We are on the verge of a new film culture and infrastructure.
Our goal producing today should be to get our movies MADE well, SEEN widely, and COMPENSATED fairly.
We need to support all four legs: Artists, Audiences, Industry, and Investors.
The best thing we can do is to make sure that investors receive a risk appropriate return.
Check out all the details in this video (never mind the pretty flowers):
Recap: This series chronicles my wide-eyed and crushingly insecure processes that pulled back the curtain on my ideas about filmmaking – revealing what it really takes to write and direct my movie, Recess. Occasionally I gain productive insights that plant me on less insecure ground. Others I still talk to my therapist about. Perhaps the most important insight I’ve kept – from teething as a writer – the idea that creating detailed, well-drawn characters with original voices can make even a script about a haunted doorknob compelling. I realize there may be infinite approaches more resolute but, for me, the haunted doorknob concept puts character development into perspective.
Television’s impressive artistic and commercial success is not a solely American phenomenon – it is not even an English language phenomenon. The case of the Danish series Borgen (2010-2013) is exemplary. Borgen brought together on average a 50% share in its home market and was shown all over the world to great acclaim. Much like The West Wing, it worked as a reminder that sincere idealism can still be part of politics, while at the same time giving a pretty nuanced idea of how politics work. Danish TV drama (shows like The Killing/Forbrydelsen of 2007-2012, The Bridge/Bron from 2010-2013, and most recently The Legacy/Arvingerne and soon-to-be-released 1864) began its revival about fifteen years ago – at the same time as its domestic film industry, and with the fiction department of the public channel DR as its driving force.
It is a rich topic, and we need to think about it far more than we — the filmmaking community — do. Here’s a start:
1. There is very little development funding of scripts. Consequently directors are encouraged to develop their own material. Generally this encourages a focus on personal stories, stories based on experience, and thus we get character dramas first and foremost.
Filmmakers, you’ve been lied to. Film school has taught you to pitch the WHAT about your project — WHAT is the story, WHAT is the cast, WHAT are the target group for the film etc — but the WHAT is not the most important element when it comes to crowdfunding. The WHY is! You see it comes down to your likability on camera. ‘But I’m cool and I’m a great filmmaker’ I hear you say. While that’s good for you, that’s not why people want to engage with your crowdfunding campaign.
Currently, I’m crowdfunding on Kickstarter for The Quantified Self, an experimental story about a family that records and analyzes everything about themselves. It’s my third science-fiction film mainly because where I grew up science fiction represented hope for something better. Just twenty years ago I was a humble physics student at Kharkov State Polytechnic University in the former Soviet Union. When I came to the US I had to start from scratch like every immigrant. My first job was $4.75 an hour working at a hardware store on Coney Island. It took me 15 years to get a stable job in IT on Wall Street. It also took me 15 years to realize that I was moving away from myself. I felt depressed and confused. Having a job I didn’t like eroded me from inside and made me rather passive and ignorant about the world around me. Something was missing.
Crafting a brilliant script. That’s all it takes to get a project noticed and “green lit”. This was my single-minded approach when I got the bright idea to start skipping down the indie filmmaking road. It was all so clear; admittedly up hill but I saw no potholes or wreckage to avoid. Nope. Curious sights and comfortable, clean rest areas amply stocked with fresh toilet paper lined my highway. The horizon seemed practically at arms length. My first detour: I had as much interest in writing a screenplay as Hunter S. Thompson probably did with the idea of writing sober.
