5 Steps To Becoming A Self-Sufficient Filmmaker

5 Steps To Becoming A Self-Sufficient Filmmaker and a Career in Film

Everyone has their own path, this is mine…

I wanted a career in film (as a film director, if course) when I was about 7 years old. I have some school diaries from the time. There’s a drawing of a (standard 8mm) camera on a tripod my dad bought me. I wrote the synopsis of films I’d seen at the cinema (ie: from memory).

One film was The Snowball Express. Over a the next few weeks I wrote out the plot-line of this film, as I remembered it. So it must have really stuck with me. This was in the 1970s, so no chance I could stream it or check the DVD to refresh my memory.

Later, at art college, I bought myself a Super 8mm camera and shot a couple of shorts. I never made it to film school, but a teacher suggested 2 options: redo the foundation course, or try to get into the film industry from the bottom, as a runner or something similar. Out of total fear and lack of self-esteem, I tried neither. Instead, I became a music engineer/programmer for 20 years and wrote screenplays in my spare time.

As a writer, I had an agent in L.A., optioned a few scripts, had meetings with the UK Film Council (now merged with the BFI) but nothing got off the ground.

1. Stop trying to be successful

In my early 40s, I was diagnosed with depression. This led to me “re-inventing” myself. I stood back, looked at why I was doing so many self-defeating things and realised it was nothing but fear preventing me from making films.

I also made a conscious decision to stop trying to be ‘successful’…  Uhh, what?

Well, I changed my idea of what success was. My filmmaking career took an individual different path. Why should your personal success be judged by other people’s’ standards?

I think many of us want to appear successful to others. And therefore we try to make our achievements impressive; we want to reach goals which will impress other people.

In other words, we are living for surface values.

I decided my idea of success was to simply make films, the way I wanted to, no matter how.

What does Steven Spielberg do? He makes films. What do I do? I make films. So what’s the difference? Currently, about $3.9 billion. But wealth and the glory aside, we’re both doing what we love doing.

Well, I was never motivated by money, anyway. Glory, maybe. But I’d grown out of that. So, by my own terms, I am as successful as Spielberg. The great realisation was that I didn’t need to strive to be something I wasn’t – I was already there.

And I knew I shouldn’t wait for someone to fund my film. So I wrote a feature script called Third Contact, bought a camcorder, invited some people to help out and started filming.

2. Learn by doing

I never went to film school. Learning things the academic way has never worked for me. I can’t spend days writing essays about film to learn how to make a film. Also, I have a bit of rebellious streak. If someone starts telling me “you have to do it this way” my mind immediately asks “why?” and starts thinking about alternative methods. This doesn’t really go down too well at school.

When I came to shoot Third Contact, I hadn’t operated a camera for filmmaking since my 8mm days. At first, I had no idea what shots I needed that would cut together well to make a scene. I was shooting my debut feature film, winging it, but trusting I my visual and artistic instincts.

I shot loads and loads of footage, thinking I would have so much covered I could eventually make something of it in the edit.

As the shoot went on (over a year), editing as I went along, I learned to be more efficient. I learned how to shoot a film. Third Contact was my film school, really. It cost me £4000 and I by the end I had directed a feature which made it to a big film festival in Germany. How many film schools can deliver that for that price?

There wasn’t much in the way of tutorials then. But more recently, especially for CGI work, I have spent hours watching tutorials people have kindly put up online. YouTube, despite a tendency to narrow people’s taste, is a great resource for learning.

I really believe that filmmaking is like any other art – you learn by doing it, not by studying it (certainly the doing is essential, whereas the studying is optional). You don’t learn to swim by reading a book about swimming. You just have to get in and splash about until you get some skills.

I also believe the more you learn by doing, the more your own voice will emerge in your work.

3. The camera that suits you

Whatever you shoot on, there are compromises and limitations. What suits you? What suits your story?

When they have these comparison videos on YouTube between an iPhone X and a Arri Alexa, they only compare the image quality (which of course the phone is always going to lose). What we don’t see is someone trying to spontaneously run onto a train, filming without permission, holding a heavy Arri set-up, with legs, lights, lenses and a 6 person sound and camera crew. In that situation, the smartphone wins by a mile.

Ask yourself: “Is my dependence on this camera stopping me making my film?” or “Is it stopping me making my film the way I want to make it?”

I could write a book on my experiences trying to make low budget films, shooting on 16mm or professional cameras. When we shot Kosmos, we had a camera crew, with a big truck full of equipment (that was the DoPs bare minimum). Although it feels like you’re making a “proper” movie, for me it can feel like wading through deep mud.

Before I made Third Contact, I remember watching David Lynch talk about making Inland Empire. He explained how liberating it was using a small digital camera. How he enjoyed shooting without having to explain everything to a DoP. And watching the film I thought, ‘this is very creative’. It’s pure Lynch. And I’d rather watch a film by someone as creative as him using a SD camera, than a film by someone less imaginative with all the kit and 50 crew.

4. Other Equipment

For sound, I used a Sennheiser 416 microphone. It was the most expensive thing I bought for making Third Contact. But I had experience as a sound engineer and sound recordist, so I understood the benefit of good audio quality.

Recording audio works differently to recording image, in filmmaking. With the image, you can be expressive. You can experiment to achieve different things. With audio, it’s much less about how you record it, but how you design the sound in post – that’s actually where the expression comes in. Therefore, you want the cleanest sound possible on location.

The only Røde equipment I used was a boom pole and mic mount. With these things you can cut the price and they still do the job. I used an H4n Zoom, which I also bought for making Third Contact (so it’s lasted me almost 10 years, so far).

Some extras I recently purchased, purely for smartphone filmmaking, were the  Zhiyun Smooth-Q gimbal and the Moondog Labs Anamorphic lens adaptor (with a 37mm clip I purchased separately). I used 3 x £1 coins stuck on with Blu Tack as a counterweight for the extra weight of the lens.

Also from Third Contact, I have a small redhead lamp. A friend found it in the back of a cupboard at the BBC. They were throwing it out, so I took it and bought some legs for it (£25).

5. Amazon and YouTube

Amazon have opened up their video platform, so they stand somewhere between Netflix and YouTube. Both Third Contact and Kosmos are on YouTube and Amazon. Since Amazon reduced their rates films with lower viewing figures, I find I make a little more money from YouTube.

On the plus side, both platforms have huge numbers of users. On the down side, they are swamped by content, because they are relatively easy to get your work onto. Which means they know they only have to pay you – the independent micro-budget filmmaker – the bare minimum.

Getting your work out into the world is now easier than ever. There is a massive, content consuming audience. Google (YouTube), Netflix, Facebook and Amazon are still the leading platforms for video, and their algorithms are tuned to get the most popular content in front of most of the people (whether they like it or not).

These algorithms do seem to reward quantity over quality – so that is a major shift in the way we are receiving art and entertainment such as film. To the point where even Oscar-winning directors such as Soderbergh are exploring ways to produce films faster.

Perhaps there’s also a balance between the two we can try to achieve. Is there a way to make the production process faster whilst keeping the soul of your story?

Producing and distributing your films, as I have done, certainly isn’t the only or the best way, but it is a way. If you are stuck, thinking about making films, waiting for someone to come along and make everything happen for you, a filmmaker has some advice…

“The cavalry isn’t coming.” – Mark Duplass

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