Each Friday I send out a free email newsletter with an original Editor’s Letter along with viewing recommendations and festival deadlines. The Editor’s Letter is usually not reposted here on this site. As a way of encouraging sign-ups — you can join for free here — I’m posting here a slightly edited version of last week’s edition, in which I draw some production and distribution conclusions from the success of the Mike Cheslik’s independent hit Hundreds of Beavers, drawing info from linked interviews, now unpaywalled, from our current print edition. — Editor

Because I edit Filmmaker and am supposed to be an early expert on all things independent film, I shouldn’t admit this, but the first time that I knew I had to pay attention to Hundreds of Beavers was when Hollywood folk called me to ask whether I had a way of contacting the filmmakers of this breakout, self-distributed independent comedy. I had heard of the film and knew it had made an impression on the genre festival circuit, but I hadn’t been pitched it, there’s a lot coming out all the time, my viewing list is long, and it was one title among many. But I was quickly able to get a link and was immediately charmed by Beavers’s Tex Avery-inspired lo-fi surrealism. With its self-distributed theatrical run still underway, I reached out to the filmmakers and paired them with New Zealand director Doug Dillaman for a print feature in our current issue, which I’m unpaywalling right now. (Click here for interviews with director Mike Cheslik and star Ryland Brickston Cole Tews and producer Kurt Ravenwood.) And in the course of putting this feature together, I ruminated a bit on how the success of this film (on a budget of $150,000 it has grossed internationally over $450,000, and that’s just self-distributed theatrical — it’s only now going out digitally) is both similar to and different than the ultra-low-budget film case studies Peter Broderick penned in the early days of this magazine. Here are some of those thoughts.

Don’t try to imitate Hollywood-style naturalism. One of the truest dictums of micro- and ultra-low-budget filmmaking is that it costs money to create the sort of polished “reality” that Hollywood films go for. If you do try to go for this reality, you’re competing against a larger pool of better-funded movies. Better to wear low-budget virtues on your sleeve. (“The budget is the aesthetic,” we said in the ’90s.) Ted Hope once posted the 10 Commandmentsof No-Budget Filmmaking he and partner James Schamus adhered to in the early days of their production company, Good Machine. One is: “Choose an aesthetic that will capitalize on the lack of money (i.e. period anachronisms, monochromatic color schemes, etc.). Invest meaning in everyday commonplace things – make an orange a totemic object John Ford would be proud of.” To wit, for Hundreds of Beavers Cheslik “slapp[ed] black and white and grain on everything to hide the shoddy compositing work, focusing on really strong shapes rather than high-fidelity detail or subtlety. The whole premise of the film is conceived around white negative space—having strong silhouettes against white.” And also, “We don’t believe you should emulate the look of a major Hollywood film. I like the indie game philosophy, where two guys make a whole game with pixel art and pick an aesthetic and a style that matches the scope of their budget and team.”

Special effects can be a free resource. Another golden rule of ultra-low-budget filmmaking is to maximize your in-kind resources. Again, from the Good Machine commandments: “Write for what you know and for what you can obtain. This goes for actors, locations, animals, and major propping or set dressing. If your friend owns something, anything, write it into the film.” Back in the day, it would have been inconceivable to make a no-budget effects-heavy film, but that’s not the case now with so many filmmakers developing these skills. Director Cheslik is an After Effects whiz, and he designed Hundreds of Beaversknowing he’d be working for free on the film’s 1,500 (!) effects shots.

Base a film around the skills of a particular performer. As a follow-up to the preceding point, available resources can include an actor. Says producer Kurt Ravenwood, “The guys thought they could make a funny movie centered around Ryland [Tewes], and they wanted to do it in Wisconsin. He’s a great physical comedian, and they put the concept together [based on] available resources. It was very much, “What do we have around us, and what kind of concept could work for that?” and, “[We] really love old silent films and slapstick, and we haven’t seen slapstick in a long time.” It was just a collage of ideas.

Don’t get overly fixated on gear. I’ve seen many an independent filmmaker be besotted by gear, endlessly testing cameras, waiting for the newest models, and then not making their films. Cheslik shot Hundreds of Beavers in 1080p — no stressing over 4K for him! — on a mirrorless Panasonic GH5. Maybe that decision didn’t suit so well with the DP — “I ignorantly bought it before the DP was lined up, then handed it to the DP, and he said, ‘Oh,’” Cheslik remembered — but the tiny camera wound up working for the film.

Figure out an ingenious creative production cheat. As this video I posted of David Lynch demonstrates, normal everyday production issues routinely conspire to limit a filmmaker’s ability to create. The ingenious concept of Hundreds of Beavers — a fur trapper battling beavers, who are played by people in mascot costumes — means that there’s no background cast continuity to worry about. The filmmakers can grab whoever can do the role on the day, stick them in a costume and not worry about scene-to-scene continuity.

Don’t try to create the film in one go. Shooting a film in stages is commonplace in documentary but less so in fiction filmmaking. Still, over the years, it’s been a productive strategy for some. (I remember Gaspar Noé explaining once how he made his fantastic debut Carne shooting weekends over years.) Hundreds of Beavers embraced this strategy, which came with both production and creative benefits. Says producer Kurt Ravenwood: “We raised just enough to shoot the first act in 2020. That shoot was maybe three or four weeks. [Cheslik and team] came back with the first act roughed out; then, that helped us get a couple other [investors] off the fence and into the movie…. The following year… they shot again—an outdoor shoot with six guys. Then, there were pickups in between, so overall it was shot over the course of two years.” All told, the shoot was about three months. Says Cheslik, “Four people over 12 weeks can make a more interesting film than an indie trying to emulate a Hollywood look and only having 10 days.” (And, about that small crew, Cheslik says, “We believe in small and slow.”)

When fundraising, get people to feel something. (And don’t stress too much about your investors losing their money.)I’ve read too many business plans from first-time filmmakers who, knowing very little about distribution, try to pitch their pictures as financially reasonable ventures. I’ve always maintained that the primary pitch for a low-budget film can’t be based on the possibility of financial return. So, it was cool to read that the pitch for Hundreds of Beavers was based around, simply, humor. Says Ravenwood about the fundraising pitch to investors, “Mike cut together a sort of trailer of mascots falling on ice, but also clips from silent films and cartoons, and you could tell what the tone of the movie was going to be by watching that mood trailer… You know, in the grand scheme of things, you’ve got some responsible guys who made this one movie for seven grand and then got [investors] to laugh in the room. The stakes weren’t that high—$150,000. I wasn’t that worried about it. If it flops, it’s not the end of the world.”

Be able to turn down offers. Sometimes the first distribution offer is the best, but you never want to be in a position where you have to take it. After the film’s run at festivals like SITGES and Fantasia, some offers trickled in, but, says Ravenwood, “…what really bummed us out more is it seemed like most distributors wanted to put it in theaters for a week and then put it right on video on demand. We just didn’t believe that that was going to help this movie out.” The filmmakers reasoned that they could promote the film better than a distributor. “There are a lot of companies that are actually just content companies who say they’re distributors,” continues Ravenwood. “They’ll buy your rights for a long period of time, but they’re not actually trying to get your film into the culture. They tie it up and hope that down the road you direct a Marvel movie or something; then they have your first feature film. They don’t do the marketing, and it’s so important to do marketing for a movie. So, I raised a little more money to start a marketing campaign, then strategized the Great Lakes Roadshow with Mike and Ryan.”

Put on a show. The Beavers team used that marketing campaign to do a DIY theatrical tour around the Great Lakes (hence why I, based in New York, took a while to catch up to the film). But they didn’t just hire a booker and publicist, they also figured out how to event-ize their film. Check out the insanity of one post-screening Q&A and the Looney Tunes-style trailer they cut that captures some of the film’s audience response.

It’s okay not to do it again. Self-distribution is hard. And 1,500 hours of free After Effects work — well, that’s upwards of $75,000 of in-kind labor. More power to anyone attempting to build a sustainable model, but it’s also okay to know that you’ll just be doing this one time. “Yeah, we have got to scale up,” says Cheslik. “The Beavers model is hopefully repeatable for someone else. We’re done doing it this way.

There are a lot more lessons to take away from the success of Hundreds of Beavers, but I’ll let you discover them in the two interviews from our current edition. And check out the film, which is just now available on digital platforms like Amazon and Apple TV.

See you next week.

Best,

Scott Macaulay
Editor-in-Chief