Day: August 6, 2010

Categories
Let's Make Better Films

Writing For A Low Budget (Pt 2 of 2): THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED

Today’s guest post is from writer/director J. Blakeson.  J’s THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED opens TODAY!!!  If you haven’t read yesterday’s part one, please read that first.

As I was writing I was always looking for tricks to make the film even cheaper to shoot. But I had a strict rule that they also had to make absolute sense to the story. I smuggled quite a lot of tricks in. Here are a few of them…

  1. After the opening sequence, each character only has one costume. And they are very easily manageable costumes (ie. track suit and boiler suits), so if we had to shoot this thing at evenings and weekends over a few months, then the costumes would be easy to manage and very replaceable from high street stores.
    Continue reading “Writing For A Low Budget (Pt 2 of 2): THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED”
Categories
Truly Free Film

DIY Chronicles: THE WAY WE GET BY (Part 4 of 5): Minimize Your Loss & Hope For A Greater Payoff In The End

Today’s guest post is from filmmakers Gita Pullapilly and Aron Gaudet.

With film prints in hand, it now changed our game plan. Though we knew likely we’d lose money realizing nationally in theaters, we were banking that the film reviews and national press would bring a greater exposure to our film—and if not help our bottom line—at least help our careers.

In the end, we decided to alter our business plan, aware of the risks, and launched a national theatrical run.

The money we had made in Maine allowed us to bring on International Film Circuit as our distributor for a national release.

 

Our national non-profit partners couldn’t provide any financial support to us, however they shared film and screening information with their members by email, on their websites, and on their social networks. Now it wasn’t just us tweeting something or adding an event to our Facebook fan page to our few thousand followers. It was a large network of organizations reaching hundreds of thousands of people.

Continue reading “DIY Chronicles: THE WAY WE GET BY (Part 4 of 5): Minimize Your Loss & Hope For A Greater Payoff In The End”