As 2019 comes to a close in just a few short days, we also close the door on a decade of indie filmmaking. Where were you on January 1st, 2010? Do you remember how you celebrated the New Year? What were your plans for the year to come, did you have goals for the decade in store? Did you achieve them?
Who were you ten years ago?
Who are you now?
If you are like me, remembering what you were doing last week is challenging enough, let alone what you were doing in 2010. But I know I was 27 years old. I would have woken up at home, in my mum’s house, and on that day we would have gone to our cousin’s birthday party – it was a tradition since we were kids. I was in Australia so it was likely hot. I am sure I would have had some shitty day job – delivery driver, telemarketer, factory hand – I’ve had so many shitty jobs I’ve lost track long ago.
I was already a filmmaker. In February 2010, I would wrap my first feature as a director, the no-budget gross out comedy Dace Decklan: Private Eye. Tarantino would debut with Reservoir Dogs in 1992, a touchstone in indie cinema, while Sam Mendes would win an Oscar for American Beauty in 1999, his first film. Dace is my debut. I don’t regret it, though I don’t think I could watch it sober today.
Only a couple months before wrapping Dace, in December 2009, I held the first Made In Melbourne Film Festival. A single night at the Loop Bar. Sarah worked the door. And this is still one of my favourite photos together. Look at those kids!
Sarah and I were only friends. In fact, we had only met a few months ago, at Tropfest in Sydney, as Tom Vogel’s film One in a Million made it to the finals. We both worked on the crew but on different days, so we didn’t meet until the event. I was drunk at the after party, she had heat exhaustion from cycling all day in the Sydney sun. I asked for her number in Sydney, asked her out on a date when we came back to Melbourne. She said no. We became friends anyway. It would be another five years before I finally got that date out of her.
It makes you reflect on how quickly life truly goes by. Look at film. At the start of this decade, in 2011, Netflix announced it would split its DVD mail order and streaming platform into two separate services. The move outraged customers at the time and lost Netflix an estimated one million subscribers. But it was also the bold decision that became the cornerstone upon which the company built its streaming dominance and allowed ‘Netflix and chill’ to become part of the global vernacular.
On October 2017 an exposé on Harvey Weinstein dropped in the New York Times, detailing decades of sexual harassment and abuse of actresses and co-workers. The impact was tremendous, a zeitgeist shifting moment, giving rise to the Me Too and Time’s Up movements, the latter raising more that USD $22 million for a legal defense fund to support lower-income women seeking justice for sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. From what began as an unmasking of the abhorrent behaviour of one big shot producer has transcended film to become a global movement addressing unequal pay, under-representation, and other unhealthy aspects of institutional sexism. Things are changing slowly, but they are changing.
On a more micro level, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera was released in 2012. It was a $3000 camera that could produce images comparable to RED at the time but at a far, far lower cost. It also came bundled with the DaVinci Resolve, the most powerful colour grading software on the market. Much like the Canon 5D MK II spawned the DSLR revolution the previous decade, the first camera released by Blackmagic was truly a disruptor in the industry and changed the game in indie film, challenging other camera manufacturers to lower the cost of their own cinema cameras, further democratizing the ability for anyone to make quality indie film.
In 2015, Tangerine by Sean Baker, a micro-budget comedy drama about two transgender prostitutes in Los Angeles, won the Sundance Film Festival. It was shot on an iPhone. Multiple iPhone 5s in fact, the filmmakers utilizing an everyday device to achieve a unique look and shots that would’ve been impossible with traditional camera gear. It was a groundbreaking film but far from the first to be shot on a phone. The rise of mobile filmmaking has been going on since the previous decade. There are even festivals dedicated to mobile filmmaking, one such being the iPhone Film Festival. In 2010, they had a little over 100 submissions. Today, they average over 2,000 submissions. The power is out there for anyone to become a director.
This power, this accessibility, only grew as the decade wore on. It has never been more affordable to make a film with amazing technology, software, and gear available at your fingertips. Crowdfunding is raising millions for filmmakers each year – in fact in April this year Critical Role raised over USD 11 million with 88,887 backers to make an animated TV show based on their Twitch live-streamed Dungeons & Dragons game. There is also more Video On Demand platforms around the world than I can even attempt to name, the market value worth multiple billions.
So, in theory, there is more places to distribute your work as a filmmaker.
Yet, conversely, all this accessibility means there is more competition than ever before. So, so much more.
There is a gluttony of content, and we as indie filmmakers aren’t just up against Hollywood for viewers, but we are competing against television, online media, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, cat videos, etc. It is a battle for the most precious commodity of all – consumer attention. A consumer already spoilt with infinite choice. This is the reality now. And the marketplace is only going to get more crowded in the decade to come.
It isn’t an easy road, but for me it is the only road. To have the means to create, to tell the stories I want to tell through film, and to do it all side by side with Sarah is something I am grateful for every day. And with gratitude is how I choose to look back upon the decade as it comes to a close.
At the start of the decade I was completing the immature Dace Decklan: Private Eye. At the end of the decade we are about to wrap post production on In Corpore, a completely improvised and ‘mature’ film about love and betrayal we filmed in four countries. In between I transitioned from gross-out comedies, green screen effects and horror films to telling dramatic, improvised, relationship and life based stories. That is quite the shift.
I ran a successful film festival for most of the decade. I stopped when I left Melbourne for Malta. In 2012, I got my first job full-time job as an editor for a TV production house in Geelong called Switch International. It only lasted six months and the following year the company would go into liquidation. But I have been editing on and off, sometimes freelance, sometimes an employee, ever since. I have been blessed to do what I love. I have met some of my closest friends in the world through film. My closest friend, Sarah Jayne, became my wife in 2016.
It has been a crazy, beautiful decade, one I never could have predicted. Who knows what the next ten years have in store but one thing I can predict: we will still be making films.
Written by Ivan Malekin.