Friday, July 22, 2011

Film Making By The Seat of Your Pants

They start showing a trailer for "Blackstar Warrior", think Star Wars with "Shaft" as Lando. Make for 4,000 dollars. The trailer is hilarious. The panel is the creators going through how they made the film.

-Lesson One: You Must Have A Story

-Lesson Two; Why Are You Doing This?

-Lesson Three: Choose Something With A Built In Audience

-Lesson Four: Create Buzz (they invented an elaborate backstory, and created mockmentaries about the lost scenes/film, find the on YouTube)

-Lesson Five: Spend as little money as you can. Use volunteers and keep in short and simple. They found people who had what they were looking for (R2D2, a Wookie, Storm Troopers) and paid them with sandwiches.

Lesson Six: At the end of the day, it is all about the story.

Lesson Seven: Shoot in Your Weight Class. Make a film that is an appropriate scale.
(If you plan and light your shots right, you can shoot a movie with a smart phone.)

-Lesson Eight: Make it fun. They pretended they were making an A List Feature.

-Lesson Nine: Plan, plan, and plan again.

-Lesson Ten: Plan for Disaster. It's going to happen, be ready to improvise. Keep the positivity and things will come together for you.

-Lesson Eleven: Take the time to find the "right" people and give them the latitude to do their jobs. Don't micro-manage.

-Spend your money on catering, craft services, camera/lens, and sound.

It was six months of planning for a three day shoot, cost 4000 dollars, most of it was catering. A firm believer in everyone focusing on one job (no multitasking) so they can do it well. Be gracious.

(Read "Invisible Ink" by Brian McDonald, a book about story telling)
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

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