For this
first installment of Dys- Day, I’ll
be answering my friend and fellow filmmaker Lori Bowen who gave me the
following challenge: “I’d love to read as much as you want to tell about the
film – financing, producing, shooting, post. Everything. No filmmaking journey
is ever alike and no filmmaking journey is ever boring.”
Lori, indeed, it is never boring and I’m
convinced this whole series of posts will help cover most of the filmmaking
journey of this particular project. I’ll use your four keywords as a starting point because I
feel they represent the foundation of any film project. Financing. Producing.
Shooting. Post. You can’t really be more thorough that that (except maybe by
adding marketing and scriptwriting), but for the sake of this first foray into
the topic, let’s stick to these as they are the elements that will have the
biggest impact in determining what the finished film ends up being (and looks
like). Furthermore, they are all interrelated and will influence once another:
how much financing you get will determine some of the producing decisions and
will impact shooting time and or means, which in turn will also impact post. You
can’t think of them individually without acknowledging how they impact the rest
of the production.
Financing: Aside from a bit of money that was
raised through crowdfunding (thank you, contributors!), most of the Dys- budget was self-financed with a
third of the amount coming from an investor. I could have gone other, more
traditional routes of financing (i.e. government funding), but I didn’t feel
like putting the project on hold “in case” I find more financing. I had already
waited long enough to make a feature, I really wanted to get the project off
the ground and take advantage of the momentum I had. Plus, I was fortunate
enough to have a decently paying day job that allowed me to save money to make
my big dream come true. Some people go
backpacking through Europe/take a six months trip around the world; I made my
first feature and I couldn’t be happier. Because yes, filmmaking is also a
spiritual journey.
From the
start, I knew it was hard for a first feature to get funded, so I wrote the
script with budgetary limitations in mind. One of my film teachers always used
to say that, when faced with limitations, we should use them to force ourselves
to be creative. This is exactly what I did and I can’t agree more! First thing
I knew, my initial idea took a turn for the unexpected and I hit a creative
zone that I don’t think I would have been able to access without being aware of
the budgetary limitations I was likely to face. In the end, I couldn’t be
happier with the script and I would not change a thing to the story, the
content or the way it unfolds, even if someone offered me twice the budget I
had!
As for
producing, shooting and post – I’ll cover those in future posts! :)
Thanks Lori
for the inspiring topic! And remember, you can ask me your question(s) or
suggest a topic by commenting!
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