This week we wanted to kick off a new feature on the blog. We'll be having some of veteran filmmakers onboard to talk about the ins and outs of film/video production.
This month we've got long-time TurnHere filmmaker Steve Janas talking about the practical costs of producing a feature film. With the cheaper cameras shooting amazing looks images (e.g. DSLR's), the barrier of entry to producing a film is becoming less and less of a challenge. If you follow Werner Herzog's school of thought then all you truly need is passion for your project and the resourcefulness to see it through.
Make sure to follow Steve's blog Life of a Preditor for more great insights. We hope you really enjoying sharing in knowledge, tips and tricks that our guests have to offer.
Several years ago, as part of a life-long quest to have a career making independent films, I enrolled in a day-long seminar on the subject featuring renown Independent Film guru Dov Siemens. Specifically, the topic was how to make an independent film for less than $100,000. This, Siemens argues, is the bare minimum required to produce a movie that met industry standards for distribution.
A hundred thousand dollars. How times have changed.
In the past 10-15 years, the film world has become flooded with the product of a technological revolution that has cut the cost of making an independent film to a fraction of what it was a generation ago. The more successful ones have grabbed headlines: "The Blair Witch Project," made for around $30,000, wound up grossing well over a hundred million. Robert Rodriguez's "El Mariachi," shot in Mexico for about $6,000, got picked up for distribution by no less an industry heavyweight than Sony Pictures. Kevin Smith made "Clerks" with about $13,000 he charged to various credit cards.
So, to the question 'Is it easier or harder nowadays to make an independent film?," the answer is this: It's easier, but don't count on making a living at it. Yet.
To refer back to Siemens' lecture, he insists that a feature film made on anything less than 35 mm film didn't have a shot of ever landing a distribution deal. Well, have you ever priced out a 35mm film? It makes a college education look cheap in comparison. Not only is the film stock itself expensive, but everything else associated with it goes up in price by a comparable factor, from processing the negatives to striking a final print.
Now, since most movie theaters still project on 35 mm, for the time being, you're going to have to create a 35 mm negative if you want your movie to be shown in theaters. So - bad news. But the good news is that you don't necessarily have to shoot the film in 35 mm.
On the feature-length music documentary "Better Living Through Circuitry," on which I served as Associate Producer - among other things - we delivered a 35 mm negative to the film's distributor, 7th Arts Releasing. The negative cost about $20,000 to make at a post-production lab in Burbank, Calif. There was no getting around that - we just had to swallow the expense.
However, we shot the movie on Sony's first generation of 3-chip digital cameras, the VX-1000. They recorded to mini DV tapes, and retailed for somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000.
Two thousand dollars. We shot a feature-length movie on a camera that cost a mere $2,000. And it gets better. The editing system on which we cut the film (in the producer's living room, it should be noted) cost all of $17,000 to buy. Sure, that sounds like quite a price, but keep in mind that, previously, computer-based, non-linear digital editing systems (like the industry-standard Avid systems) cost upwards of $100,000 to purchase, and you had to keep a tech on-staff at all times to deal with the system's inevitable idiosyncratic issues.
That was more than ten years ago. The cost of computer-based editing systems has dropped dramatically since then, particularly after Apple released the game-changing Final Cut editing software, which at first retailed for around $1,000. Its latest version can be downloaded from the Internet for about $300. And the camera? My latest purchase, the Nikon D7000 DSLR, sold for $1,100 (minus the lens, it should be said), and yet film Director Darren Aronofsky used this model as a production camera on the Oscar-nominated film "Black Swan."
To re-cap: making independent films can be relatively inexpensive these days, unless you want your film shown in theaters, in which case you're looking at a bitter, $20,000 pill you have to swallow...
Stay tuned for Part II of Steve's post coming next week...
