How Low Can You Go?

Now that the production phase of my film is over, I’m completely and utterly broke. Which some people have told me is a huge problem because post-production is very expensive. 

Call me naïve but these words of warning don’t rattle me too much. I found a way to shoot the film for a fraction of the cost of what most people said I would need, so I know I’ll find a way to get post finished. I’ll do it the same way that I shot the movie. With every paycheck I get, I’ll keep putting as much as I can afford to into post production costs. And if I still don’t have enough, then hell, I’ll finish it myself on iMovie if I damn well have to. I’m more determined than ever. And I’ll tell you why:

One of the part time jobs that I have right now (along with freelance film PR, babysitting and dog walking) is that I am on the screening committee for a well known US film festival. I won’t say which one, just in case I’m not allowed to – but to put this blog post into context I will say that it’s considered to be a very well established and competitive festival. My job is to basically watch a ton of films that have been submitted, give them a rating out of five, write coverage on them, then pass that coverage on to my supervisor, who is one of the festival programmers.

I was stoked when I got this little job because I’m a huge movie nerd and especially love watching great little under the radar films. I was excited by the possibility of discovering some new talent and seeing what the latest generation of indie-filmmakers are up to.

Instead, what I discovered was a disappointing trend. 90% of the narrative features that are being submitted have very good production values but no effort has been put into the script and story. And I’m sorry, but in my opinion it doesn’t matter how professional a movie LOOKS – if it has nothing to say, then who gives a damn?

With the advancements to digital filmmaking technology in recent years it has become a lot cheaper to make a film now that it was in “the old days”. And when I say the old days I mean when you had to shoot on film and when the studios controlled almost everything.

These days you don’t need 20 million dollars to make a decent looking movie. You don’t even need 1 million. But you do need some money. Filmmaking definitely isn’t cheap.

Which seems to be where this trend is coming from. Currently the indie film scene is flooded with self financed films under the $1M mark, made by people who haven’t had to get through all the red tape of the studio system but have rather been able to greenlight themselves because they have some money (with some simple IMDB searching it’s easy to find out that many of these films are being made by first time directors – some who’ve never even made a short). As a result we are hearing a LOT of the same voices telling their stories. The voices of upper class and upper-middle class white people (usually men).

Then I started thinking..... well what are the chances of an aspiring director being a very talented filmmaker, having something to say AND being rich? Pretty low, right? Because most people aren’t rich.

Now, I’m not rich, I never have been rich and maybe never will be. BUT I did end up in an incredibly fortunate position that allowed me to make my film. For the year leading up to the movie I was able to keep my living costs very low. My partner Pete really helped me out by taking care of most of our household expenses, leaving me the ability to put all my earnings into the film.

But what about the aspiring filmmakers who are not in that position? Well, some would say – turn to crowdfunding. But from my experience, unless you have a lot of rich friends and family or you already have a huge following, this is more trouble than it’s worth and most campaigns fail. So how do you make your film and tell your story?

My film ended up costing about $25,000 to shoot. But knowing what I know now, I could have done it even cheaper. Over the next few blog entries I will be going in to some detail as to what I spent that money on and how I could have done it for less.

My mission for 2015 is to investigate all avenues for cutting budgets so that filmmaking can be more accessible to people who have big ideas but small wallets. 

I really want to know, just how low can you go.....?

The Cut Off Date - Literally

It’s been several months since my last blog entry. I didn’t have time to write because I was busy FILMING THE MOVIE! The whole freakin thing!

17 locations, 28 actors 16 days and a lot of hard work.

So how did it go????

I think it went well. I can’t believe it’s finally over. This sounds very cliché but I learned SO much during the process, and if I ever get to make another feature, I’ll be way more savvy.

When I look at the first video blog I posted back in May of last year, I now disagree with many of the things I said. Come to think of it - maybe I should take that video down so some other unsuspecting first time filmmaker doesn’t stumble across it and take my bad advice. Or I should at least add a pop-up annotation bubble to the video that says “DON’T LISTEN TO ME! I AM WRONG!”.

But really, who knows. Maybe that old advice would work for some people. Everyone’s experience is different. All I can tell you is what ended up working for me.

I think the most important thing to remember is that you can’t give up. If you’re serious about making your movie, then set a deadline and promise yourself you will stick to it no matter what. Many of my friends who are parents have told me; “There’s never a perfect time to have kids. You just make it work”. If you’re insane like me and care more about making films than making babies, then I think the same advice applies. There’s never going to be a perfect time to make your microbudget film. If you tell yourself to wait for the perfect time you’ll be waiting forever. So, set a deadline.

I set myself the deadline of Feb 6^th 2015. Because this is the date I get both my boobs chopped off.

WAIT – WHAT!?!?

Yes, you read that right. A bit of backstory:

Many women in my family have had breast cancer, and last year, after a lump scare of my own, I decided to get tested for the BRCA gene mutation. The tests came back positive, which means I have a VERY high chance of getting breast cancer during my lifetime. My doctors suggested a preventative double mastectomy, which will take my chances of getting breast cancer down from 87% to under 4%. So next Friday I’m getting them both chopped off.

Knowing that this surgery was looming and that I would have to have a second surgery in May for the breast reconstruction and recovery time after both surgeries, I felt I wouldn’t have the energy to shoot this film anytime soon after all that. The film had been cast, the locations had been chosen, I'd spent over a year working on the script, I'd put so much preparation into place, there was no way I was gonna let it all go and try to re-establish momentum one year later. In all honesty, the experience of trying to put the film together had been so gruelling for me, I don’t think I would have had the energy to start from the beginning again after my surgery. In my mind it was January or bust.

So I began putting everything into place within my budget of $50,000. Then, two weeks before I was due to start production, disaster struck… (Yes, AGAIN). A family member who was going to lend me $25,000 for the film no longer could. I was two weeks away from production and half of my already tiny budget was gone. I would have to humiliate myself again and call the whole cast and crew to tell them once again that the film wasn’t happening. I felt horrible. I cried on the phone to my mother, who told me not to be so hard on myself and to give myself a break. To wait til after the surgery and then see what happened. I cried to my husband who told me that I shouldn’t feel like a loser. That I was a human being and that my work didn’t define me – which was incredibly touching, but somehow didn’t make me feel much better.

Then my friend Lindsay called me about another project I'd been doing some work on. She wanted to find out what my schedule was. I told her: 

 “Well, as of an hour ago it’s completely open, because I have to cancel my movie”.

Something you should know about Lindsay before I go any further: Lindsay is hands down the most positive person I have ever met. 

She asked me what happened. I told her I just lost half my budget and was supposed to start production in two weeks.

“How much money do you have left?”, she asked.

“Under $25,000”, I replied.

Lindsay paused for a moment and then said “I think you can still do this”.

She then proceeded to give me a pep talk about how it was entirely possible for me to still make this happen. And it was exactly what I needed to hear.

Over the next couple of weeks, I slashed the budget AGAIN, by half. I’ll go in to more detail about how I did that in another entry. But we did it. I shot the whole film. And I shot it before I got my boobs chopped off.

"To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time." - Leonard Bernstein

Our last day on set January 18th 2015

The "F" Word

No, I’m not talking about everyone’s favorite F-bomb, I’m talking about a much more hideous word…. FAIL.

It’s a word that came to mean a lot to me a couple of weeks ago at the conclusion of my fundraising campaign. I felt like I'd failed.

Before the campaign launch I was working with two producers who advised me that I needed $75,000 to make this movie. Then that number changed to $150,000 for reasons I’m still not sure of.

 

This is a lot of money. And I questioned whether I could raise it. But they told me to stop being so skeptical.

I had a little money already put aside, but we still needed to raise a lot of money. So we set the fundraising goal at $75,000.

After the first few days of the campaign, we plateaued at around $3,000. I started to suspect that this was never gonna happen. I had entered this fundraising campaign without a good team in place, and without any rich friends.

Despite my best efforts; posting a bunch of promo videos and updates, emailing everyone I know, even buying a couple of facebook ads, I was way off my target. I made a total of $7936.00

The reaction from the two producers after the money didn’t appear out of thin air? They shrugged and suggested I enter the script into a screenplay competition. I went home from that meeting and cried, feeling like failure. The dream was over.

After I dragged myself out of the black hole I’d entered and upped my daily dose of Prozac, I realized wallowing was a huge waste of time. I still had a movie to make.

I parted ways with those two producers and then I got to work breaking down the script myself. Cutting locations, and minor characters – getting rid of everything that wasn’t 100% necessary to tell the story. At its core, this film is about human relationships. To tell that kind of story you don’t need bells & whistles. You just need a good script and good actors.

As I started re-gaining momentum I realized how ungrateful I was being about the money I had raised for my campaign. I raised almost $8000! That’s fucking awesome. 76 incredibly generous people donated their hard earned money into a movie that I want to make.

What’s even more amazing is how much the cast and crew started rallying together and supporting me; offering up their homes to use as locations, offering to bring snacks and cook food to have on set, finding crew that will help free of charge, offering their cars to pick up equipment. Even friends of mine who weren't already attached to the project started reaching out to offer help.

With the money that I already had saved, plus the campaign money, I’m gonna make this movie. It will take some more time and it will be a lot harder on such a tiny budget, but I’m determined. And I’m now spurred on by the fact that I truly believe storytelling doesn’t have to be insanely expensive. And that if we live in a world where only people who are wealthy and privileged are allowed to tell stories, we will all be missing out big time. Because although those people may be able to afford to make a movie that looks beautiful and slick – They often don’t have a whole lot to say.

This was the attitude that I started out with when I set out to make this film. And somehow I got lost along the way, letting money become more important than the movie itself. It took a little failure to get my attitude back on track.

My State Of Hopeless Desperation

What have I learned over the past 6 weeks?

Fundraising is hard as fuck and I hate it.

When I lived in Sydney I would see those fundraising workers outside the train stations wearing green T-shirts, or even worse a Koala suit. They would try desperately to trap commuters into a conversation that turns into a sales pitch. “Hi there! Can I ask you a question? Do you know the rainforest is dying?" They would subsequently be ignored. I'd always think, wow – that would be the worst job ever.

Well, this process has felt a little like that. I feel like a guy in a Koala suit. GET THIS THING OFF ME!!!

Part of the problem was that I was very optimistic going into the campaign. I thought, hey – if some dude just raised over $50,000 on Kickstarter to make potato salad, why shouldn’t this work for me and my film? I also listened to a couple of people that I shouldn’t have, who encouraged me to set a huge goal and convinced me that “the money will come”, that they would help me bring money in. Funnily enough, the day that the campaign was launched, they disappeared.

Despite all this, I have kept at it – knowing that every single dollar I can raise will help me get this film off the ground.

Even now with 5 days to go, I am still frantically brainstorming ways to bring in dollars.

Yesterday I decided I needed to add a $5 perk for the final week, to entice people on a budget who may still want to support the film. I came up with what I thought was a great, fun idea, that fitted in well with the theme of the movie; For $5 I would photoshop the contributor's face into a romantic photo with a celeb crush who they would have no chance of dating. I put together one of myself that I was going to use as an example. It took me 2 hours to make. Here it is:

Last night at dinner with some close friends, I showed them my masterpiece and explained my plan and waited for the positive feedback. The response was unanimous: 

“I just don’t think anyone will wanna buy that”.

“That took you 2 hours?”

“There’s something really sad about it”

“Yeah, you can’t put that on the campaign page.”

“It looks….. Um… What version of photoshop did you use?”

It was at this point I admitted I don’t even have photoshop. I had made that in Microsoft Word.

Hey, you can’t say I’m not trying. 

But you don't always see things clearly when you're wearing a Koala suit.