Production
Filmmaking - Production
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10 Lessons Learned While Making My First Short Film Budget
Earlier this year I produced a very low budget short film, Affections, directed by Bridey Elliott and premiering at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Armed with a Master’s Degree and several experiences assisting producers in the past, I assumed I knew everything I needed to in order to create an accurate budget. As with all firsts, this was an incredible learning experience that highlighted several integral lessons to keep in mind while creating any kind of film budget. Look to the script Although labor intensive, it’s worth spending the time to do a comprehensive script breakdown (a big spreadsheet outlining […]
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Learning Not to Share: The Benefits and Pitfalls of Social Media for Independent Films
Mynette Louie, president of Gamechanger Films, recently had a problem. She caught a stand-in on set not only taking photos of her film’s star, whose contract had specific photo approvals in place, but posting the photos to Facebook. “I told him to delete them from his Facebook, then I went through his phone and deleted all the photos he took on set.” Traditionally, producers, marketing departments and publicists labor over key stills and publicity images, methodically crafting a film’s identity in careful, strategic installments. This practice continues today, but can quickly be subverted by a tweet, post or status update. […]
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Anomalisa, Stop-Motion Animation and How 3D Printers are Changing Filmmaking
Remember stop-motion, that venerable technique of animated films ranging from old-time children’s classics by Rankin/Bass to sword-and-sandals epics by Ray Harryhausen? Given the success of Pixar’s movies, Minions and other computer-animated features, you might have thought that 2D, hand-drawn, and traditional stop-motion has been relegated to the dust bin of history. Well, if you are a fan of these styles, don’t lose hope just yet. Opening just before the New Year was Charlie Kaufman’s much-anticipated directorial follow up to 2008’s Synecdoche, New York, Anomalisa. Directed by Kaufman and Duke Johnson, it’s being touted for its unique amalgam of animation processes […]
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“The Odds Were in Our Favor to Fail”: Krisha at the BFI London Film Festival
Krisha Fairchild is a 64-year-old actress who lives in Mexico and has four dogs. She’s named after a young Polish girl who saved her father’s life during the Invasion of Normandy in 1944. With an older sister named Vikki and a younger one called Robyn, Fairchild grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Today, the three sisters take turns visiting their 91-year-old mother — who suffers from cognitive brain damage as a result of her late onset closet alcoholism — in an assisted living facility in Texas. Fairchild’s mother is remorseful about the addiction, and like her own alcoholic father, is charming […]
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“To Make an Independent Movie is Delusional in a Way”: Alaska is a Drag‘s Shaz Bennett and Melanie Miller at US in Progress
US in Progress is a biannual event held in June during the Champs-Elysées Film Festival in Paris and in October during the American Film Festival in Wroclaw. It’s a five-year-old industry event that aims to strengthen transatlantic film collaborations and partnerships between European industry and emerging American filmmakers. The fifth US in Progress recently held in Wroclaw featured six films in various editing and post-production stages. The participants included: Mike Ott and Nathan Silver, Actor Martinez Shaz Bennett and Melanie Miller, Alaska is a Drag Zachary Shedd and Daniel Patrick Carbone, Americana Benjamin Kruger, It Had to Be You Joel […]
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The Rasmussen Brothers on Shooting Their Microbudget Horror Film, The Inhabitants, Part Two
In this second part of the interview with brothers Michael and Shawn, they talk about directing their microbudget movie The Inhabitants, the music and sound mixing, and distribution for the movie. Filmmaker: With one of you running the camera and the other doing sound, how did you manage to handle directing at the same time? Michael: I think we’ve learned to multi-task, but it is hard. You are trying to make sure that everything is in focus and you’re pulling focus yourself, you’re doing all that stuff. The good thing is that Shawn is standing there with the boom, he can […]
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IFP Screen Forward: Five Questions for Producer Mike S. Ryan
Ahead of his conversation at tomorrow’s Screen Forward conference, Mike S. Ryan fielded five questions about his career and recent Filmmaker piece “TV is Not the New Film.” A producer on such films as Meek’s Cutoff, The Comedy and Palindromes, Ryan explains how transmedia represents an loss of faith in the filmic medium, why True Detective is an exception to the rule of the TV writer as auteur, and what he looks for in a script. Filmmaker: In your “TV is Not the New Film” piece, you mention that the move to transmedia shows a “[loss] of faith in the medium,” while many others seem to argue that transmedia is […]
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“We’re Making Fat Cells, Arteries, and a Heart:” Bill George on Innerspace
Today teenagers interested in the world of special effects are a few tutorials and some affordable software away from getting their feet wet. In 1977, the requirements were a bit more elaborate. It involved woodshop, sheets of styrene, and maybe a few surreptitious pictures taken at a screening of Star Wars. That’s how a teenaged Bill George got his start – making models from scratch dedicated to George Lucas’s space opera. Four years later, George was working on the crew of Return of the Jedi. Now in his 33rd year at Industrial Light & Magic, George has been a part […]
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No Mimes, Please! Soderbergh Recuts Antonioni’s Blow-Up
“For legal reasons, all of the footage with the mime troupe will have to be excised,” writes MGM “executive receptionist Tureen Patarga” to one Michelangelo Antonioni about his movie, Blow-Up. “Apparently one of the striped shirts worn by a cast member was originally created by the noted designer Hermoine Girth-Schnitt and was not cleared for use by the costume department.” Any on-set producer, particularly on a low-budget picture with lightly-staffed departments, has experienced that morning-of irritation: “Hey, is this okay to use? Can we clear this?” Usually it’s a rock-star poster, a t-shirt, or some ambiguous knick-knack foregrounded in the […]
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A Reader Asks, “How Do I Find A Director for my Screenplay?”
We’re always happy to receive questions here at Filmmaker about filmmaking itself. One such question inspired one of our most-read posts, “15 Things to Do After You Finish Your Script,” and now a reader of that blog post has written in with a logical next question: How do you find a director for your screenplay?” Below, my response and, as I like to do, further comments from someone who might have more experience than me — in this case, screenwriter and Filmmaker reader (and writer), Marc Maurino. First, here’s the reader letter: Hello Scott: I’ve just read and thoroughly enjoyed […]
