires a very different story-telling mindset
from the start, but when it works, something really quite new happens."
Gardner believes
that production quality demands the appropriate tools. "What we learned
was how important the moving camera is, how a Steadicam shot or 30-foot
Jib movement creates an almost dream-like effect for the audience, a virtual
movement through space. These moving camera platforms together
with extremely wide-angle lenses pull the viewer into the location
in an often startling three-dimensional fashion. This is one of the ways
that we transcend time, by creating a shot which continually unfolds,
continually reveals itself to the audience, so that the eye never rests
too long on a costume or prop."
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