Micro-budget filmmaking is bloody hard work.
After wrapping production on ForeFans – our sixth micro-budget narrative feature – at the start of the month, I can feel that in my tired bones. And creaky knees.
We spent two weeks filming guerrilla style all over Zagreb and Paris, 18 different locations, a skeleton crew of only three or sometimes two (only Sarah and I), 12 to 14 hour days, 5 hours sleep a night.
To say it was exhausting is an understatement. We were stretched too thin, multi-tasking like mad, putting into practise philosophies for micro-budget filmmaking that we teach in our own educational courses: “Use a small crew to move quickly and keep costs down.”
But halfway through filming I realized something about this philosophy and perhaps micro-budget filmmaking in general: I’m getting too old for this.
Are Film Festivals Worth Your Time & Money?
In 2022 we have been paying attention to an aspect of film distribution we have largely ignored for several years beforehand: film festivals.
We have had rejections of course. With many festivals receiving thousands of entries, there will always be rejections. But we have also found some success. Machination has picked up several awards at film festivals for Acting, Directing, and Sound Design. Cats of Malta has been selected for the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, New York Cat Festival, and other festivals we cannot reveal quite yet. Our latest Life Improvised film, The Dance, screened at Kinemastik International Short Film Festival in Malta last night.
But this handful of success has come at a cost of almost $1000USD so far in festival submission fees. Could this money have been better spent elsewhere? Like running Facebook ads for the release of Machination? Have we gotten enough return for our funds? In short: are film festivals worth the cost and effort?
Reflecting on the CBI Workshop
Last week I sent off a private screener of Cats of Malta to our Kickstarter backers. The next day I received a reply from an actor/filmmaker I knew from my past life working out of Studio 106 in St Kilda. Katrina asked me about our improvised process of filmmaking, how we make films, and if she could see an example of my favorite improvised NPG film.
This request got me thinking and sent me down a rabbit hole of reminiscing about our improvised work and how we started producing and shooting films using this unique method. All this thinking led me to Tubi TV and getting lost within the first twenty minutes of Friends, Foes & Fireworks – the first improvised film Ivan and I produced and directed, plus shot in a single night.
Within the body of the email reply to Katrina I pasted the Tubi TV link to Friends, Foes & Fireworks and filled the rest of the blank space with our improvisation inspirations, directors and films we admire – one of which is Mike Leigh. His name led me to thinking about the whole improvisation journey and business transition which NPG has gone through since making Friends, Foes & Fireworks in 2017. Again this led to yet another fond memory – the five days Ivan and I spent in Basel during 2019 taking part in the Character Based Improvisation (CBI) workshop Robert Marchand teaches.
I also mentioned the CBI workshop to Katrina, then I hit ‘send’. Sitting at my desk I realized it's been a few years since Basel, and that realization brought on some wonderful memories.
SEX, VIOLENCE & CENSORSHIP
Exposing the Double Standard Surrounding Sex & Violence in Film & Art
Our new film In Corpore is too sexy for Tubi.
This is something we learnt two weeks ago, and we’ve added Tubi to our list of platforms and apps we cannot reach with the film. All our attempts to advertise In Corpore on Instagram fail. Our trailers and teasers are flagged on YouTube. When we wrote in the film’s IMDB synopsis “a sensual, sex-positive exploration of contemporary relationships”, the synopsis suddenly disappeared. Trying to advertise the film through GoogleAds is an ongoing battle and we are losing – Google restricted our ability to market the new release through YouTube due to images being deemed “adult content”. Images, mind you, of people dancing, fully clothed. And for a year leading up to the film release, we couldn’t even share the In Corpore website on Facebook or Instagram because it was blocked by those platforms. The crime: too sexy.
Read MoreReleasing an Indie Film During a Pandemic
In February this year, Sarah Jayne wrote an article about self-distributing our feature In Corpore. She talked about screening the film in a cinema in New York, one of the settings of the film, perhaps doing a tour of the country à la The Joyful Vampire Tour of America, and then doing cinema screenings in the remaining countries we filmed in: Australia, Germany, and Malta.
Well, none of that went ahead. The world changed, as we all know; a global pandemic brought everything to a standstill. And still we aren’t clear of the spectre of this virus, with different parts of Europe facing another lockdown, America still out of control, and Australia suffering too. The way films are distributed changed, perhaps irrevocably. Cinemas shut like so much else. The traditional release windowing model was scrapped, blockbuster films like Mulan streaming for free on Disney+ as a $200 million dollar experiment, while Tenet by Christopher Nolan stuck to its guns and became the first Hollywood tent-pole to launch in theaters following their prolonged shutdown, the bold move hailed by executives and media as the saviour of cinema.
It bombed. Studios were spooked. Cinema wasn’t saved.
Read MoreFrom Writing to Wrap: A Feature Film in Four Months
Just last week, on August 26th, we wrapped principal photography on Machination, our fifth feature film shot in the last four years. This was very much a film inspired by this new Covid-19 reality we live in, a story about a highly anxious woman named Maria who struggles to cope in isolation as a pandemic sweeps the world. Maria is forced to confront the monsters in her head, in the media, and in her past.
Maria in her bedroom, Machination Behind the scenes. Credit: Monika Kopčilová
We had the initial idea for the film during our own lockdown in April in Malta and spent a few days at the end of the month writing the first draft outline. May was spent redrafting and refining the outline. In June we approached cast, researched the equipment we would need as well as the VFX we wanted, and worked to fill gaps in knowledge for the story as well as the production, such as the specific mental health issues Maria was suffering from or how we could pull off a particular shot – a period that was a mix of development and pre-pre production. One month of official pre-production and rehearsal began from July 13th. Finally, in August, we went into a 10-day production period split into two halves – August 12th to 16th and August 22nd to 26th.
This was all done between Sarah working a full-time job and myself working on other projects, including still shooting our Cats of Malta documentary and planning a short film called Crossing Paths for the end of June. So until production, and perhaps the last couple of weeks of pre-production, we never dropped everything to simply focus on Machination, and Sarah didn’t stop working her day job until the first shooting day. That makes Machination a feature film done from first draft to wrap in four months, mostly part-time, during an uncertain time in the world where many productions shut down completely. And the budget was only €6000. And we still paid everyone.
This is how we did it.
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Black, White and Writing in Color
To begin I would like to inform readers that my words and thoughts flow solely from an inner place of reflection. This piece is written by me, a privileged white, approaching forty female with European ancestry. I am a writer and filmmaker who is currently working on a personal journey towards educating myself on African American history and the representation of minorities in film. Some of the topics I have been reading, watching and listening to over the last month have included police brutality against minorities in America, how American history is built on a foundation of oppressed black slaves, and how white feminism has and continues to exclude women of colour.
I felt compelled to write this article during the beginning of recent protests occurring around various states in and around the USA, after countless unjust deaths of black men and women at the hands of white American police officers. I can’t identify to my core with the African American community as I have not lived my life as a person of colour. I will never understand how it feels to have to make calculated daily choices based around my safety due to the colour of my skin, but it doesn't mean that I don't feel angry, sad and frustrated when hearing of the unwarranted deaths of George Floyd and the many who have come before and likely will follow.
For me, though far removed, the protests brought up a lot of memories of my past and made me think about how much American Black culture I consumed as a child and a teenager through watching American movies and music performed and written by African American artists. It also made me realise that despite all that consuming in my youth, as an adult I did not know much at all what a truthful representation of African American culture was, what the culture was built on or what it stemmed from.
With this miseducation and ignorance in mind, I want to talk about how I personally consumed and then perceived African American culture as a white woman growing up in Australia. Also, I want to share with fellow white artists reading this ways in which we can take responsibility for what perceptions are put out there and how we can change the narrative through storytelling.
Personally, my introduction to African American culture started through music. Growing up in my pre-teens I listened to my parent’s record collection religiously, and that is when I fell in love with the sounds of Motown. I would listen to Marvin Gaye, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Tina Turner, The Supremes, and more. Jimi Hendrix was my favourite.
Read MoreThe Value of Micro-Shorts
“If you want to be a filmmaker, grab a camera and go out and shoot something, anything.”
This is advice I've heard multiple times during my decade plus long involvement within the indie film scene. This very same advice I have given, and still do give to new filmmakers, however the camera element can now be a phone and the filmmaker part can also be broadened to include 'content creator' and such. How times, technology, and thinking have changed.
Luckily, what has also changed and evolved over the years is my mentality towards the value of short films, as myself and most others once shared the idea that you made shorts early on in your career, then you graduated to features. Now you are a 'real director' – whatever that means. But this kind of thinking is limited.
Read MoreHow We Shot a Feature Film in One Night, Without a Script →
Not only did we shoot a feature in a single night. And not only was it entirely improvised (without a script, without a shot list, without regrets), but we decided to do it on the craziest and most chaotic night of the year... New Year’s Eve.
The film is called Friends, Foes & Fireworks and it explores relationships, love, friendship, and the truths we try but fail to keep to ourselves.
We have been asked one question numerous times: “How did you actually manage to shoot this in a single night without a script?”
The second question, often unspoken, but lingering on lips nonetheless is “…and have a story and structure that actually makes sense without a script?”
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