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.
Good, Fast & Cheap is Possible
Good, Fast, Cheap. Pick only two.
How often have you heard this adage? Maybe you have even said it yourself, especially if you have worked in the corporate video world and have dealt with clients who expect blockbusters on b-level budgets.
It is a popular and often hilarious meme, and an educational Venn diagram illustrating a reality check. If you want something fast and cheap, it won’t be good. If you want something cheap and good, it can’t be fast. Sure, you can create a great video or film with little money, but the trade off for not spending big is you’ll need to spend a lot of time and patience to achieve greatness.
But I am here to tell you that good, fast, and cheap is indeed possible in filmmaking. As micro-budget filmmakers, if we were to believe otherwise, we would be crippled with doubt before we even attempted to make a film.
New Year's Resolutions are Fleeting; Long-Term Planning is Key
The concept of the New Year resolution started around 4000 years ago with the agricultural Babylonians. During their ancient annual Akitu festival, which included crop harvesting and appointing a new king, the Babylonians focused on pleasing their gods. Over twelve days they made promises to their gods that they would pay debts and return borrowed tools. Keeping this promise would gain them favoritism from the Gods in the coming year.
Other cultures adopted a similar belief around New Year's resolutions. In ancient Rome 46 B.C, the new calendar was introduced by Emperor Julius Caesar, making January 1st the start of the year. Caesar named the month after the two faced God Janus. Similar to the Babylonians, the Romans offered sacrifice and made promises to Janus to show good behavior in the new year.
UNDER PRESSURE
It’s these traditions that we have to thank for the reason most of us feel the pressure around mid-December to be better versions of ourselves in many aspects of our lives once January 1st rolls around.
Which brings us to today. Why does our society still hold on to variations of these ancient traditions?
Read MoreCinema Is Still Sexy
Why Indie Filmmakers Should Still Consider and Value Cinema as Part of a Film’s Release
In late November we attended the Zagreb Film Festival. We had booked tickets to see the A24 film Lamb weeks in advance, and I eagerly waited for the date to arrive. It felt surreal going to the movies for an event and I can’t remember the last time I was in a cinema for an actual organised film festival. Besides the guy without a mask coughing in the seat somewhere close behind us, it was an enjoyable experience to have my eyes glued to a big screen again. Immersed fully in a story playing on a huge screen. The cinema was less than half full, but it was a film event during a pandemic!
Cinema was back and I was excited. I carried forward this excitement to watch our own films, Cats of Malta and Machination, in the cinemas in Malta for a series of preview screenings only a short time later.
Show Me The Money
I have been thinking of writing this article for a long time now. It is an awkward, potentially controversial topic, especially with what is going on with film crews around the world protesting set conditions and working hours and lack of pay. It’s about money. It’s about low rates. It’s about deferment, working for exposure, volunteering, using students on set, or any of the other short cuts producers use to indicate “no pay”. It’s about the perceived exploitation producers put cast and crew through to create movies. And the fact that everyone feels underpaid and is putting their hands in the air saying “please sir, can I have some more?”
Money, money, money.
And it is completely understandable. Everyone deserves to be paid properly for the hard work they do on set, for the years of training and experience they bring to their craft, for the skills in camera or sound or production design or acting they bring to each project.
The Power of Film Always Lies in the Story
Recently I had begun writing reviews for a film publication called The Sound View. The latest review I finished was one I was proud of, despite the fact that I was worried due to the film being political. Politics is not one of my topics of interest, in film or otherwise.
After writing my review I questioned my rating, but only for a brief second. This was not because I didn't like the film – story wise it was strong – but I thought the cinematography and the set-up of some shots could have been more creative. Personally, I know how hard it is to make your first feature film on a budget, so I try to be fair. Unless a film is off-putting visually, I won't comment on the visual aesthetic.
I hit 'send' on my email, letting my review go out to Dan, the CEO, so he could forward it to the editors.
A few hours later a reply came back from Dan. The review was excellently written, but he wondered why I rated the film 'recommended' instead of 'highly recommended’, since my review was so positive. Honestly, I thought some of the shots were a bit boring, the sets bland – I wrote this in my reply email. In my opinion, the filmmakers could have experimented with more interesting shots, and dressed the white walls and improved the lighting. But in the review I wrote nothing about the filmmaking technicalities, I focused only on the story.
Our email thread grew. In the end, I saw things from his point of view. We came to an agreement – the story is much more important than the visual elements. If you have a badly written character or a story that is not engaging, it's more inexcusable than having a badly dressed set or a boring shot.
Read MoreWhen Your Hobby Becomes Your Job ... You Need a New Hobby
Filmmaking, by most people, is considered a hobby. Something you do on the weekends or evenings after your day job. My mum still feels this way and waits for the day I give up Nexus and go back and complete that Business and Commercial Law degree I abandoned in my twenties. It's not just filmmaking though; art in general is considered a hobby, and the way artists are constantly asked to work for free across multiple disciplines speaks to the little respect art commands as a career.
So when filmmaking becomes your full-time job, and your hobby becomes your bread winner, this is a cause for celebration. Something we used to do for 'play' is now something we can do all the time. But all work and no play can be just as bad as no work and all play. Even though we love what we do, switching off from film and finding time to pursue other hobbies is crucial for work / life balance and finding a healthy way to de-stress.
Read MoreQuality V Quantity in Filmmaking
Recently, I focused all of my creative energy and time solely on one film project over a six-week period. It was the Kickstarter campaign for our documentary Cats of Malta. A week before the campaign launched, I was fired from my English teaching job in Malta for not coming into work when I was sick (that’s another story). So then there was nothing distracting me from this single project, an odd experience for me, a serial multitasker and juggler of life.
The campaign took up almost all of my waking hours each day. It proved to be mentally and physically draining because it meant taking on multiple tasks — social media, campaign page building, interacting with fans, managing a team, updating backers and sending newsletters on two platforms, going live on Facebook to engage online, sending emails daily, and watching and learning from crowdfunding course videos.
Imagine if I was also focusing on our other films with Nexus and all the tasks I have to complete for them, which are plenty! I was promoting, marketing and building audiences for Machination, In Corpore, and No Woman is an Island before the Kickstarter campaign for Cats of Malta went into prep. Not to mention I do the same tasks for our filmmaking courses, YouTube Channel and website, plus I update the website regularly and write the monthly newsletter.
That all stopped for six intense weeks.
Read MoreHow Long is a Feature Film?
This week, I finished yet another edit pass on Machination, our pandemic inspired horror / drama that follows the plight of a character named Maria suffering from mental illness in the face of a world pushing fear. It is running at 62 minutes, minus opening and closing credits.
When the first cut clocked in at only 60 minutes, we went back to the drawing board and wrote new scenes to be filmed. We called back the lead actor Steffi Thake and even recruited new actors to play additional characters, young versions of Maria and her brother Yorgen, which we meet in dreams and flashbacks in the story.
We had this idea in our head that we wanted the film to run for at least 70 minutes. For some reason, 70 minutes felt like a feature to us whereas anything under wasn’t quite there. But why did I feel this way? Wasn’t 70 minutes still on the short side? What is the length a film needs to run to quality as a feature film?
I RETURNED TO THE 9 TO 5 ... AND LASTED ONLY 2 WEEKS
At the end of last month, I was working full-time as an editor and videographer for a Maltese news organisation. When I first saw the job advertised, I was excited. Filming news and human interest stories around Malta, editing videos, learning more about what was happening on the island, it sounded fantastic.
I was entering my fifth month of travelling around Portugal with Sarah, staying three months longer than intended due to multiple cancelled flights, so our bank accounts were running low, and we could use the influx of steady income. So I applied. I went through two rounds of interviews to land the job. I negotiated a higher salary due to my experience. I flew back to Malta with full-time work guaranteed and the prospect of an exciting new experience and even new career.
But even before I began work the voice in the back of my head was asking ‘are you sure you want to do this?’ I wasn’t. And the result was an awkward conversation with the boss announcing my departure only two weeks into the job.