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Marathon Training: The Documentary Awards Season Grind
By the time you read this, awards season, that annual ritual of accolades and extroversion, will be full throttle. Mounting and sustaining a campaign is often prohibitive, both as a budgetary line item and as an all-consuming occupation. Contenders live in the air and in hotels, go where their team sends them, agree to hundreds of interviews and participate in just as many Q&As and roundtables. But on the upside, an awards campaign is an opportunity to build a worldwide network of friends and contemporaries. Filmmaker reached out to former Academy Award nominees in the Feature Documentary category to share […]
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Among the Ashes: Iterating the Generative Documentary Where There’s Smoke
I grew up in a firefighting culture full of pancake breakfasts, fire parades and beef and beers. For 20 years my dad was a volunteer firefighter and amateur fire scene photographer. He shot thousands of 35mm slides of blazes, often capturing moments of destruction that are disturbing and yet at times hauntingly beautiful. However, my dad’s obsession with fire would eventually intersect with our lives in devastating ways. In the 1980s, while on a family vacation, our van erupted in flames. 11 months later, our house burnt to the ground. For over 30 years, I’ve wondered if those two fires […]
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How and Why to Set Up a Production Company
In today’s entertainment industry, owning a production company has become synonymous with having a trainer, manager or overall deal—no celebrity can be seen without! But what exactly makes owning a production company such a crucial and sought-after asset? How can aspiring producers, particularly those who are young and not yet famous or well-established, go about creating one? What are the key factors that contribute to making it successful? Drawing from a decade of observing producers, learning from their triumphs and setbacks, as well as my personal experiences, here I explore the anatomy of a production company, the elements that lead […]
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Reaching the Peak: Exploring Virtual Production on an Independent Budget
Given our tech-driven and communication-obsessed culture, it’s highly likely that you’re reading this article while multitasking on your smartphone. But as is the case with so many commodity industries like data, the true cost of all this connectivity often eludes us. This disconnect is what drove us to write the film HIGH, set in the fascinating and rarely seen world of telecom tower climbers. In the aftermath of a tragic accident, team foreman Butch Robbins leads his crew through the brutal Buffalo winter to finish their job on deadline and save the company, all without losing the connection he needs […]
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Producer Data: The Numbers Don’t Lie (The Truth about Independent Film Revenue)
Last fall, desiring information to aid our own filmmaking careers, we launched an experiment to see whether we could obtain hard data on independent film revenue. Having experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get this information, we created a Google form and asked filmmakers to self-submit not just their feature film top-line revenue data, but thorough, detailed and specific numbers on everything from their budgets to best- and worst-performing revenue streams to cast to how much their films made in gross and net terms. From the details of the 104 submitted films, we have drawn critically important—and many surprising—conclusions. […]
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Case Study: Dramarama
At the end of the 2000s, Jonathan Wysocki went to both the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs, then spent years on projects that would assemble pieces of financing before falling apart. All the while, he watched colleagues from those labs launch Kickstarter campaigns and make ultra-low-budget debuts. Deciding to take a similar approach, at the start of 2019, he raised $62,000 on the crowdfunding platform and an additional $180,000 in private equity and was shooting his first feature, Dramarama, by summer. Of course, as the timeline above suggests, Wysocki’s picture will forever be asterisked in the independent film distribution history […]
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Case Study: S&M Sally
S&M Sally, the third feature in writer-director Michelle Ehlen’s trilogy of character-based comedy dramas dealing with gender and sexuality, was financed largely via crowdfunding and premiered at the Frameline Film Festival in June 2015 before going on to play more than 70 other fests, generating about $15,000 in revenue. For Ehlen, who has a devoted fanbase, festivals provide a kind of audience research: “Even if my films might land on the LGBTQ circuit, I try to go to bigger festivals, too. The festivals guide me as to how big a movie this is, how big the audience is, then I […]
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Case Study: Playing with Beethoven
“As a filmmaker, you’re just happy if your investors get paid back,” says director Jenn Page about her sixth feature, 2020’s Playing with Beethoven, produced for just $65,000. “Even if you’ve done the whole thing—produced it, packaged it and spent your life on it—you just go, ‘Let me just please make my investors’ money back,’ and even that is always obviously risky in this business. You literally put in the packet to your investors, ‘You’re probably not going to make your money back.’ What kind of business does this?” With the exception of her very first film, Page hasn’t had […]
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Case Study: Desperate Acts of Magic
Joe Tyler Gold made his magic-themed comedy Desperate Acts of Magic, co-directed with Tammy Caplan, “a day or two a month, over 18 months, until the film was done,” he says. The protracted production worked in the film’s favor because, with new crews shuffling in and out, “people kept getting introduced to the movie, and we kept getting new supporters. So, we were able to get donations and funding through the whole process and, toward the end, when we released our trailer, a producer saw and was impressed by it. He saw that we were looking for money, and he […]
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Artistic Outputs: Filmmakers and Production Designers on Using Generative AI
“An ominous slender figure in the foreground, a gay couple kissing in the distance, alleyway, two-point perspective, at night, a bar crowded, 8K, cinematic, cinematic composition, in the style of Jean-Luc Godard, rendered in the Gaspar Noe engine.” Via Zoom, Natou Fall shares her screen with me, allowing me to look at the hundreds of images she’s created using text prompts in the generative AI program Midjourney. The image resulting from the prompt above is an eerie one of a silhouetted couple holding hands, both wearing fashionable flared jackets and standing in a sparse, neon-accented nightclub with a figure lurking […]
