You've got twenty minutes to finish this shot. Twenty minutes before the sun sinks behind that hill. If you move a hundred yards to the left you might have another five minutes, but your crew is getting tired, and the fact you haven't paid them a blessed cent since the start of production is beginning to show. "Action!" The camera runs, and you're out there in front of the lens because all your actors suck and you wrote the lines a certain way so they're going to be said a certain way. As you repeat the words, for the seventh or eighth time, you wonder if you can have the film developed on Friday so by Monday you can edit the first three minutes. "Cut. That was great." Shit. That sucked. 'Pack it up boys, I'm impressed with what we got." Your director of photography, the only kid in school with film experience (he owns a Nikon camera), turns to you with a sheepish grin: "Same time tomorrow" As you grab the 8mm tripod and fold it down, you try to put on your best smile. "Yeah. We did well today, but tomorrow I want to do the same thing a little different. For coverage." He puts on a serious face. "Of course. Coverage." The next morning, you wake up to a shrieking alarm and roll out of your! bed. You glance out the window and notice it's raining. Great. But before you can worry about that, you have to put on a tie and blazer, and get ready for the AP Physics test you have in sixty minutes. So is the life of the high school indie filmmaker.
I was eight-years-old and my family took a trip to Universal Studios. Somehow my parents knew one of the guys giving the tour and he picked me out of a hundred kids to sit on a bike in front of a giant green screen to reenact the finale of E.T. When they played it back for me on tape, and I saw myself flying over the moon "just like in the film" I was hooked. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to make movies.
If you have the bug, you need to do something about it. If you one day realize that you want to be a writer, director, producer, actor, whatever; you need to do it. Don't get an agent, don't join the guild - just make something. Anything, do it all if you have to. The days of showing up in L.A. and working your way up from the bottom of the ladder are over. And if you don't know anyone in Hollywood- you can forget it. The only way your going to get noticed is to do something yourself, and then pass it around. Another thing: start young. John Glenn never made a movie. If you hit and miss young, get a lot under your belt, and read enough to know what your talking about, you can impress a hell of a lot of people. With enough of a cocky attitude and a whole lot of heart you might even get hired.
First thing you need to do is pick up a camera. My days with the old 8mm thing are over. Digital is getting good, and when Steve Soderbergh makes commercials for the Cannon XL-1, you know for a little bit of money you can make a whole lot of picture. Full time students can purchase Apple's G4 computer at half-price. And programs like Final Cut and DVD Studio Pro can make amateur crap look like professional crap, you're halfway there.
If you look hard enough on Kazaa.com's software download section you can find a copy of Final Draft. Download it, it's free. If you can't find it: buy it. Type up a short film, ten to fifteen minutes is good. Think of something original, interesting. If you can't, don't worry - your first film is going to suck anyway. Print out your first draft and don't worry about a rewrite. It's there on paper, if you think you have a Driving Miss Daisy, you can rewrite and re-shoot it later.
Now you need to put together a team. If you can avoid it, don't grab a bunch of friends. I typically work with people I don't know well because they try to impress you. The movie made with a bunch of buddy's is a movie that's typically never made. You're not paying anybody and sooner or later they're not going to want to wake up at five in the morning to say three lines without an incentive. Food helps.
Use one camera. You get more creative that way. If you have no idea what you're doing, it means you haven't watched enough movies. I average four movies a week, sometimes the same ones. Try to notice the different angles the director uses, the way he sets up the scene. Look at lighting, listen to the music cues, and notice the blocking. Turn off the sound and see if you can guess what's going on without the dialogue. If you can't do this with your film, then you should look into directing for television. If you can, get actors who can perform at a decent level. Keep the car chases and gunfights out of this one and see if you can film the entire thing in one location.
When it's done, you need to edit it together. Watch more movies. Look at the different cuts, timing, speeds, and transitions. Get to know your editing software and get to know it well. Burn the thing to DVD or VHS and lock up the master DV tapes. Then you gotta shelve it. Put it away and start on your next project.
I made sixteen shorts and two hour long films at St. Michael's, the all boys' Catholic boarding school I attended for four years. We were located in BFE, nothing but shrubs and hills for miles, so war movies were what we did best. I used the same guys till I was a senior because we were bored kids who got good at pointing a camera at something and making it fun to watch later on. We would gather up our money and spend about five hundred dollars a project. One guy went to the Army surplus store and bought the uniforms, WWII history junk, and even one time a random parachute. Another guy went down to Tijuana and spent two hundred bucks on pyrotechnics. Another guy made lots and! lots of fake blood. Another guy went to his step dad's house and stole the antique Japanese machine gun hiding out in the attic. We laced up our boots, shouldered our bb-guns and smeared dirt on our faces. Then we ran up into the hills and everybody tried jumping off short cliffs with the parachute.
"War of Prisoners" played in front of seventy restless high school kids who paid five greens each to get inside the door. The end was never seen publicly, however, because the headmaster happened to enter during a very graphic, and very profane, death scene. The plug was pulled, the film was trashed, and my crew and I spent two weekends in community service. Yet four days later we were off and doing it again. Which just proves that in any production there will be setbacks, drawbacks, and obstacles. Mine, was a one Father Gabriel Stack, O. Praem, headmaster of St. Michael's College Prep High School.
In a way, this man helped me deal with the fact that there were indeed setbacks, drawbacks, and obstacles. I could only think of him as a Producer or Major Studio that was in my way. I'm sure that other directors have used the phrase, 'bastard asshole sonofabitch prick!' in their tenure. Needless to say I was in the confessional box often because of this man. In one specific instance I was banned from all contact with any film application, hardware, software, or manuscript; note to beginning filmmakers, do not play with fire.
Now that I'm out of high school, and five hundred dollars doesn't cut it for a budget anymore, the only good advice to get money I can give you is to call up and ask for it. That's what you're going to be doing a lot of: calling and asking. To get locations for shooting, money for the shoot, or people to work on it, you need to be doing a lot of calling around. Cell phone's come in handy.
Dentists are a good place to start. Single one's are better. No offense to woman, they're beautiful and I love them all, but men without a significant other tend to spend more frivolously. Call up these guys and ask them if they've ever been interested in the movie business. Give them your good idea (it is important at this point that you have a good idea) and tell them how much you need. 30,000 dollars is a good number. The less people you have giving you this money the better. Edward Burns made his first, and best film, "The Brothers McMullen", for this amount of money; it is possible.
If you want to work with digital you won't need to spend that much money. You can post your film on the Internet and hope that you get a lot of hits, and then some big wig will see it and BAM! you're signed to a three-picture contract with Warner Bros. Good for you. For the rest of us who are not hopeless romantics, you can go about haggling with Fuji and Kodac for cheap film (use the term 'cents per foot' and they will respect you). Talk to Panavision or Arriflex and if you impress them with a good outline of what you want to do, they'll loan you the camera to work with for free. Before you run out with the camera and use up valuable film, practice with a 35mm still shot camera. Play with lighting and lenses. Film is a whole other animal compared to digital (If you don't know what I'm talking about, think of the relationship between a nice crisp 35mm still shot and a pixilated web-looking digital still shot). Make sure you keep good track of your money and get the best damn post-production cost possible.
I mentioned that I'd done only two hour-long projects and said nothing about a full-length feature. Unless you are paying your cast and crew there is no way on all of God's green earth you will finish your project if it's over an hour. People are not going to work for free and show up everyday on time unless they have an incentive. Trust me. They need something to keep them there. If you're short on money, food helps.
As far as production goes, just be prepared. You can never be too prepared. If you don't show up with plans A, B and C ready to go, D, E, F and G formulating, no one on the set is going to take you seriously. Before you film, put together a production budget, schedule, scene storyboards, a musical score. Go out and shoot a trailer with digital. If you look good, the people giving you the money or helping you put the film together will really help you out. Get decent actors, college campus' are a good place to post audition flyers. If you're going to act in it, make sure you get a cinematographer who knows what he's doing, spend the extra money on him because he's worth it. Write out exactly what your going to do each day and have backup plans so that no one is just standing around waiting. Time is money and you don't have money so use your 24-hour clock well.
When directing your actors don't pretend to be Stanley Kubric. He's dead, and if you shoot like him so will you. If you get a decent take, print it and move on. If your actors can't keep a straight face, act like a dick and throw a chair. Scare them into doing it right. If nothing else works, food helps.
So you've got the film in the can (and if you've gone this far I salute you), what now? Submit. What the worst that could happen' The film is a bomb, gets mixed or horrible reviews, no one picks it up and the hot lead actress breaks up with you the next day. Possible. But hey, you've made a movie, and you've got the bug so you will make more.
Just submit it. The Independent Feature Film Marketplace is a frequent launching pad for independent films in search of a distributor. That's what you want, a distributor. Send it out to the Sundance Institute and any film festival in your area' or not in your area. You want to get it out. You want to get it out. You want to get it out. Get ready for criticism, debate, controversy and letdown after letdown. Don't get depressed, just roll with the punches. If nothing else, food helps.
I was eight-years-old and my family took a trip to Universal Studios. Somehow my parents knew one of the guys giving the tour and he picked me out of a hundred kids to sit on a bike in front of a giant green screen to reenact the finale of E.T. When they played it back for me on tape, and I saw myself flying over the moon "just like in the film" I was hooked. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to make movies.
If you have the bug, you need to do something about it. If you one day realize that you want to be a writer, director, producer, actor, whatever; you need to do it. Don't get an agent, don't join the guild - just make something. Anything, do it all if you have to. The days of showing up in L.A. and working your way up from the bottom of the ladder are over. And if you don't know anyone in Hollywood- you can forget it. The only way your going to get noticed is to do something yourself, and then pass it around. Another thing: start young. John Glenn never made a movie. If you hit and miss young, get a lot under your belt, and read enough to know what your talking about, you can impress a hell of a lot of people. With enough of a cocky attitude and a whole lot of heart you might even get hired.
First thing you need to do is pick up a camera. My days with the old 8mm thing are over. Digital is getting good, and when Steve Soderbergh makes commercials for the Cannon XL-1, you know for a little bit of money you can make a whole lot of picture. Full time students can purchase Apple's G4 computer at half-price. And programs like Final Cut and DVD Studio Pro can make amateur crap look like professional crap, you're halfway there.
If you look hard enough on Kazaa.com's software download section you can find a copy of Final Draft. Download it, it's free. If you can't find it: buy it. Type up a short film, ten to fifteen minutes is good. Think of something original, interesting. If you can't, don't worry - your first film is going to suck anyway. Print out your first draft and don't worry about a rewrite. It's there on paper, if you think you have a Driving Miss Daisy, you can rewrite and re-shoot it later.
Now you need to put together a team. If you can avoid it, don't grab a bunch of friends. I typically work with people I don't know well because they try to impress you. The movie made with a bunch of buddy's is a movie that's typically never made. You're not paying anybody and sooner or later they're not going to want to wake up at five in the morning to say three lines without an incentive. Food helps.
Use one camera. You get more creative that way. If you have no idea what you're doing, it means you haven't watched enough movies. I average four movies a week, sometimes the same ones. Try to notice the different angles the director uses, the way he sets up the scene. Look at lighting, listen to the music cues, and notice the blocking. Turn off the sound and see if you can guess what's going on without the dialogue. If you can't do this with your film, then you should look into directing for television. If you can, get actors who can perform at a decent level. Keep the car chases and gunfights out of this one and see if you can film the entire thing in one location.
When it's done, you need to edit it together. Watch more movies. Look at the different cuts, timing, speeds, and transitions. Get to know your editing software and get to know it well. Burn the thing to DVD or VHS and lock up the master DV tapes. Then you gotta shelve it. Put it away and start on your next project.
I made sixteen shorts and two hour long films at St. Michael's, the all boys' Catholic boarding school I attended for four years. We were located in BFE, nothing but shrubs and hills for miles, so war movies were what we did best. I used the same guys till I was a senior because we were bored kids who got good at pointing a camera at something and making it fun to watch later on. We would gather up our money and spend about five hundred dollars a project. One guy went to the Army surplus store and bought the uniforms, WWII history junk, and even one time a random parachute. Another guy went down to Tijuana and spent two hundred bucks on pyrotechnics. Another guy made lots and! lots of fake blood. Another guy went to his step dad's house and stole the antique Japanese machine gun hiding out in the attic. We laced up our boots, shouldered our bb-guns and smeared dirt on our faces. Then we ran up into the hills and everybody tried jumping off short cliffs with the parachute.
"War of Prisoners" played in front of seventy restless high school kids who paid five greens each to get inside the door. The end was never seen publicly, however, because the headmaster happened to enter during a very graphic, and very profane, death scene. The plug was pulled, the film was trashed, and my crew and I spent two weekends in community service. Yet four days later we were off and doing it again. Which just proves that in any production there will be setbacks, drawbacks, and obstacles. Mine, was a one Father Gabriel Stack, O. Praem, headmaster of St. Michael's College Prep High School.
In a way, this man helped me deal with the fact that there were indeed setbacks, drawbacks, and obstacles. I could only think of him as a Producer or Major Studio that was in my way. I'm sure that other directors have used the phrase, 'bastard asshole sonofabitch prick!' in their tenure. Needless to say I was in the confessional box often because of this man. In one specific instance I was banned from all contact with any film application, hardware, software, or manuscript; note to beginning filmmakers, do not play with fire.
Now that I'm out of high school, and five hundred dollars doesn't cut it for a budget anymore, the only good advice to get money I can give you is to call up and ask for it. That's what you're going to be doing a lot of: calling and asking. To get locations for shooting, money for the shoot, or people to work on it, you need to be doing a lot of calling around. Cell phone's come in handy.
Dentists are a good place to start. Single one's are better. No offense to woman, they're beautiful and I love them all, but men without a significant other tend to spend more frivolously. Call up these guys and ask them if they've ever been interested in the movie business. Give them your good idea (it is important at this point that you have a good idea) and tell them how much you need. 30,000 dollars is a good number. The less people you have giving you this money the better. Edward Burns made his first, and best film, "The Brothers McMullen", for this amount of money; it is possible.
If you want to work with digital you won't need to spend that much money. You can post your film on the Internet and hope that you get a lot of hits, and then some big wig will see it and BAM! you're signed to a three-picture contract with Warner Bros. Good for you. For the rest of us who are not hopeless romantics, you can go about haggling with Fuji and Kodac for cheap film (use the term 'cents per foot' and they will respect you). Talk to Panavision or Arriflex and if you impress them with a good outline of what you want to do, they'll loan you the camera to work with for free. Before you run out with the camera and use up valuable film, practice with a 35mm still shot camera. Play with lighting and lenses. Film is a whole other animal compared to digital (If you don't know what I'm talking about, think of the relationship between a nice crisp 35mm still shot and a pixilated web-looking digital still shot). Make sure you keep good track of your money and get the best damn post-production cost possible.
I mentioned that I'd done only two hour-long projects and said nothing about a full-length feature. Unless you are paying your cast and crew there is no way on all of God's green earth you will finish your project if it's over an hour. People are not going to work for free and show up everyday on time unless they have an incentive. Trust me. They need something to keep them there. If you're short on money, food helps.
As far as production goes, just be prepared. You can never be too prepared. If you don't show up with plans A, B and C ready to go, D, E, F and G formulating, no one on the set is going to take you seriously. Before you film, put together a production budget, schedule, scene storyboards, a musical score. Go out and shoot a trailer with digital. If you look good, the people giving you the money or helping you put the film together will really help you out. Get decent actors, college campus' are a good place to post audition flyers. If you're going to act in it, make sure you get a cinematographer who knows what he's doing, spend the extra money on him because he's worth it. Write out exactly what your going to do each day and have backup plans so that no one is just standing around waiting. Time is money and you don't have money so use your 24-hour clock well.
When directing your actors don't pretend to be Stanley Kubric. He's dead, and if you shoot like him so will you. If you get a decent take, print it and move on. If your actors can't keep a straight face, act like a dick and throw a chair. Scare them into doing it right. If nothing else works, food helps.
So you've got the film in the can (and if you've gone this far I salute you), what now? Submit. What the worst that could happen' The film is a bomb, gets mixed or horrible reviews, no one picks it up and the hot lead actress breaks up with you the next day. Possible. But hey, you've made a movie, and you've got the bug so you will make more.
Just submit it. The Independent Feature Film Marketplace is a frequent launching pad for independent films in search of a distributor. That's what you want, a distributor. Send it out to the Sundance Institute and any film festival in your area' or not in your area. You want to get it out. You want to get it out. You want to get it out. Get ready for criticism, debate, controversy and letdown after letdown. Don't get depressed, just roll with the punches. If nothing else, food helps.