How Filmmakers Stay Sane on Set

Toni Attell and Carl Gottlieb are the authors of The Little Blue Book for Filmmakers.  Enjoy an excerpt of their book below, provided by IndieWire.

The source of most drama outside of the script is the actors, and anywhere they congregate may be a hotbed of intrigue, gossip, and disinformation. This is also true of anyone who talks to actors, so view the makeup, hairdressing, wardrobe, and transportation departments as minefields. Even on a low-/no-budget production, where all the departments are combined in the person(s) of your overworked colleagues, a few misplaced or ill-chosen words will resonate throughout the production, and anything said in confidence is public knowledge as soon as it can be repeated. A favor for one will be expected by all, and any violation of boundaries will result in the loss of those limits.

This is not to say a director cannot speak or be spoken to; if that were true, directors would be the loneliest people on the set. Feel free to chat about wind and weather, but remember that in all close-knit male groups, from nineteenth-century British colonial armies to the crews of nuclear submarines, there are three topics deliberately ignored: women, politics, and religion. In a less gender-specific world, include members of the opposite sex as subjects to be avoided. Add to those topics these sources of friction: the problems of the production, the character of the personnel, and the personal lives of everyone on or near the set. The director’s problems are uniquely off limits; like the captain of a ship or the leader of a combat patrol, his or her thoughts must remain private. We discussed the director’s isolation before; it goes with the job, it even has a name: “the loneliness of command.” If you must share gossip and commentary, do it with someone far from the set or the production: a therapist, a life partner, a close family member, or an animal companion (these may all be the same individual). If you’re a writer, your closest confidante may be the director. If he or she is not sympathetic, the same limits apply to your options.

A strategy (or habit) that many executives (including directors) find useful is to acquire or maintain a group of friends or confidantes with whom you can share frankly and safely. The advantage of this is that the natural loneliness of command is softened by a close-knit circle of advisors, sounding boards, and lieutenants who can be trusted to keep people and things organized and functional (including yourself, on the bad days). But, beware—the inherent danger is that your group becomes a “posse,” a gang that gives the appearance of a support group but is, in fact, a barrier. These individuals are people whose principal interest is preserving their turf, influencing your decisions, and insulating you from all criticism and useful input. They become gatekeepers and relish the role.

Keep reading this excerpt on IndieWire!

 

Originally conceived as a workbook for young directors, The Little Blue Book for Filmmakers has become a handbook for easy reference, with all the information a student director/actor/producer needs to create a film, from inception through production, to sales, distribution, and exhibition. The book discusses issues faced by all beginning filmmakers, with a historical perspective that explains problems and solutions that reach back to the invention of movies at the turn of the last century, and stretch forward to include new digital technology and the popularization of videography as global self-expression. A valuable addition to the shelves of all film school instructors who’ve not had years of practical experience working in the trade, it’s also a syllabus in itself and can be the foundation for a course schedule. More important, it’s something every film student will want to own as a reference and guide.

Filmmakers: The Editing Process

Guest Blogger: Glenn Berggoetz is the author of The Independent Filmmaker’s Guide: Make Your Feature Film for $2000 (Limelight Editions). Visit his blog for more great tips!

 

One of the toughest parts of being a filmmaker, if you don’t do the editing of your films yourself, is waiting to see how the final edit of one of your films will turn out.  Tomorrow I’m meeting with editor Erik Lassi to watch the first full-length rough edit of our film Midget Zombie Takeover.  I’m quite excited!

There are pros and cons to having someone else edit your film.  The major con is that you relinquish some control over your film, which can be a bit worrisome.  With my film Evil Intent the initial editor of the film didn’t have his heart in the project, and when I viewed the final edit, the film was bad.  I thought I had simply written and directed a bad film, but I was convinced by a friend to have someone else edit it, so I did, and the second  edit of the film was completely different, and quite good!  We now have a distributor for the film and a tentative cable TV deal for it.

The major pro to having someone else edit your film is that they can add extra insights and humor (assuming you’re doing a comedy) to the film.  When Alan Dague-Greene edited our films The Worst Movie EVER! and To Die is Hard he added in dozens of little humorous touches to the films that I’d never considered.  His fresh pair of eyes made both films much better than if I had decided to edit them myself.

So consider having someone else edit your films.  It can bring fresh material to the project, plus it allows you more time to move on to writing and shooting your next film.

More Tips from Glenn
The pay off for your efforts
There are very few days off for a filmmaker
The editing process
Be creative to land your screenings
Do something every day

Award-winning independent filmmaker Glenn Berggoetz shares all he knows about making a marketable feature film for $2,000. While most books on independent filmmaking talk about how to make a film with a budget of anywhere from $50,000 to half a million dollars or more, the reality of the indie film world is that most filmmakers rarely have more than a few thousand dollars at their disposal for making their film. This book is written specifically for those filmmakers, and for filmmakers who would typically waste years trying to raise tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to make their film simply because they’re not aware that there’s another, more efficient way to go about it.

Filmmakers: The Pay Off for Your Efforts

Guest Blogger: Glenn Berggoetz is the author of The Independent Filmmaker’s Guide: Make Your Feature Film for $2000 (Limelight Editions). Visit his blog for more great tips!

 

While small-budget filmmaking like I do might seem as if it’s dooming the filmmaker to anonymity, it certainly doesn’t have to.

This past summer we shot two films, and for $2000 we made the film “Midget Zombie Takeover.”  We’re planning to have the finished edit of “Midget Zombie Takeover” ready in January.  But even though the finished edit is months away, we’ve already booked the film into two theaters and heard from an international distribution company that’s interested in acquiring distribution rights to the film.

Small-budget filmmaking does not have to be bad filmmaking.  The keys to making a good film are to have a great script and a handful or so of talented cast and crew members who can make you look like you know what you’re doing.  You can have all of these things on a small budget.  If you want to learn how you can improve your odds of making a great film on a small budget, purchase my new book that’s just out from Limelight Editions, The Independent Filmmaker’s Guide: Make Your Feature Film for $2000. 

More Tips from Glenn
The pay off for your efforts
There are very few days off for a filmmaker
The editing process
Be creative to land your screenings
Do something every day

Award-winning independent filmmaker Glenn Berggoetz shares all he knows about making a marketable feature film for $2,000. While most books on independent filmmaking talk about how to make a film with a budget of anywhere from $50,000 to half a million dollars or more, the reality of the indie film world is that most filmmakers rarely have more than a few thousand dollars at their disposal for making their film. This book is written specifically for those filmmakers, and for filmmakers who would typically waste years trying to raise tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to make their film simply because they’re not aware that there’s another, more efficient way to go about it.

Filmmakers: Do something every day!

Guest Blogger: Glenn Berggoetz is the author of The Independent Filmmaker’s Guide: Make Your Feature Film for $2000 (Limelight Editions). Visit his blog for more great tips!

One of the keys to being successful as an independent filmmaker is to make sure you do at least one thing every single day to advance your career.  That one thing can take many forms.  It might mean jotting down ideas for a script or working on a script.  It might mean lining up cast and crew members for your next film.  It might mean sending out emails to promote you previous films.  Whatever it might be, do it!

In my own case, at this point, since we completed shooting two feature films in the last few months, I’ve been focusing on promoting our previous films, and today we received a big payoff when I found out that our film “The Worst Movie EVER!” will be shown in November at yet another independent theater.  That makes six theaters the film will have played in, and by the time the film screens in November, “The Worst Movie EVER!” will have been making the theatrical rounds for fifteen months.  That’s quite a run.  And with every new theater the film plays in, and with every extra dollar the film brings in at the box office, the chances increase of landing foreign deals, DVD releases, cable deals, etc.

So make sure that every day you do at least one thing to continue your career.  And on those days when you have some extra time on your hands, do five or ten things to advance your career.  You might not be a star overnight, but you will have taken a few more steps along the path toward reaching your goals.

More Tips from Glenn
The pay off for your efforts
There are very few days off for a filmmaker
The editing process
Be creative to land your screenings
Do something every day

Award-winning independent filmmaker Glenn Berggoetz shares all he knows about making a marketable feature film for $2,000. While most books on independent filmmaking talk about how to make a film with a budget of anywhere from $50,000 to half a million dollars or more, the reality of the indie film world is that most filmmakers rarely have more than a few thousand dollars at their disposal for making their film. This book is written specifically for those filmmakers, and for filmmakers who would typically waste years trying to raise tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to make their film simply because they’re not aware that there’s another, more efficient way to go about it.

Tora! Tora! Tora!

Guest Blogger: Hiroshi Tasogawa is the author of All the Emperor’s Men: Kurosawa’s Pearl Harbor (Applause Books). This post is taken from an interview with Flixist.com. Please visit their site for more insight from Tasogawa. He had been the translator for Akira Kurosawa while the director was working on the Japanese portion of the film Tora! Tora! Tora! Kurosawa was expelled from the production before his vision was realized, but Tasogawa (as you’ll read in his book) has a unique perspective into that original vision for the film. In this post, Tasogawa gives his opinion on the finished film Tora! Tora! Tora!

I first saw the film at the 1970 world premier at the Criterion Theate in Manhattan. I felt then and I still feel now that the Kurosawa version of Tora! Tora! Tora! would have been a different film in many ways. Most likely, it would have been a better film with more humanized tragic components woven into the Japanese sequences. This feeling is based on my understanding of Kurosawa’s mindset and aspirations concerning the Pearl Harbor epic film.

What was probably most compromised was the opening scene which Kurosawa thought very important. The entrance of the tragic protagonist, Admiral Yamamoto, the C-in-C of the Japanese Imperial Navy’s Combined Fleet. He arrived at his flagship the Nagato on September 1, 1939. That was the day when World War II began in Europe. In this opening scene, Kurosawa was about to describe beautifully a sense of destiny surrounding Admiral Yamamoto who was soon to be the architect of Pearl Harbor attack. For years Yamamoto had risked assassination dangers and tried boldly to prevent a disastrous war with the United States.

After Fox expelled Kurosawa from the studio, Elmo Williams — with the approval by Darryl Zanuck — revised Kurosawa’s final shooting screenplay although they tried to keep the basic storylines. They deleted a dozen scenes, and shortened or rewrote more than 30 scenes. Those changes seriously affected many of Kurosawa’s ‘pet scenes’. Most regrettably lost was this opening scene. Kurosawa’s idea was cheapened almost beyond recognition. I resent it.

Read more from Hiroshi Tasogawa in his interview on Flixist.

When 20th Century Fox planned its blockbuster portrayal of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, it looked to Akira Kurosawa – a man whose mastery of the cinema led to his nickname “the Emperor” – to direct the Japanese sequences. Yet a matter of three weeks after he began shooting the film in December 1968, Kurosawa was summarily dismissed and expelled from the studio. The tabloids trumpeted scandal: Kurosawa had himself gone mad; his associates had betrayed him; Hollywood was engaged in a conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the truth behind the downfall and humiliation of one of cinema’s greatest perfectionists is revealed in All the Emperor’s Men. Journalist Hiroshi Tasogawa probes the most sensitive questions about Kurosawa’s thwarted ambition and the demons that drove him. His is a tale of a great clash of personalities, of differences in the ways of making movies, and ultimately of a clash between Japanese and American cultures.

Read Your Contracts

Guest Blogger: Toni Attell is the co-author of The Little Blue Book for Filmmakers. Below is an excerpt from her blog The Acting Biz.

As actors or parents of children who are actors, we are always thrilled when we get the job.  We get to the set early, get our hair and make-up, don our costumes, and then there is the knock at the door. It is contract signing time. Please read all your contracts very carefully. If there is something on the page that makes you uneasy, then question it.  Here are some suggestions for young actors and parents.

• If you have a question, call your agent or manager.
• The assistant does not always know what is in your contract.
• If they are taking pictures and you are to be paid, make sure they have that part of the contract there for signing. SAG/AFTRA does not cover photos.
• If you are not Union, take your time, as you can do one non-union show, save your money from the first show to put to the Union dues when you need to join. Then wait until you get your next job, and then make an appointment to go in and join. That is called “a must join.” Even if they cannot see you right away, make that appointment, as the company you are working for could be fined quite heavily if you are not registered to join the Union.

Keep reading this post on Toni’s blog, The Acting Biz.

 

 

The Little Blue Book for Filmmakers discusses issues faced by all beginning filmmakers, with a historical perspective that explains problems and solutions that reach back to the invention of movies at the turn of the last century, and stretch forward to include new digital technology and the popularization of videography as global self-expression. A valuable addition to the shelves of all film school instructors who’ve not had years of practical experience working in the trade, it’s also a syllabus in itself and can be the foundation for a course schedule. More important, it’s something every film student will want to own as a reference and guide.

The Runaway Train: Behind the Scenes of Making the Movie

The following is an excerpt of the book All the Emperor’s Men: Kurosawa’s Pearl Harbor by Hiroshi Tasogawa, as posted on CreativeCow.net. Please visit their website to read this entire excerpt. The book takes you behind the scenes of the filming of Tora! Tora! Tora!, a film about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Director Akira Kurosawa was hired to do the Japanese scenes, but he was expelled from the production. This book remembers his vision. Today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day in the U.S. This excerpt deals with the filming of the movie The Runaway Train, before Kurosawa started working on Tora! Tora! Tora!

Culture Shock

A reporter at the New York press conference called to announce production of The Runaway Train asked: “Are you worried about language differences being a problem in the creation of a movie in America?” Kurosawa answered: “With a single conductor’s baton, Karajan enables the people of the world to understand his music and with a single brush, Picasso can communicate his image to the people of the world. I am confident that if you give me a camera and film, I can create a movie that will be understood by the peoples of the world.” In later years, he added: “Movies communicate to the heart at a level that transcends language.”

Kurosawa undoubtedly believed what he said but he was most likely thinking about the communication that occurs between the finished movie and its audience. The language issues that arose in the course of producing the movie could not be so easily glossed over.

An orchestra conductor has the musical score to serve as the common language for himself and the orchestra. A painter can face the canvas alone with only a brush in hand. Film, however, is an art form requiring people in a group that includes both cast and staff pulling in the same direction. To manage the production of a movie while reconciling differences of opinion and correcting misconceptions, a high level of verbal communication is indispensable. Even with skilled interpreters, communicating the will of the director is not easy.

Furthermore, Kurosawa relentlessly polished the script while the filming was underway and tended to be more ruthless than other direc¬tors in coaching actors on the delivery of their lines. If he trusted the discretion of the actors or entrusted the coaching to an assistant who was a native English-speaker, it would be one thing. But that was unlikely. So it was not really clear how Kurosawa intended to instruct the American actors about their English lines or how he intended to judge the success of the resulting performances. Particularly serious, Kurosawa was not aware of the pitfalls inherent in a process in which his Japanese screenplay had not been merely translated word for word but rather rewritten in a framework of the American English language in a Hollywood screenplay. Having earned a reputation as a skilled screenwriter early in his career, Kurosawa was fully aware of the importance of the screenplay. “If the screenplay is excellent, even a third-rate director can make a decent movie, but if the screenplay is no good, the situation is hopeless even for a first-rate director,” he once said. Kurosawa was woefully unaware, however, of the accommodations demanded by Hollywood as standard operating procedure with respect to screenplays in English.

The ways of Japanese movie production known to Kurosawa are centered on the director. In the Japanese movie world, a director comes to be recognized as a “master,” with more and more people likely to see it as natural that he be permitted to be dictatorial. In the case of Kurosawa, movie production was director-centered as he brought each project to completion by writing the screenplay—and doing the directing, shooting, and editing.

In contrast, in America the principle is that movie making is not director-centered but rather producer-centered. In many cases, it would not be far off the mark to consider the director to be a foreman who does not appear on the scene until after the preliminary arrangements have been made. From an American perspective, a Japanese movie screenplay, particularly one by Kurosawa, is inherently different from that in Hollywood. Taking Kurosawa as an extreme case, so long as he had a clear picture in mind, he would write the screenplay concisely. Even if no one else understood, he had no problem using keywords to suggest the image he desired.

In the screenplay for Kurosawa’s first movie, Sanshiro Sugata is a scene described only as: “Quiet afternoon in the temple district.” The No Regrets for Our Youth screenplay has a scene that says only: “Vivid young leaves.” When read in Japanese, such notes might leave the reader with a vague sense of knowing the feeling Kurosawa was looking for. But a non-Japanese had no way to come up with a reliable image of the picture Kurosawa had in his head. Intimately connected to an aesthetic sensibility, these Japanese expressions are almost impossible to translate accurately into a foreign language. By nature, such scenes have no place in a Hollywood screenplay. But Kurosawa had no doubts about the propriety of instructions like “the black runaway moving along through the white snowfield at a high clip.” He already had a fully developed image of the scene in his head.

This would be a problem for the American staff. It was unclear whether this was to be a live-action shot or a special effects shot. And if live action, was it to be shot from a helicopter? Was it to be shot with a telephoto lens? Was it to be shot looking at the snowfield from inside the cab of the first locomotive? Was it to be shot with a camera fixed to the side of the locomotive? Only Kurosawa knew for sure. If the American staff were to receive such a screenplay, they would have had no idea of how to prepare. It would be different from the screenplay that the producer, cinematographer, art director, and other staff in America would expect to receive as a matter of course.

From this perspective, Carroll went beyond the call of duty. Was this scene on location or in the studio? Was it morning, mid-day, evening, or late at night? How were the people to be positioned with respect to each other? What is the camera angle and what is in the frame? If Kurosawa would not decide such things, there could be no English screenplay. So Carroll repeated these questions endlessly.

In some cases, answers were immediately forthcoming but in other cases answers were like: “I have not yet thought about it at that level since we don’t yet know what the situation is going to be at the site.” Pushed for a reply, Kurosawa would manage to come up with a response that sometimes even he was not satisfied with.
Faced with Carroll’s comment that, from an American’s viewpoint, a line of translated Japanese dialogue did not make sense, Kurosawa had to change it. Changing one line, however, can affect what comes immediately before or after it. In some cases, the entire script was affected.

Carroll’s three-week stay in Japan was over all too soon. He returned to America but the rewrite continued for another two weeks and the final version of the screenplay, approved by Levine, was sent back to Japan. Kurosawa, however, was not happy with that version, which had been translated back into Japanese. It was quite different from what Kurosawa had intended. Finding fault in one place after another, he sent requests for revisions to America. “Making new revisions and returning to previous versions, it seemed like we were just doing the same thing over and over,” Kurosawa said.

This was Kurosawa’s first encounter with culture shock. He faced a continuous series of provocative situations that made him worry that his fundamental method of movie making was falling to pieces. As getting a final version of the screenplay took more time than expected and the date to start filming approached relentlessly, Kurosawa began to doubt even his initial scenario. So he wanted to make more revisions.

With one thing left undone and another thing still unfinished, everything seemed to Kurosawa to be in a desperate and distressing rush. Moreover, Kurosawa became exhausted both physically and mentally.

Keep reading this excerpt on Creative Cow…

When 20th Century Fox planned its blockbuster portrayal of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, it looked to Akira Kurosawa – a man whose mastery of the cinema led to his nickname “the Emperor” – to direct the Japanese sequences. Yet a matter of three weeks after he began shooting the film in December 1968, Kurosawa was summarily dismissed and expelled from the studio. The tabloids trumpeted scandal: Kurosawa had himself gone mad; his associates had betrayed him; Hollywood was engaged in a conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the truth behind the downfall and humiliation of one of cinema’s greatest perfectionists is revealed in All the Emperor’s Men. Journalist Hiroshi Tasogawa probes the most sensitive questions about Kurosawa’s thwarted ambition and the demons that drove him. His is a tale of a great clash of personalities, of differences in the ways of making movies, and ultimately of a clash between Japanese and American cultures.

Being Flexible and Staying Calm

Guest Blogger: Glenn Berggoetz is the author of The Independent Filmmaker’s Guide: Make Your Feature Film for $2000 (Limelight Editions), which will be available wherever books are sold beginning October 2012.

Being flexible and staying calm are just two of the many requirements of small-budget film making.  If we weren’t willing to make adjustments to work around this unavoidable change in plans, the shoot would be dead in the water.  And if we didn’t stay calm and instead allowed ourselves to get bent out of shape over this last-second change, the film wouldn’t get done either.  Or at best, we’d get the film done, but there would be a lot of contentiousness on set that would almost assuredly spill over into the film and sabotage any chaces the film had of being well made.  So no matter what curveballs might get thrown your way in making your indie film, stay calm and find a way to quickly make the necessary adjustments to make sure your film gets made.

More Posts from Glenn:
Writing Your Script
Working Quickly
Try to Avoid This When Filming
Right on Schedule
Finished!

The Independent Filmmaker’s Guide: Make Your Feature Film for $2000

Award-winning independent filmmaker Glenn Berggoetz shares all he knows about making a marketable feature film for $2,000. While most books on independent filmmaking talk about how to make a film with a budget of anywhere from $50,000 to half a million dollars or more, the reality of the indie film world is that most filmmakers rarely have more than a few thousand dollars at their disposal for making their film. This book is written specifically for those filmmakers, and for filmmakers who would typically waste years trying to raise tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to make their film simply because they’re not aware that there’s another, more efficient way to go about it.

Writing Your Script – For Small-Budget Indie Filmmakers

Guest Blogger: Glenn Berggoetz is the author of The Independent Filmmaker’s Guide: Make Your Feature Film for $2000 (Limelight Editions), which will be available wherever books are sold beginning October 2012.

This weekend, Glenn shot the small-budget film The Ghosts of Johnson Woods and blogged his way through the process, giving tips to aspiring filmmakers along the way. Visit his blog for more entries.

A couple years ago I had an aspiring filmmaker approach me and tell me he had an idea for a great script that he wanted to turn into his first independent film.  He was very excited, as he should have been.  He then proceeded to ask me if he should set aside a year to write his script.  My answer?  An emphatic “No!”

Indie filmmakers typically think they need to spend a year or more writing their script, and it’s easy to understand why they believe this since the script is the most important aspect of making a good film, because, let’s face it, if your script is lousy, even having Will Ferrell star in the film (rememberLand of the Lost?) won’t be able to save the project.

The fact is, however, that as the maker of small-budget independent films, you have to make more than one film every two or three years to give yourself a legitimate chance to turn your hobby into your livelihood.  So set aside a couple weeks to write your script, then get right into putting together your cast and crew (you can do your re-write during this time).  Next, take a couple weekends to shoot your film, then get your next script written and make your next film.

As a small-budget indie filmmaker, you’re not going to make a masterpiece that film buffs put in the same sentence with Citizen Kane and A Christmas Story.  But if you keep writing one script after another (and make films based off those scripts), you’re going to drastically improve your chances of making that one film that launches your career.

More Posts from Glenn:
Being Flexible and Staying Calm
Working Quickly
Try to Avoid This When Filming
Right on Schedule
Finished!

The Independent Filmmaker’s Guide: Make Your Film for $2000

Award-winning independent filmmaker Glenn Berggoetz shares all he knows about making a marketable feature film for $2,000. While most books on independent filmmaking talk about how to make a film with a budget of anywhere from $50,000 to half a million dollars or more, the reality of the indie film world is that most filmmakers rarely have more than a few thousand dollars at their disposal for making their film. This book is written specifically for those filmmakers, and for filmmakers who would typically waste years trying to raise tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to make their film simply because they’re not aware that there’s another, more efficient way to go about it.

Dealing with Change At All Phases of Production

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Guest Blogger: Gini Graham Scott, author of The Complete Guide to Writing, Producing, and Directing a Low-Budget Short Film

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The nature of filming is that it involves frequent changes at all stages of the production, and you  and others in various roles need to be ready to respond accordingly to successfully make your film. Normally, making these necessary changes is successful, because those making films in whatever capacity know to be flexible and responsive to changes in a project, or they won’t perform effectively or be invited to continue to participate in such shoots.

For example, in writing the script, I will typically ask for feedback at script readings and make changes if this seems warranted.  In doing auditions with the actors, I may make changes in the script to incorporate their lines, and if it is not possible to cast an actor for a particular role, I may make changes in the script to eliminate that role or rewrite it for another actor.  In looking for crew members, I will make changes in what people will do depending on who is available; and if someone is ill or can’t come on the day of a shoot, I will make changes that day in who does what and I may take on the role of missing crew members.

There may be other changes when it is difficult to get a particular item for a prop; for example the script may be changed or one prop may be substituted for another.  Then, too, there can be changes when there are problems during the shoot, such as the sun moving so the lighting changes; a battery running down, so the number of scenes and takes has to be reduced; or a microphone placed in the wrong direction, so not all the sound is well-recorded, resulting in making changes in the editing process to use only the good footage that was actually shot.

In short, everyone has to adapt quickly when changes are necessary during pre-production and on the day of the shoot to have a successful shoot. And normally these changes are successful, and the finished film reflect the changes that have been made during all phases of pre-production, production, and post-production.

The Complete Guide to Writing, Producing, and Directing a Low-Budget Short Film
The Complete Guide to Writing, Producing, and Directing a Low-Budget Short Film is a comprehensive step-by-step overview of how to complete and promote a low-budget short film. It begins with how to write a short script, keeping in mind the goal of shooting it in one or at most two days.

It discusses how to finalize your script by getting feedback and then preparing it for production through doing a scene breakdown and possibly a storyboard. It describes how to direct the film yourself or work with a director, audition the actors and cast the short, plan for and participate in the shoot, and work with an editor to finish your film. Finally, it discusses how to get your film shown, including entering it in festivals, and concludes with an extensive list of resources and references, including books, articles, script and storyboard software, conferences, expos, festivals, and more. Available for purchase from Limelight Editions or booksellers nationwide.