Sunday, February 27, 2011

Micro Budget Features and Film Festivals

Probably one of the most daunting things any independent filmmaker has to deal with is finding funding for projects. This is why many new filmmakers opt to make what I would call micro budget features (films with production budgets in the tens of thousands). I've done several short films to date, and all of those have been projects that my fellow producer Andrew Gilbert and I have funded ourselves. I would definitely classify them as micro budget shorts. But you can do that with short films. Most often the main expenses are some rented gear, a location or two, and food. Everything else is either borrowed, donated, or deferred. In our case, we've done a lot of deferred deals with cast and crew looking to gain more experience in filmmaking. In those cases, the act of being involved in the project tends to be payment enough with the added bonus that should the film manage to turn a profit, there could be some payment down the road. 

But what about feature films? Can you do this with features?

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Cliches and Lazy Filmmaking

Recently, I was drawn into a conversation with a friend about this idea of “cinematic shortcuts” or “film cliches.” These are some highly visual devices used in storytelling in movies and on TV fairly often. Like all cliches, they were at some point effective in communicating an idea. But now they have been over-used. And savvy audiences roll their eyes and grow tired of seeing these cliches time and again.

Friday, February 11, 2011

My New Cinematography Reel for 2011

2010 was a great year for me where I got to do a lot of new, challenging, and exciting cinematography work. So I wanted to take a moment share here my latest demo reel for such work. For those of you who have been following this blog, you've seen my entries on shooting narrative films with the Canon 7D and T2i. Here, you can see some footage from those projects as well as some other projects I'm sure I'll be writing about soon as well.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Favorite Video Projects of 2010

2010 was busy year for me on the freelance video production side of things. It was also a year new things both in terms of types of videos and in terms of starting to shoot a lot of material on DSLR cameras. Here's a quick look through some highlights of projects I worked on in 2010 in my freelance video work.