Recently in Filmmaking Category

The old way of raising money to make a film consisted of one or a combination of all of the following:

Yesterday I decided to search for a filmmaking community.  I know there are several out there and I know of several people that are involved in them, but I haven't really felt a part of any of them myself.  So I did a search on google for 'filmmaker'.  That was it.  One of the first places I went to is http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/ which had several interesting things going for it right away.  Having recently been part of Sundance, I recognized a few of the movies that were being talked about.

I then stumbled on a very interesting article about the value or purpose of film festivals.  http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2011/02/the-microbudget-conversation-what-are-festivals-good-for/  I was sucked in and had to read the whole thing.

It mentioned a rant from filmmaker Kevin Smith at Sundance which I had not heard about yet, and so followed the link and watched the whole thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90pcHCF2h44

It sure made me think.  He has some interesting points and the article also brings up some interesting points about marketing a film at a film festival.

To boil down the ideas to bullet points to mull over:

• film festivals rarely serve the filmmakers or films as a gateway to getting your film seen across the country in normal theaters, nor getting the filmmakers a deal for a future project.
• getting into festivals costs money and is a gamble
• film festivals still do allow for networking with other filmmakers and industry insiders
• film festivals still provide a means to "get noticed"
• financing a film is hard in the first place, making the film is also hard, trying to market the film to get your money back is really really hard
• distributors only deal in big money- they almost never waste their time on low cost stuff.  not enough profit, or potential profit to spend their time.
• Studios are distributors.  That is how they make their money.  They don't make it from making movies, they make it from selling movies.
• Self distribution is hard because there is not much known or available to support it.
• Self promotion is hard unless you already have huge network of followers on social network sites and email lists, or have access to those that do.
• What Kevin Smith talks about ("road show" approach to marketing/exhibiting) has been done by may other people already- some successes and some failures.  Warren Miller does this very thing, and has for 40+ years.  Success.  Some independent Mormon cinema tried this 5 years ago- flopped and lost money (Handcart).

I'm going to mull these over in my head for a bit and hav a followup post on some other things I've recently found that are related to the money/business side of filmmaking.

Sundance 2011 is now over.  I took the week of Jan 24 - Jan 28 off work so I could volunteer, and was at the Broadway theater in SLC for the week.  It was a great week and I had a lot of fun.

6 years ago my wife and I went on a great vacation to New Zealand.  I took my video camera (a Canon GL-1), and shot lots of video footage- about 3-4 hours of raw footage.  We were there for 10 days.  It was great.

While in film school I was taught video editing on three different software products: Adobe Primier, Final Cut Pro, and Avid.  Out of all of them I liked Final Cut Pro the best, and felt most comfortable in it.  So, back in 2004 (the same year that we went to New Zealand) I purchased a Mac Pro tower and Final Cut Pro (academic version).  And I imported the footage and began editing it near the end of that year.  Since then I've gotten rid of that tower and now have a 20" iMac and have the latest version of Final Cut Express (it is better than my old version of FCP from 6 years ago).

I just "finished" editing it this summer 2010!  Whew!  I put finished in quotes because there are things that could still be improved, but I'm not going to worry about them any more.  It is time to move on to another project.  Now that the editing is done, I need to put the DVD together for it.

One of the main reasons it has taken me so long is simply that it hasn't been a top priority for me.  And I also find that when I'm editing, I want the final result to look professional.  When editing my own vacation I try to imaging someone else who is not familiar with me or my wife watching it and edit it so that it would be interesting to them.  I mean, at some point I expect my children to see these videos and I hope the videos stand on their own without needing to be explained.  Is that over kill?  Perhaps.  But it means that I'm not ashamed to show off my work to any one.  Even if I look ridiculous in parts of the video, the video itself tells a story in an structured way.

So lessons learned?  I'd say, when editing vacation videos, make it a higher priority to finish them within a year of the trip.  Next time.  :-)  What else?  Definitely I learned a lot about audio levels.  Things sound totally different when on the computer versus on the tv.  Any music on the sound track needs to peak somewhere around -17db and dialog captured from the camera should be between 0db and +7db depending.  Audio was a big time consumer for me.  I hate to have to adjust volume on the tv when watching something, so you need to do all the normalizing when editing.  But it pays off if you can hear everything when watching it on the tv and don't need to touch the remote at all during it.  Any other lessons?  Perhaps one more- migrating a video project from one computer to another, and from one version of video editing software to another can be risky.  There was a time when I nearly had to start all over again when I got my new iMac.  The lesson learned- it is better to complete a project on one platform than to let it languish and have to be migrated onto another.  The risk of something going wrong and chances for headaches are pretty high.

If you are going to write a screenplay, then you really should look into Celtx (http://www.celtx.com ).  Hands down, this is the best tool you can have to begin your creative process.  There are many ways you can write a screenplay, and many tools to help you do so.  But Celtx combines all the best features, and many that others don't have, into one product.  And one of the best things about it- it is Open Source!

It is based on Mozilla's FireFox web browser, and works on WIndows, Linux, and Mac OS X.