Entries for the 26th Annual Telly Awards opens October 14, 2024. The Telly's Managing Director, Amanda Needham, was a judge for the Filmcraft Film Festival at Capture Summit 2024 presented by Church Production Magazine.
Amanda Needham is the managing director of the Telly Awards. “Telly Awards honor excellence in video and television across all screens, and we've been doing it for a good old 46 years,” Needham explains. “We're launching our 46 season October 15th. I have not been involved with it that long, but it is a veritable institution and in general, we're sort of the only video and television award show that accepts work from wherever it happens to be made in the video medium, which is relatively unique.”
Needham says it used to be only TV creatives were honored with Emmy’s and filmmakers got Oscars, but these days content creation is so diverse that Telly Award winning projects can come from just about anywhere. “The world is so hybrid and content making is so across the board that we're kind of in an interesting position in that we've never really cared where or who you were making your video work for. We cared if it was good,” she says. “And so, these days we accept work across branded content commercials and marketing television shows and series immersive, interactive social media and non-broadcast. And a lot of our entrants come from everywhere from a TikTok show to a television show to an independent producer or an institution or a nonprofit, anything like that. We get everything under the sun.”
Living in NYC, with a background in independent production, Needham was a documentary filmmaker and did work on feature films before she took the job with the Telly Awards. She’s also trained as a journalist. And when she started seeing Telly entries coming from churches, she realized there must be more of a story there.
“When I first took over, I thought, well, what's going on? Let's see what kind of work is happening. And I saw some really beautiful documentary film work coming out of the Life Family Church in Austin, Texas,” she explains. “I have conversations with our entrants on and off and had a great conversation with a guy named Will Hammond, who was just talking about how he's bridging their many campuses into conversation points, which is the power of film. It's empathetic, it's emotional driven, it's storytelling. And they, in their particular situation had a very rural campus in Texas. They had a downtown campus and they had more of a suburban campus. And I just thought, how interesting is it for a church to be able to be a connector, a storyteller?”
After that Needham learned about the Capture Summit and Filmmaking Contest and wanted to get involved. She looked into it and became a judge for this year’s event with little previous knowledge of how churches are using video story telling these days.
“And that's what was cool is seeing different people from different orientations using video production to further their means. And it's just always interesting to see how that happens and where it happens. Well, I wasn't familiar with the term creative pastor, but I think that's a fantastic term, and I think every church should have one.”
To hear all the the Church Production Podcasts, visit Transistor
To learn more about the Telly Awards, visit https://www.tellyawards.com/.
To learn more about Capture Summit, visit https://capturesummit.com/.
