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Truly Free Film

Producing Your First Feature? 5 Insights That Won’t Lead You Far Wrong…

In June 2014, director Alex Lightman produced his first feature film, Tear Me Apart. Here he talks about the major lessons him and his team learnt along the way.

The London Screenwriters’ Festival 2011 was where my career really began. Made to talk to the person next to me by festival creative director Chris Jones, I shook hands with screenwriter Tom Kerevan. A fateful encounter.

We started working together and soon after met cinematographer Ernesto Herrmann on a short film shoot. The three of us have been working together ever since.

In May 2013 we made the somewhat snap decision to take the plunge and produce a feature film ourselves.

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Truly Free Film

A Quick Word On Exploring Your Film’s Essence Through a Financial Lens

Financing an independent film is no joke. For those of you who have gone through this process, you know just how grueling it is — taking meetings and phone calls with potential investors, entering your script into conferences and competitions — it gets overwhelming.

We’ve seen and experienced this firsthand with the films we’ve put together, and with clients as well. The process for our films and our colleague’s  films begin with a process of cutting, compromise, and parring the script down to the very essence of the story.

While attending this fall’s film festival circuit and working with writers across the globe in mentorship programs, we saw a lot of great stories get wrapped up $50m-$100m bows.

Coming from film finance and production backgrounds, we were able to help these writers par their screenplays down to reasonable budgets while keeping the essence of their story in tact, and conveying one simple truth — the essence of every story costs nothing.

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Truly Free Film

The New Curiosity And How Can We Best Utilize It

"We can build it!"
“We can build it!”

We live in an era of cultural abundance.  How does this change the way we engage and discover? How has it already done so?

When I moved to NYC I initially was overwhelmed by the options I had before me. A simple newspaper gave me a good heads up of the cornucopia of options on how to utilize my leisure time. I found solace in Woody Allen’s line “In New York, you always know what you are missing.”  As a kid from the boondocks, my teen years were rife with anxiety over FOMO. Arriving in NYC, I found a new calm. It no longer was a question of access. The choices were before me; there was no scarcity. And I could step out my door and be there in a blink. I knew I would never be bored in NYC.

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Truly Free Film

YEKRA Case Study: Sirius

With much appreciation to recent technological advancements, the costs associated with producing content have fallen through the floor.  Thrillingly, they’re going to keep on falling over the coming years too.

For producers, this is groundbreaking. Finally, the playing field is leveling out, making it possible for truly talented individuals to break through without needing monstrous budgets.  

Sure, most producers definitely need to harbor an entrepreneurial gene or two in order to realize their ultimate musings, but for those that have the drive and determination, the wonder that is the interwebs has offered forth a plethora of tools and platforms that make it possible to fund, produce and distribute content, on an otherwise non-existent budget, all from the comfort of ones own home.

Alas, with every yin must come yang.

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Truly Free Film

A First Time Writer/Director’s Trial by Fire, Part #7: What The Hell Are You Looking At?

I like to tell myself there is great success to be found in the details. A justification for my own obsessive nature? Probably, but often true. Getting sucked up inside the tornado of sweeping, acute tasks necessary to get a film made has been easy. Distribution plans, business plans, breakdowns, pavement pounding, relationship building, due diligence and rewriting. Important details appear less important and fall by the way side. But, like Dorothy landing in Oz, I eventually find myself back in the land of detail. For example: a look book. 

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Truly Free Film

Cut your cloth, get out of development hell and make your films

“Making something out of nothing” is what filmmaker Mira Nair called the Filmmaking workshop that she was doing in the spring of 1999 in Cape Town South Africa.  The bulk of the students were from the black and “colored” townships way outside the city and traveled more than an hour each day for their two-week initiation to cinema. It was the dawn of the post apartheid years and they were pregnant with compelling and amazing stories that they wanted to bring into the world either through narratives or documentaries.  For decades, generations before them had their voices stifled, and they were fighting to finally become the narrators of their own history and had chosen filmmaking as their weapon.  And I was there to film that process.  “Show, don’t tell, make films that are accessible to you, be inspired by what’s immediate, cut your cloth”.