L.A.-based YayBig Productions has signed writer/director Ryan Prows. His debut feature film, Lowlife, is moving towards its 2017 premiere. Both the film and Prows are represented by UTA. He has written and directed content for a variety of platforms including a music video for The Hotel Alexis’ “Gold Tonight” and numerous viral sketches for online channels Funny or Die and All Def Digital. He is currently in development on Masked Intruder, a horror/thriller feature for Fox Digital Studios. Prows recently wrote and directed an NES Classic spec titled “Remember When.” YayBig works with such ad agencies as Ogilvy, DigitasLBi and Energy BBDO and a range of brands including American Express, SMS Audio, EA, Kaiser Permanente, Rabbit, and Flow Water….
The American Film Institute announced that six documentary projects that screened at AFI DOCS 2016 in Washington, DC, have been selected to receive funding from the AFI DOCS/NBCUniversal Impact Grants. Now in their second year, the grants will support the outreach and social action campaigns for these six documentary projects that participated in the AFI DOCS 2016 Impact Lab, a two-day filmmaker workshop sponsored by NBCUniversal and presented in partnership with Picture Motion. Spanning some of the most critical and urgent problems facing the world today, the projects supported by these grants demonstrated their ability to leverage distribution in 2016. The documentary projects receiving a total of $75,000 in support from the 2016 AFI DOCS/NBCUniversal Impact Grants are: Director Michael Collins’ Almost Sunrise which deals with war vets coping with trauma; Deirdre Fishel’s Care, shedding light on the caregivers who take care of the elderly but themselves lead economically challenged and fragile lives; Toby Oppenheimer and Dana Flor’s Check It which introduces us to a street gang comprised of gay and transgender teens who are shown a more productive way of life through the creative world of fashion; Kim A. Snyder’s Newtown which delves into the lives of families grieving over the loss of loved ones in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and how those families have endured and come together to do good for others; director Margaret Byrne’s Raising Bertie which centers on three African-American teen boys striving to escape adversity, racism and poverty in the rural community of Bertie County, NC; and Ben Lear’s They Call Us Monsters, a look at the juvenile justice system….
