Sunday, February 28, 2010

I just became a fan of the Frugal Filmmaker group on Facebook


and I was kind of curious about how well I stood in regards to the principles on the Frugal Filmmaker web page.

As it turns out, not too well. My comments are in italics.
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Frugal Filmmaker Philosophy

- Watch a lot of movies.
I drop the ball here. I'm a bit notorious for not watching movies. Heck, I didn't even make it all the way through Avatar.

- See how others have done "it".
Meh. Most others do it badly. You should worry about the quality of the dialog first.

- Spend time on your screenplay.
Ha! Our latest screenplay is a 45-day special! (Although it's also possibly our best so far. Go figure.)

- Surround yourself with talent.
Well that's true.

- Smaller crews are preferable.

Preferable? I'd say "mandatory". What's a big crew going to do for you? I mean other than spend your money?

- If you can't buy it, build it.
Meh. Maybe. But sometimes homemade grip gear really is worse than having no gear at all.

- High quality, low cost.
That's what we aim for, of course.

- Recycle, reuse, repurpose.
OK. I guess. Are we talking sets? 'Cause then I'm all like "hell yeah."

- It's not the camera, it's the DP.
I'll buy that.

- Distribute and market online.
Ab-so-lute-ly freakin' not. No way. No how. Nope. Distributing online is great if you want to keep your day job. If you want to finance your next movie though? No, not so much. Not and pay rent at the same time. Make movies people want to see and do your damnedest to get home video and DVD deals in markets otherwise. Did I spell "damnedest" right? My spell check says I did but I don't believe it.

- Document everything.
Ha! We don't even write scene and take numbers on the freakin' slates! We do go to some effort to make sure that visual effects shots all have a unique shot number but that's about it.

- Just make your damn movie.

There ya go.

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