A feature documentary about who gets funded in technology, and who never gets the meeting. Written and directed by Joshua Otis Miller. Produced by C&I Films.
The Making Of
Fund Black Tech
Almost every industry got better when it opened up. Music, sports, fashion and advertising all changed because new people got in the room. Technology did not move the same way, and the money is where you can see it most clearly.
Filming the answer took three years. The first shoot was in March 2021 and we were still picking up footage in 2024. Twelve people sat down with us, and the largest of those setups ran five cameras and a separate audio recorder at once so nobody had to say anything twice for coverage.
What came back fills close to 23 terabytes of RED raw across nineteen drives. This page is what that actually looked like. The sets we built, the gear we moved between cities, the days we spent in one room to earn twenty usable minutes, and the edit and color work that is still going.
Pre Production
Outreach and Scheduling
None of this exists until people agree to be in it. Every interview in the film started as an email or a phone call to somebody who had no particular reason to hand us a day of their time, and most of them took several rounds of back and forth before a date existed at all.
That is its own job. Keeping lines open with a dozen busy people at once, following up often enough to matter without becoming a nuisance, getting a confirmation and then getting it again when a schedule moved, and holding a crew and a location against a date that was not truly locked until the day arrived. One interview day sits on top of weeks of that.
Pre Production
Location Scouting and Set Design
The people in this film are spread across the country, so we went to them. New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and more, sitting down with real people to hear their opinions and experiences. Every one of those cities meant we had to location scout first, walking the space, working out where a camera could live and what the room was going to sound like once it was full of gear. Then the set had to be dressed. It had to be visually engaging for two hours and it had to be comfortable for the interviewee. All of these boxes had to be checked within limited windows of time.
Some of these interviews were shot on sets we built from the ground up in our Los Angeles studio, which let us design the room around the conversation instead of working around whatever a venue would let us move. Across the production it ran as a balance of the two, rented locations dressed properly, and full sets built in our own space.
One Theme, Twelve Scripts
We conducted 12 interviews, each one across a full production day.
The questions carried the same sentiment on purpose, because the film had to stay on one theme. Everything else changed. Every person got their own script, and we studied each of them before they walked in, what they had built, where their story met the money, what they were actually in a position to answer. This was never a copy paste scenario, and it would have shown on camera if we had run it like one.
Production
Conducting the Interview
An interview like this requires a lot of patience. Sound gets set, the room goes quiet, and then the interview process begins.
The script works as a guide more than a plan. You cannot be fully prepared for the answers, so you work off what the person in front of you is actually saying and bounce from there. Sometimes a better conversation opens up in the middle of a question, and the job right then is to leave what was next on the page, follow it, and find a way back on track afterwards without the subject ever feeling steered.
That takes being locked in for the whole day. Somebody is tracking what has been captured and what is still missing, somebody else is watching the frame, and none of it can look like work from where the subject is sitting. Our crew has done enough of these to run it as a team and to keep each other sharp across a full day.
Camera, sound, grip and DIT were all our own people. The crew who lit the first interview in 2021 were the same ones still shooting pickups three years later.
Production
Nobody Got This on the First Take
It is always a goal in the interview process to keep the person being interviewed comfortable enough that they can open up in front of the camera. Somebody who feels like they are stuck on a stage gives you a performance. We needed our environment to have the opposite effect, to instead bring out their open, honest and real answers.
The Fritz Orlando interview ran five cameras and a separate audio recorder at the same time, which came back as two full drives of footage from one sitting. That is a lot of setup for one person in a chair, but it is necessary.
With limited shooting time you have to over prepare. After traveling, coordinating schedules, hauling gear and setting the scene, we only get one sitting with our subjects. If a camera missed the moment they finally said the thing they came to say, it is gone, and asking a person to go back and repeat is rarely an option. So we cover every angle, pay close attention, and make the most of the time we have.
On Set
Behind the Scenes
On the Road
Where the Story Took Us
Twelve interviews did not happen in one city. The gear went into cases and the crew went with it. Over and over, for three years of production.
After the Shoot
The Part Nobody Sees
Shooting the film is only one step in the production process. Every interview that comes back needs to be transcribed and read line by line, scored for what actually matters, and then cut. The first full assembly for Fund Black Tech ran past three hours before it was pulled apart into eight chapters and taken down again into a ninety minute selects cut.
Archival work ran alongside all of it. A film about who gets funded now has to show where the pattern started, so we pulled and cleared public domain material on Tulsa in 1921, the Freedman’s Bank and the Great Migration, and cut it against footage shot on our own stages.
Post Production
Keeping the Edit Organized
A film built from dozens of shoot days across several years only holds together if the material underneath it is organized. Every card that came off a shoot had to land somewhere the whole team could reach it later, and an editor opening a scene two years after it was filmed had to be able to trust what they were looking at.
That is as much communication as it is storage. Group reviews, notes going back into the cut, returning to a scene to improve it once something later in the film changed what it needed to be. It means knowing the footage to a T, well enough that somebody remembers the better take from a shoot three years ago and can put their hands on it.
Color is one part of that. There is picture editing, sound editing and continuity running the whole length of it, keeping twelve interviews and years of b roll reading as one piece of work rather than a stack of shoot days.
Post Production
Inside the Grade
Twelve interviews shot across three years in different rooms, on different days, under different light, all have to end up looking like one film. The harder part is matching. Five cameras on a single interview, and decades of archival material cut in beside them, all have to sit in the same picture without an audience noticing the joins. This is a color pass on a single interview, sped up, node by node, until the skin tone and the room agree with each other. Then it starts again on the next one.
The People
In Front of the Camera
More From C&I
Explore More C&I Films
Work With C&I
Bring Us Your Next Project
Three years, twelve interviews and nearly 23 terabytes later, Fund Black Tech is still being finished by the same team that built the first set. We do not hand this work out. If you have something that is going to take more than a weekend, we can take it the whole way there.