The art of Art.

This last week I've been involved in something rather new and interesting to me.

Producer-Director Roger Larry approached me about shooting a couple of projects for Canadian artist, Mark Lewis.  I said yes of course and soon found myself a cinematographer in the world of art, nay, Art.

Talk about shifting paradigms, it was a revolution for me, a full 360, coming full circle.  Back when I was a student filmmaker in the late eighties, Art was all I was interested in.  I think of myself from back then and wince at my arrogance.  Those of you who know me, if you think I'm unbearable now I was far, far worse then.

Our film school professors wrestled us into narrative filmmaking.  We grudgingly accepted film as a story medium, not as Art for museums, art as in craftsmanship.  Building houses,  not exhibits.  The story is the thing.  Great cinematography supports the story, you're a base player, a backup singer.  You may be called upon to solo, but generally you're supposed to disappear into the background.

Anyway... I gradually evolved to the point of making movies as crowd pleasers.  Emotional rollercoasters.   Definitely Art with a little 'a'.  I mean:  INSECTICIDAL.  Really.

On my last show, GOBLIN, I literally scoffed at the idea of doing anything artistic.  'Big A-Art has no place on this set' I practically proclaimed to cinematographers Tom Harting and previously Andy Strahorn (HOUSE OF BONES).

All this to communicate how refreshing participating in the making of an Art film was for me.  It was all about that one shot.  Getting it perfect.  Taking whatever time it takes, returning to the scene if necessary.  All about just one shot.

It had little to do with how I saw Art back when I started.  When you're looking for perfection, beauty, the ego disappears just as it does (perhaps more so) when it bows away for the needs of the story.

Two separate projects, two shots then.  That we worked on over a week.  Then there was the technical nature of the shots, truly poetic from my perspective.  You'll soon see why.

One of the shots was a traditional technical challenge:  a rear screen plate, day-for-night on the water.  Shot in black and white 35mm.
I love this sort of thing, Panavision supplied us with a 535B and a couple of primes, an assortment of heavy 6x6 grads, a polarizer, classic B&W filters (Red and Orange, a little hard to find nowadays) etc...  The idea was to paint the shot entirely in camera and do a classic photochemical post workflow, they'll project the plate behind the actors in Toronto and Mark Lewis will reshoot it there.

Hardly anyone processes 35mm B&W anymore, but I was happy to hear that my old ally:  Alpha Cine in Seattle still offers the service (and with gray-haired guys at the tiller too!).  We used to ship them our S8 and S16mm B&W negative all the time back when I got started.

The other shot was a portrait of a specific spot in downtown Vancouver where people have been showing up and dancing night after night.  We ended up shooting that with a dslr, a Canon 1D Mark iv for it's amazing low-light capability.
I love this sort of thing too.  Using a bleeding-edge camera system, learning it's intricacies.

Because we weren't able to source a PL-mount adapter we ended up renting primes from a photo place (Canon-PL adapters are still rare and hard to get to, also some companies -like Panavision- won't rent them out even if they have them - draw your own conclusions as to why).

And ended up with an out of focus shot!  Embarrassingly I'd figured that I didn't need an AC as the shoot was so simple (a static DSLR with a wide angle prime).  However, it rained, and I failed to protect the lens sufficiently.  There was a fine mist on it that I figured would have little effect on the image other than a slight diffusion.  It had looked fine on my SmallHD monitor, but back in the suite, it was obvious that everything was soft.  Ugh.

When we returned to reshoot.  I also discovered how hard it can be to focus an extreme wide shot with a dslr.  Modern-day still camera lenses are all autofocus of course.  In order to save on battery power as well as speed up the autofocusing of a shot, the lens is designed so that the markings are all compressed:  it needs to move very slightly for focus to go from 15' to 30'.  Solution?  You MUST magnify x10 to find your focus, and the slightest nudge will throw it way out.
Conclusion regarding further shooting with a DSLR?  Either use a PL-mount with a cine-lens OR possibly use old, manual focus lenses.

And so it was that in the course of a week, I ended up shooting in two fringe formats, one ancient and expired, the other so new that we're still discovering how to use it.

That was my week, dealing with The art of Art.

Collaborating

I am convinced that when it comes to making great films the real challenge is how we go about collaborating.

We've all heard about the studio system nightmare.  Executives with lawyerly, accounting, or administrative backgrounds attempting to guess what the mainstream wants.

Mostly I believe the mainstream doesn't know what 'IT' wants.  People on the other hand, want a good story well told (to quote McKee).

What does it take to pull this off?  While I do believe it is possible for an individual to pump out a work of genius in solitary, I think it is very difficult, unlikely, frankly not going to happen.

Why?  Because we rapidly become unable to evaluate the strength of our ideas.  You have it, you fall in love with it, and as they say, love is blind.

More importantly, we conflate the idea with our identity.  We see them as one and the same.

Let's not get into what 'identity' is.  That's a whole other matter, a very different conversation (and a worthwhile one).

The point is that we need each other to build a good story.

"But all my friends think my script is fantastic!"

Yeah, we're not talking about your friends here, not about your girlfriend, your parents, your children.  We're talking storytellers, market experts - yes, but storytellers first.

So how do we go about collaborating?

This is the challenge.  Luckily we have Pixar these days to look up to.  Their story process is legendary and there is no reason it can't be replicated on an indie level.

If the problem with so many studio films is the 'designed by committee' vibe, the problem with indies is the 'I did it all on my own' vibe.  So many of them (the ones you never see because they don't get released) are artistically interesting but storywise flat.  Boring.  Nonsensical.

We need story conferences.  Egoless brainstorming sessions of the type that TV writers are accustomed to.

Development workshops (almost but not quite writers circles) by indie filmmakers, for indie filmmakers.

And I'm going to start one, right here in Vancouver.

Filmmaking for profit.

A central pillar of my whole microbudget filmmaking paradigm is that of filmmaking as a FOR PROFIT enterprise.

This is not to say that ALL filmmaking needs to be for profit.  Often it isn't in the near term.  For instance, a network will commission a movie or tv series as an exercise in branding.  They're not looking to recoup anything specific per se, it's just part of their business model to get a reputation for quality programming and by God they're willing to spend a little to get there.

There's also the legacy investor.  The motivation here is to make a difference somehow.  There are many wealthy people who are shifting directions and are interested in exploring filmmaking.  On the surface they may be somewhat concerned about money but when you get down to it it's really about a sort of passion or about giving back somehow.  Institutional nonprofits or government agencies are often in this category as well.

As a filmmaker, those types of projects can be really fantastic to work on.  The emphasis becomes the craft, the art, the mission, the message.


Generally however, the people investing in your microbudget (most often you and your immediate family) really do want the money back  They're hoping to make money.  You're hoping to make money for everyone.  If you are serious about generating profit, your focus will be the market.

I hear many of you rebelling: focusing on the MARKET instead of the craft?  the art?  the message?!

Absolutely, I'm saying you need to look at your movie as potential product.  A product made for a price x that you will attempt to sell for a price y.  Yes.  The product will benefit by being well crafted, artfully made.  Yes it will benefit by delivering an urgent, moving message.   But only insofar as it works as a product.  Seriously, what's the point of busting our butts if the movie's not going to be seen?

I hope I've made it clear in earlier posts that it is a buyer's market these days.  Rarely do you find a movie that is truly unique.  You can't expect that just making whatever movie you want will mean a sale.  This is why any producer with any longevity works closely with the sales guys and broadcasters.  Ideally it's a warm vendor-client relationship.  You, the producer, are the vendor.  There to deliver the product the sales guys and broadcasters need to score big.

The more they score big, the more freedom, budget and power you get.

This is sort of the path I've taken, and I've been able to keep working consistently for the past few years.  What I see however are a lot of filmmakers who are out for themselves.

Many of them are quite brilliant.  When they're directing a show they're obviously committed to it being as great as possible because they're completely ambitious, uber-committed to getting their first oscar before 30.
But their commitment doesn't extend to the bottom line.  They don't care about it at all.  It wouldn't matter to them if the investors all went broke as long as the movie is well reviewed or they get a studio deal.
These directors are busy building their reels.  Though often delivering fantastic footage, the project needs to be rescued with reshoots, recuts, massive post production overages.

Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this.  You could level this accusation at one of my favorite all time filmmakers:  Terry Gilliam.

I'm saying you just can't have that on your microbudget.

O a bigger movie, the director can be overruled by any number of executives and producers and stars, on a microbudget, the director rules.  Sometimes there is one person who can talk them down.  You need to accept fiduciary responsibility.  You need to divorce yourself from your passion and double check your choices and beware of yessers (people who think all your ideas are great).

You need to be able to direct dispassionately.

Which people will appreciate when you start working at bigger budgets.

Naked Filmmaking

A catchy title for an old idea.

When we make movies these days there's all this stuff.

Movies all begin with an idea, which rapidly is measured against the 'market', agents, lawyers, executives get their fingerprints all over a highly structured script with the right beats landing in the right spot.  McKee, Vogler, Snyder all have lots to say about this.

The screenplay practically becomes an armoured delivery mechanism, but that's only the beginning.  Next comes the financing, the packaging; and eventually the diversity-preferred, foreign-market-taken-into-consideration casting.

Locations are selected based on their suitability for the story, yes, so long as they qualify for the tax credits that are central to the financing and how long to drive to and from the nearest 5-star-hotel for the cast?  Not too expensive please.

Then there's the schedule, which on the day is distilled down to the call sheet.  There's all sorts of gear and crew we need to help us wrangle reality, and then there's the gear and crew we need to wrangle the gear and crew.  The day is about making the call sheet.  Making the day.  You shoot scenes in the most efficient order taking into account hair/makeup/wardrobe changes, lighting logistics, minimizing cast days.  Story and performance concerns are hardly prioritized at all.  That's why we sometimes see professional actors and directors as well as a script supervisor and an A.D all fumbling to answer just where exactly in the story we're at right now.

When you get to set to direct, and it's time to find that concept again, there is so little time on the usual low budget show.  There's the day to make, the tightening marketplace has crushed the budgets and now you get fourteen, twelve, sometimes ten shooting days to make your movie.  A pro knows to shoot fast and move on as soon as what you have is technically competent.  Sometimes sooner.

This is the way we make movies in the low budget world  (let's say for argument's sake the 1M - 3M range).  And believe it or not it works pretty well.  Sometimes not so well.  Sometimes very well.  There are people who are very good at what they do.

When I used to crew, we called it the factory floor.


Many filmmakers yearn to let that all go, yearn to shed as much of it as possible.  So many of us lust for a sort of direct contact with the work.  Skin to skin as it were.  I certainly do at times.

Naked filmmaking.

The French called it 'Nouvelle Vague', Cassavettes did it, heck, that's what the Lumiere Brothers were doing.  I'm talking about a craftsperson approach to the business of filmmaking.  Not a factory floor operation but rather a home office operation.

There was DOGME 95, with a whole manifesto and certificate thing.

Steven Soderbergh impresses me as a director who chooses to go back and forth between studio pictures and true craftsman pictures.  FULL FRONTAL and the 'rules' he put out back then are a great example of how you go about making craftsman (or naked) pictures.

I like to think of them as rules, but of course, you're always going to look to break them.

Here are some of mine.

1.  Budget BELOW 100K.
2.  All locations are practical
3.  Crew fewer than 10 people
4.  No 'company moves'
5.  Shoot in sequence as much as possible.
6.  Writer-Producers-Director-DP-Camera Operator-AD-Editor-VFX-Sound- Composer-Colorist = at most five people
7.  Single camera, supplemented natural light
8.  Cast responsible for own wardrobe, hair, makeup, props
9.  Improvisation on set
10.  Break up the schedule (several small shoots rather than one big shoot)

You do feel naked, there is a freedom and intimacy in the process.  As a filmmaker, I do find I'm so much more exposed, more vulnerable since it's all me.  I can't blame anything on anyone else, I'm not a cog in the machine, I'm the craftsman at work.

There is an ideal to strive for, a purity there, just as there is an ideal to strive for in the perfectly honed production machine a well run set can be.

Naked Filmmaking.

An emergent model

In the midst of the collapse of the independent film market, I'm quite hopeful really, there IS a light at the end of the tunnel.  I do believe there IS an emergent model.

Sure, year after year continue to be banner years for the major studios.  When you have a hit nowadays, there are so many ways to exploit it.  And that's great and I look forward to making more movies on that side of the line.

For small independents however, they're being increasingly fractured and crushed.

It's just that the overhead required nowadays to finance and sell a million dollar film is about as much as the movie itself.  And the market is massively overcrowded.

Lose the overhead.

There's another model emerging, that of the independent filmmaker, truly independent, truly an auteur.  The filmmaker who makes the movie and sells it off a web site.

Maybe you license it to itunes, or netflix, people can watch your movie instantly, an impulse buy.  Or stream it directly from your own site (as bandwidth issues get relaxed over the next decade this will become more feasible).

The filmmaker needs a web 2.0 (3.0?) apparatus, you need to blog, facebook, twitter, get screeners out for reviews, work it work it baby.

Then maybe a new species of filmmaker can emerge.  Truly auteur and unconstrained by the need to be able to entertain the mainstream.  Free to address all sorts of niche markets.  Free to be self-expressed, finally.

When we make movies in the 'biz', we hardly ever make the movie we want to make.  We make the movie 'they' want us to make.  The marketing people.  The numbers.  Because we need the millions.

But if you're willing to work with a much smaller audience, in a distribution chain that has far fewer middlemen, if you're willing to massively cut the overhead, you will find a market for the movie YOU want to make.

Massively cutting the overhead means more to me than just less money and fewer people.  It actually means a whole other approach to filmmaking.  A whole other approach to the craft itself.  A model has emerged there too.

Basically it looks like this:

a tiny team.  One, two, maybe three filmmakers.  There's no point calling them anything else because everyone wears multiple hats and everyone will be making sandwiches and picking up the trash in addition to weighing in on the drafts, budgets, cast, and cuts.

and that's it.  Really.  I call it Naked Filmmaking.

More on this later.

Big ratings for House of Bones

The infamous 'Week of Lando' has passed. Each premiere was completely unique.

Thirst has been playing to thunderous silence on Superchannel. Literally no one has twittered a thing, nor even mentioned it to me. I caught it however, deep on channel 164, where I never venture.

Later that night it played in HD. But absolutely no feedback, it's as though it never happened.

Now take in absolute contrast the Syfy premiere last friday of House of Bones. The Twitter feed was full of mentions, reviews began popping up all over the web immediately, the imdb message board and user comment sections got very active.
For a while, House of Bones was showing up at the top of Google trends.

Amazing how you can track this stuff as it happens. From my phone no less.

A couple of days later my Twitter filter picked up a press release from Syfy (here), House of Bones got huge ratings. 1.8 million households. Hopefully, this gets me working soon.

Funny thing is, I thought Thirst was my best film ever. By far.

I'm learning.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The Savage Screening

A real pleasure to see my first feature, SAVAGE ISLAND,  screened last night.

It's been almost a decade since we ventured into the freezing November rains to shoot our micro-epic.  I'd forgotten all that we'd achieved.  The movie played great.  Better than I've ever seen it play, quite possibly because I was too insecure or uptight to notice what worked about it before.

When I finish a film, all I tend to be aware of are the imperfections, the places we fell short.  Maybe it takes a decade to get away from all that.  This time, I saw strong performances, an unstoppable story, a rich script...  Sounds a little self-congratulatory, I know, but I couldn't see all that before.

You've heard of the Hero's Journey, perhaps you've heard of the Writer's Journey (a fantastic book by Chris Vogler), sometimes I like to talk about the Filmmaker's Journey.

There's a psychological journey every filmmaker goes through with their movie, I've seen it again and again when DPing or handling post or just being in contact with my indie filmmaker colleagues.  I've noticed it going on within myself (but harder to see there) when working on my own movies.

It doesn't matter if you're doing a short, a documentary, a commercial, a music video, a psa, a corporate or a feature, the journey is there.  You will follow it.  However it does look different every time.

This is what it looks like:

(Stage of Process --> associated emotional state)

Concept --> elation.  We have a great idea, we love our idea.  It's the best idea ever.  We're going to make a fantastic movie.

Screenwriting --> determination.  We know our idea is great.  We've punched out our script.  It's a strong script, we're quite proud of it.  This is where most indies fail by the way, at the screenplay stage.  Frankly it's where most movies fail period.  More about this in a later post.

Financing --> more determination, tinged with desperation.  This phase can go lots of different ways, but let's talk about ultra-low budgets in particular since that's what SAVAGE ISLAND is.  Generally, the money in these situations is rather easy to get.  It's within the filmmaker's reach.  It may be her money, it may be his parent's or some other investor's money, credit cards, a reverse mortgage.  Whatever it is, it's easy to get, but you don't have enough of it.  And it hurts.

Prep and Production --> excitement/terror.  You're a leader, a general.  You're building your team, new people joining every day.  Stuff is happening.  Truckloads of gear, schedules, call sheets, lists and lists.  Life is full and you're in charge (this is the exciting part), you're 100% responsible for everything (this is the terrifying part).  My nerves show up as stomach problems.

Post... Dailies --> joy/rage.  The footage looks either absolutely amazing or totally wrong.  There is no middle ground.  When it looks great, you're at the top of the world.  You have talent, genius, the movie is brilliant.  When it doesn't, you simmer and rage.  It's someone's fault, rarely yours.  Mostly though, like a newborn baby, the dailies are met with wonderment and delight.

Post... Rough Cut --> depression.  The assembly is generally bad news.  This is the worst the movie will ever look and man does it look bad.  Some people lose all hope here and give up.  Movies get lost here.  This is the proverbial belly of the whale.  The forty years in the desert.

Post... Fine Cut --> a hero emerges.  I know, I know, but that's how I think of it.  Basically you go into the room to wrestle with all the problems in the assembly.  You do battle with them.  And you hope to emerge, a victor, having vanquished the demons before you.  Really, the director's cut can be quite exciting, when you get that scene working, when you watch the sequence you're in come alive, you realize the movie may not be dead after all.  It's like the classic resurrection beat.

Post... the Polish --> pride and joy.  The movie just gets better and better as the color correction, the ambience and music and fx and ADR and mix and vfx and titles and stock all come in together.  It's a delicious time.

The emotional journey repeats itself every time we make a movie, I see other people go through it, each in their own way.  And the entire time, we're completely blind to how the movie actually plays to an audience.  It's so hard to tell, we're so consumed by our emotional journey, by our familiarity with what we're building, that by the time it's done, we have no idea what we've made anymore.

And I sit in the audience, blind to what we've wrought.

Took me ten years to see why people like the movie so much.

House of Bones premiered on Syfy

TV premieres are odd.  Especially when they're in the US and you live in Canada.

House of Bones premiered three days ago on Syfy.  Quite likely that over a million people watched the movie, possibly twice as many.  Here in Canada nothing happened however.

When a movie premieres on TV, there is no screening to attend.  There was no cast and crew screening, no premiere to dress up for.  It just sort of happens, somewhere else.

As a director, I've found it both very difficult and very rewarding to sit in a theater with an audience as they watch my movie.  It's one of the best ways to learn your craft.  You can see the gags work, or not work.  Feel the tension in the room (you need to see past your own first), or feel the boredom.  Hear the laughter in the right places (or the wrong ones).

With the HOUSE OF BONES premiere however, as with the upcoming THIRST premiere, I get none of that.

So I've spent a large part of the last couple of days combing through reviews, user comments, forums, and even tweets trying to get a sense of how it played.  Yes, we read as much of it as we can.

I like to think of the movies I make as my children.  Well, creative offspring anyway.  TV premieres are sort of like your kid ran away before they graduated high school, and you find out about their exploits on line.

It's a little sad and lonely to tell you the truth.  House of Bones seems to be doing well.  I wish she'd write.

Tonight, Savage Island screens in a theater like a good girl.  It'll be nice to sit with an audience.

Dropping frames with the Canon 5D mark ii

My wife, Rachel, is a photographer and we happen to own a 5D Mark ii.  I -like every other filmmaker out there- have been very excited about the whole hybrid DSLR revolution.

There are many extraordinary benefits offered by this new breed of camera.  Many blogs have been covering them.  The cost to sensor size ratio is probably the foremost one.  With the 5D mark ii, you're basically shooting with imax depth of field characteristics.  This has advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of course is that you get a beautiful big picture look.  Focus falls off beautifully (an there's a world of gorgeous lenses available for far less money than quality cine lenses).  Looks very cinematic.

The disadvantage of course is that your depth of field is often SO tight that focus can be VERY hard to nail.  It's certainly impossible to tell focus on the tiny screen, you need a high def monitor etc... etc...  The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the photo lenses are actually designed so the focus ring doesn't have to travel far (faster autofocus, more energy-efficient).  When you're trying to pull focus manually however with great precision this works against you obviously.

I figure the troubles are well worth the look you get.  If a take goes soft (and I use the Small HD monitor to gauge it, with my face about 6-10 inches away from the screen), I can always do another.  Get more coverage.  I can also stop down.

Yes, the other benefit to the huge sensors in vastly increased light sensitivity.  The footage I'm going to post below was shot at 3200 ASA.  Yes, there IS noise visible in the low end, there IS some slight vertical lining noise (which I often see on the RED footage I handle) but it can easily be crushed out.  Also, I'm not completely anti-noise on most shows.  Depends what you're shooting.

Here, we were performing a screen test (of tech, style, and cast) for an edgy experimental film we're working on called ZOO.  It's a gritty thriller set in a warehouse, and so, some noise is not an issue for me.

But 3200 ASA!!!  It's absolutely mindboggling.  Thanks to that level of sensitivity I was stopped down to a 5.6, close to the sweet spot on the lens and the image looks glorious (IMHO).  Obviously, this helps massively with the aforementioned depth of field problem.

Sadly however, I've discovered a serious problem with the camera.  It is dropping frames.  I'd read some reports online about dropped frames but people have been waving them off, saying they're due to the high bit rate of the compression.  Most machines won't play it back smoothly.  Though the high bit rate does make it hard to play back the footage natively, it has nothing to do with the problem at hand.

Here are a couple short clips.

Canon 5D Mk ii dropping frames on a pan
Canon 5D Mk ii dropping frames on actor movement

If you play the footage back you'll see two duplicate frames, then motion catches up.  Always one original and two dupes before it catches up.  The fact that it's always exactly the same number of frames gives me hope that it may be a software problem and firmware fixable.  I have no basis at all to say that, it's just a hope.  Because the camera is great in so many other ways.

A short note about workflow, the footage was transcoded to 1920x1080 ProRes HQ at 30 (not 29.97, same as the native stuff).  When I saw the problem I went back to the native footage (which is choppy to play directly as mentioned before) and saw that the problem is in the original media.  The camera duplicated frames and then 'jumped' back into real time.

This is hard to reproduce which may be why there isn't much chatter about the problem yet on the intertubes.  It appears to happen only when the image is changing substantially (pan or other major movement in the frame), yet it doesn't happen ALL the time.  I read on another blog that people were linking it to a change in aperture but the camera was on full manual (with the latest firmware) and all settings were constant.  I DID have the image stabilization set on the lens but that should not be creating duplicate frames.

My current theory is that the internal processor gets overwhelmed occasionally with new data and this is the result.  This is VERY VERY bad and potentially disqualifies the camera altogether at this point.

But I'm not ready to give up.  Firmware update anyone?  Or any other theories out there.

I'd love to hear back.

UPDATE:
I think the problem is most likely an overheating one.  I've now seen the duplicate/dropping frames problem happen right in the middle of a static shot.  Just not at the beginning of takes.
It is obvious from looking at the camera that it isn't designed for heat dissipation.  RED cameras and SI2K cameras have fans and heat sinks.  The 5D on the other hand is designed to be water and dust resistant, lots of seals, poor heat dissipation.

I wonder if the 1D-Mark iv suffers from the same problem of if their dual DIGIC-processor design solves this problem.  I bet the 7D is just as bad.

In the meantime, there will be more testing.  And if we're shooting, I'll be getting additional coverage.  It does happen quite rarely.

Bummer though.

These are the best of times, these are the worst of times.

Yes, the technology at our disposal these days is freaking amazing.

The workstation I'm using to write this blog is the same workstation I've used to edit, composite, and color correct footage for at least five feature films and a few shorts and art projects over the last 18 months.

Without leaving my seat I can research, coordinate, promote, write, budget, perform, edit, render, composite, color, compose, mix, distribute and promote to name just a few routine activities. Much has been written about the extraordinary flattening effect this has on the industry. I particularly love what it's done to the workflow.

For those of us who are ADD (I suspect I may be though I've never been diagnosed), it's all the more fantastic. I bounce from activity to activity, tweaking a scene in COLOR one minute, jumping into SHAKE or AE to clean up a comp the next. I'm completely free as a filmmaker, artist, craftsperson, whatever, to take the action I'm inspired to take INSTANTLY.

We can work anywhere we want, we can cut in HD in the middle of camping trip if we want to. Pretty soon we'll be doing it on our phones.

Compare that to a decade ago when FCPro 1.0 was just coming out and DV was coming of age. To edit you needed to go to a post house, pay extraordinary amounts of money by the hour and work with a specialist who could only cut and wouldn't let you near the machine.... Revolutionary doesn't begin to describe it.

That's what Y2K was for me. That was the year I bought FCPro 1.0 and a DV imac (graphite). I remember how angry I was that FCPro wasn't supported on it and wouldn't start up (I found a workaround anyway).

That's when the revolution happened for me. Then I went and made Savage Island.

As an indie filmmaker who's been making movies for almost 20 years now, having spent half my career on either side of that line, I can tell you, times are good. Creatively speaking. We are more empowered than ever before.

Anyone can shoot a movie. HD camcorders are practically free at this point, and most phones can shoot video. I was at Best Buy yesterday and saw HD palmcorders for sale around $200. There was one there that was capable of shooting standard def at 600 FPS for only $500 (no kidding).

Anyone can edit a movie. Editing systems are extremely cheap at this point, some phones can EDIT video.

Anyone can distribute a movie. Thank you intertubes. That's the topic for another post, another time.

The problem of course, is that since anyone can, everyone does.

What an avalanche of product (as movies are called by buyers and distributors) has hit the marketplace over the last few years. When companies finally began seriously considering digitally acquired media for distribution (around 2002) the floodgates opened. I was an early benefactor of the new potential obviously. SAVAGE ISLAND was shot on miniDV with a puny budget.

Now, there is a host, a legion, a monstrous glut of microbudget horror in the marketplace. People are delivering surprisingly strong movies for under 10K, for less than 1K, heck, I've heard of feature budgets as low as $20. Many of the pics are quite interesting, and they sell.

Yes, they sell but in very small quantities, and at lower and lower prices. The global marketplace has opened up, has gained in efficiencies over the last few years as well. The problem however is that it still costs money to sell a movie in the marketplace. A lot of money.

On my last trip to the AFM, I was told my sales agents that it costs them between 40K-75K to sell a movie these days.

And I believe it. Any effective world market distribution company needs a large number of staff to handle the business and administrative affairs with all the territorial distributors. The sales and aquisitions teams will hit a dozen markets and festivals a year all over the world (only used to be three or four a few years ago).

50K in sales expenses is a lot more than the 25-30K they used to need only five years ago. Especially when total revenues for your straight-to-dvd microbudget masterpiece are topping out around 200K, often far, far lower.

Yup, we're empowered more than ever, great cameras, great post equipment, a powerful promotional tool at our fingertips yet at the same time the market for our movies has utterly collapsed for a myriad of reasons. As the old world collapses however, as the old model of business proves to be unsustainable, a new model is emerging. Again, a topic for another day.

These are the best of times, these are the worst of times.

And I'm loving it.

An auspicious beginning.

It's a great time to start something new. An unusual week is ahead of me, a confluence of astrological proportions.

It all begins the day-after-tomorrow, Saturday January 16th when HOUSE OF BONES, the movie I directed in Louisiana last year premieres on the SyFy Channel.

One week later, THIRST, our difficult desert survival film, starts playing Superchannel here in Canada.

And right in between those two beginnings (and entirely coincidentally), screenwriter Kevin Mosley scheduled a benefit screening of SAVAGE ISLAND here in Vancouver. Our feature debut.

One week, three Lando movies premiering.

Doesn't happen every day.

So I thought I'd take the hint and start doing what I've been meaning to do for some time now.

Share.

These are intended as dispatches from the front of indie cinema as it were. I'll be writing regularly about the ups and downs of independent filmmaking today, where I live in Vancouver, Canada. On the edge of civilization, exploring the cutting edge of technology for an edge (any edge), working the bloody edge of the collective unconscious.

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