Since 2016, Chicken & Egg Films has opted into the Non-Fiction Core Application process. The Non-Fiction Core Application is a collaborative field-wide effort led by the Sundance Institute in partnership with IDA ”to standardize a set of questions that are used in nonfiction funding, fiscal sponsor or artist support opportunities”… “to alleviate the burden of proposal re-writing on applicants, foster greater access to sources of creative and financial support and build toward a more equitable and transparent nonfiction field.” (via IDA)

We have consistently updated our application questions to be in alignment with the Core Application with the latest version created in 2022. The majority of our questions about the project information, key creative personnel, financial information/budget, and work samples are directly in line with the Core Application. Supplemental questions are few and have been added where we have noticed a repeated need to capture information that we need to inform our selection process. We acknowledge the effort it takes for filmmakers to complete any application and our team reviews our application processes each year to ensure the information we are requesting is necessary to our evaluations and decision making.

We were involved in the discussions around the most recent update of the Core Application specifically about how to standardize response lengths to allow both for word count limits as well as character count limits (for those organizations like ours whose application platform only works using character counts). As an outcome of these discussions, the Core Application v. 2022 has a word-to-character count equivalency listed on page 1 of the Application Proposal Checklist. Our applications follow this guideline of 100 words = 650 characters. We have this information available via our application platform, but understand that there is space to clarify it further on our program webpages as well as our application checklist documents. We have included this on our webpage and application checklist for the (Egg)celerator Lab, which is open for applications through May 22, 2024, to reflect this as well.

We are sharing this information now because an inquiry was raised about our application process via social media and it’s our practice to be responsive to filmmaker inquiries, but also because it is likely a question that has come up for many more filmmakers beyond this particular instance.