The only film making advice you really need

Yesterday, I told you how Listening to ’so called’ experts could destroy your film career before it even starts.  Today I’m going to share with you the few principles you really need to know.  If you’ve ever dreamed about being a director, then this post is a must read for you.

The 9 things you need to do if you really want to be a film maker.

1. Shoot the damn thing - Stop obsessing over what gear you need, stop worrying about raising money, stop obsessing over every little detail.  If you can’t raise the money you need, then figure out how to do it with less money.  If you can’t find the location you need, rewrite the script for a new location.  Rewrite until you have a movie you can actually do right now then do it right now!
2. Three takes and go - Ok, so its digital video.  You can have as many takes as you want right?  No!  Shoot three takes and move on just like you were shooting 35mm film.  Only on the really really important scenes, or really short shots are you allowed to go up to five takes, but after that move on.  The actors aren’t going to do it any better. Deal with it.
3. Get coverage first, then do the fancy stuff - Do a wide establishing shot, do a medium close up of each character, then do some inserts.  If you are positive the scene will edit together, then you can start doing some more fancy stuff.   But even then…if that “fancy stuff” you want to do doesn’t add to the film, maybe you should just move on to the next scene.
4. Get good sound or learn to ADR - It’s imperative you get excellent sound.  If you can’t do it while shooting, then you will have to ADR.  This can be very expensive, if you don’t have access to a post production audio suite.  Try to capture the best sound you can during production, but be sure to budget and plan to do a little ADR as well.  It’s probably a good idea for you to start trying to figure out how to ADR dialog right now.  It is a skill you will definitely use later.
5. Learn to edit - Regardless of whether or not you intend to edit your film yourself, you need to learn how to edit.  If you don’t know how to edit, then you’ll never know if your movie will cut together at all.  Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ll shoot way more coverage than you could possible use and your editor will have to sift through hours of pointless footage.  This is also a bad thing because if the editor gets bored while sifting through useless footage, he is more likely to half ass his way through the edit.  If you’ve directed the thing right, the edit should naturally evolve from the footage itself.
6. Finish the film - Above all finish the film.  If its your first film, it will probably suck.  Deal with it.  But you have to realize that no matter how bad, a a finished film has value but an unfinished film is worthless. Go to best buy and search for some of the action or horror four packs and watch them.  It will likely be the best $7.99 you ever spend.  Many of these movies aren’t just bad…they are laughably horrendous.  Everything is out of focus, the story makes no sense, and fifteen year olds pretend to be mob bosses.  It’s utterly ridiculous…but they have one thing going for them:  They were finished.  Not only that…they were sold.  There are distributors who make it their business to pick up extremely terrible movies and sell them in retail stores like best buy.   Typically, a producer of these types of movies can make between $5000 to $10,000 selling 100% rights on one of these masterpieces.  Not going to put you sipping Champagne in Beverly Hills…but at the very least you can say you’ve sold a movie.  The reality is very few people can actually finish a film.  It’s a difficult, if not nearly impossible task to do even when you have millions to spend.  But if you’ve finished a film, you can approach real investors and pitch yourself as a real producer.  Let the entire movie fall to pieces, frame every shot poorly, stay out of focus the entire time…but finish it.  Your career has to start somewhere.  It starts here…with one crappy (yet finished) film.
7. Nail one aspect - Hopefully I’ve convinced you by now that you are not going to make the next big hit movie shooting DV with your friends and editing on your iMac.  And also, I hope that I’ve convinced you that its still worth doing regardless of the fact that you aren’t hitting theatres anytime soon.  How do you go about making sure you build the most momentum towards achieving your real goals in your filmmaking career?  Well, as I’ve said, the persuit of a perfect film is a fools errand…but that doesn’t mean you can’t be perfect in one regard.  Make at least one aspect of your film really stand out.  Ok, so maybe it doesn’t have the best acting…but maybe you have the skills to make the cinematography really wow the audience.  Maybe you know someone with an epically beautiful location that you can use to make your little movie seem larger than life.  Maybe you and your friends are black belts in karate and you can put together a killer fight scene.  The idea is that you want at least some aspect of your film to really stand out.  Lets say you do put together that killer fight scene.  Maybe you will never make another film again, but you and your friends are noticed at your film festival premiere  by a producer looking for a stunt team for his next action flick.  Two years down the road you are now a professional stunt and action choreography team.  Maybe not the goal you were chasing in the beginning, but certainly not a bad result.
8. Nail one scene - Make at least one scene in your film really highlight the one aspect that you want to show off.  Maybe you need to expand the fight scene and make it more epic.  Maybe you can do one scene as a single continuous take to show off the skill of your actors and your direction.  Above all you need one really solid scene that you can use to show off your talent in the future.
9. Make a badass trailer -Without a great trailer no one will want to see your film.  The secret to a great trailer is to build curiosity…and on that note, stay tuned for my upcoming article:  Thirty seconds to a successful film: How to make a good movie trailer.

72 Essential Filmmaker Resources

Here are a ton of links to help you on your next movie.

Don’t make this indie movie mistake.

There is a conventional wisdom when it comes to making movies, that is often expressed as “Show, don’t tell”. But that can mean alot of things to different people. I really think its one of those things that, essentially is good advice, but can be so easily misinterpreted, that it actually does more harm than good. Ultimately, it results in a huge mistake that first time directors always seem to make.

This weekend I saw the movie No Country For Old Men. First off, I must say the movie is amazing. But more importantly, it got me thinking about the above mentioned ‘conventional wisdom’. Is it really necessary to show everything? Is it possibly better to leave the audience guessing a little? After watching No Country For Old Men, I certainly think so.

At the very beginning of the movie, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon what appears to be the aftermath of a horrific shootout. The movie approaches this scene very slowly, as he examines each detail…the parked cars, the bodies lying everywhere, the shells casings scattered around, and the truck bed full of drugs. It is very clear to the audience just what has happened, despite the fact that up to this point hardly even a word has been spoken.

The movie continues very much in this same vein. Rather than showing someone get shot, it will instead show a hitman walking out of there home, then checking his shoes (making you assume he’s checking for blood). You don’t actually see the killing…and in some ways you aren’t even sure if it really happened.

Are they violating the rule? Did the fail to “show”, and instead “tell” you what happened? No…not exactly…and its that misunderstanding that is a huge mistake for indie directors.

What is the mistake?

The mistake is believing that because you have to “show not tell”, that that means that you have to show something beyond your means or budget. In No Country for Old Men, the first scene is essentially a common scene for most mobster or cop movies. A drug deal goes bad. However, you never see the actual gun fight, but you can still tell just how serious it is from the aftermath. For the budget conscious indie filmmaker, there is an enormous savings in simply showing the aftermath of a gun battle, rather than showing the shootout itself.

And doing so doesn’t really violate our “rule”. You are still showing the audience what happened, you’re just doing it from a different point of view. Telling would be if you did something like have a scene at a bar where two cops say, “Did you hear about that shoot out?”. That is certainly not as good as showing the aftermath, but is still far better than a poorly executed shoot out.

In the realm of indie filmmakers, we need a new rule. That rule is:

Show what you can, tell what you can’t.

You have to know your limitations. If something is dangerous, expensive, or difficult then you really have to ask how important it is to your story that it actually be shown. If you do it poorly, then its far worse than if you didn’t do it at all. For example, lets say the bad guy blows up the good guys car. You don’t have the budget for insurance, a licensed blaster, fire marshals, etc. Now, you could do a really cheesy after effects explosion and cut away really fast. I’ve seen it done in some DV movies before…and it looks stupid.

Perhaps you could do it differently. Instead, it would be far better to spend your time looking through the junk yards for a duplicate of the car. Have the actors talking inside of a bar, when they hear a sudden explosion (offscreen) outside. They rush outside to see the junk car on fire. Such a scene might cost you only $200 more than your after effects version. But it costs you $15,000 less than actually blowing the car up….and as far as the audience is concerned the effect is much closer to really blowing up the car. The audience will never think, “Oh..they were too cheap to blow up the car”…because they see a burning car. The audience is far more willing to suspend its belief based on the sound of an explosion, than it is based on actually seeing a really fake looking explosion.

Ultimately, you are trying to show concepts, not absolute realism. The blood circling down the drain in Psycho tells you everything you need to know, while allowing your own imagination to make up the rest of the scene. That is the beauty of movie magic.