We all have to eat. Here's a few tips on saving money and the environment, all while keeping your crew happy and healthy.
Green Production Tip # 6 The Trouble With Bottles
We all need it, but here's how to get it without the waste and toxins.
http://www.mymilliondollarmovie.com/blog
Green Production Tip # 5 Phantom Power
It's like a bad horror movie.
These are simple things you can do around the office and home to save energy and money.
Green Production Tip # 4 Generators
GOT POWER?
Here's the next installment in our Green Production tips.
Saving energy will save you money and with a small production, every penny counts.
Tomorrow we will have a guest Blogger. One of our producers, Amy DeCorte, will be talking about her experiences with the 100 mile diet. Should prove to be very entertaining as well as informative.
Green Production Tip # 3 PAPER
Cutting back on paper is easier than you think. Check it out.
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Green Production Tip #2 Post Picture.
Check us out every Monday for a new tip. Today's is on the Post Production picture process and how you can save some money and keep the planet beautiful.
Thanks to the good folks at REDLAB Toronto for their support.
Click on the "HQ" button in the player for a higher quality image.
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And if you're not a producer yet, become one by clicking here.
Happy Earth Day!
In honor of this day reserved for keeping the planet beautiful, and our commitment to making our productions green, I present to you the first video in a series on greening your production.
Get out today and do one thing that will help make the world a little cleaner and in doing so, you'll be helping future generations enjoy the same beautiful planet we do today.
Cheers
Casey
Or download the podcast by clicking here
Now you can produce a movie with Kevin Smith
Here is the video.
Don't forget, that $10 is CANADIAN!! that's like, $8 bucks US!! So sign up today!
Believe me, there is no ONE or BEST way to fund a feature film. There are new and creative solutions to this problem coming out every day. You just have to find out what works best for you.
These steps may help guide you as they have me. Please share your ideas in the comment’s section!
1. GOT TALENT? USE IT. This is a creative business and if you have a hope in hell of being moderately successful, you better be creative. Apply this to your funding methods and you’ll be surprised at how well people respond.
2. DELEGATE. You can’t do everything yourself. Even if you try, it will hurt your efforts.
3. HAVE A SOLID BUSINESS PLAN. No one is simply going to give you the type of money a film requires unless they know you’ve got a plan to make the movie AND distribute it.
4. BE PREPARED TO PITCH . You never know who you’ll wind up talking to so know your sales pitch because you’d be surprised who you’ll be sitting beside in a restaurant, at they gym or on a plane. And pitch someone as aggressively for $100 as you would $100,000. Every penny counts.
5. PERSEVERANCE. This is not a sprint, it’s a marathon and you are going to have to find something that keeps you going. Hopefully it’s your desire to tell the story of your film.
Figure out what works for you, fine tune it and get out there. There is always money for a good project. I hope you find your’s.
Today’s guest blogger is a 20+ year vetran of the sound deparment. i’ve had the pleasure of working him numerous times over the last 3 years.
His post not only gives you an interesting history of this department, but will give you some tips on greening your set, as well as saving money!!!
“Roll Sound.” “Speed! Green!”
With the discussion on greening productions it is important to chime in on the importance of recording from an environmentally sound (so to speak) perspective. Kermit sang, “It’s not easy being green.” I say, “Yes it is and I’m going to show you how.” I’ve been a sound recordist for over 20 years and in that time I have seen this industry grow progressively greener while actually increasing quality, standards and bottom lines.
Making the sound department’s workflow greener has not necessarily been a priority but it is much easier that you might think and the sound department is now among the greenest although we started out as wasteful as any department on the set.
In the bad old days we recorded sound on reels of tape in Nagra machines and the opportunities for green production were very limited. Tapes were made of celluloid backed with metal oxides. Production sound was recorded on these reels and handed off to post where they were transferred to mag stock using more celluloid and oxides. Depending on the scope of the production there could be hundreds and hundreds of reels and as many as 20 audio tracks or more; dialog, atmosphere, sound effects, music, foley, the list goes on. All these tracks consumed resources to be used solely for that project then stored, forever. Since the early-nineties though, the sound department has experienced a sea change that (although this was not the original intent) had the effect of lessening the impact on the environment.
After a brief flirtation with DAT tape recording the industry moved whole-heartedly to recording on hard drives and/or removable flash media. This greatly reduced the consumption of resources in the form of tape. Now, what used to fit onto hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes can be recorded onto and stored on one hard drive. (The first pillar of being environmentally conscious is to REDUCE) This hard drive is submitted to post where it is copied onto a hard drive there for editing (and usually another for backup). The first hard drive is then returned to the recordist the next day to be reused. (The second pillar is RE-USE. We’ll talk about RECYCLE in a bit) The overall cost to the production after the initial investment in hard drives is miniscule compared to working with tape and mag stock (the resolver machine used to transfer the reels to mag stock alone took up half a room and must have cost tens of thousands of dollars) not to mention the cost to store libraries of these tapes forever. Even with the usual industry standard of creating an archive backup copy on DVD the costs of the disks and storage are far less than that incurred in the days of reel and mag stock. A film’s entire sound requirements and output could easily fit onto 50-100 DVDs. It’s usually 1-2 disks total per day of shooting. Look at that stack of DVDs next time you’re in the store. Now imagine that the same output on tape and mag stock could easily take up an entire bookcase in the edit suite and then a warehouse somewhere. You get the picture.
Batteries were the other issue.
Nagra recorders consumed batteries (D cells, remember those?) at an enormous rate. 8 batteries on a short day, usually 16 on a full day and if the day went long (that never happens does it?) you could end up using 24 cells! Way back, this was, as bad as it was, the only power requirement. It was a Nagra and a boom mic. Everything was recorded like that.
Eventually, with the advent of hard drive recorders, the power requirements dropped to the point where manufacturers were able to develop internal, rechargeable batteries or, when possible, the sound recordist ran his gear on a cart with external power. With the advent of multi-track field recorders and reliable wireless mics though, directors and sound recordists were able to wire all their talent up to get cleaner dialog tracks from everybody. This led to a new problem. Wireless mics consume batteries. Lots of them, and battery technology hadn’t progressed with microphone technology. The carbon-zinc or alkaline batteries of the day only lasted a couple of hours. Now the sound recordist was faced with changing batteries on 3-4-5 talent up to 3-4 times a day. You do the math. 15-20 batteries per day or more not counting the slate, comteks, IFB feeds and the various people who always seem to come by the sound cart when the batteries die in their CD players because they know the sound recordist is the biggest battery pimp on set… (but I digress) and you arrive at a lot of batteries in a hurry!
All these batteries just ended up in a landfill leaching their components into the ecosystem forever. For an interesting and slightly scary look at what’s actually inside those little power cells we so casually throw away just Google “battery chemistry”. Batteries used back in the day contained Zinc, Carbon, Manganese dioxide and either Ammonium chloride, Zinc chloride or Potassium hydroxide. Yummy.
So what to do? Those of us who were concerned about this issue, even back then when it wasn’t cool, attempted to use rechargeable batteries. The problem was that the NiCd batteries of the day just didn’t have enough juice to power the high-drain microphones efficiently. You’d get an hour or two, tops. And they’d fail without warning. And they developed a memory so you’d have to be careful how long you ran them. And then you’d have to do a deep discharge and recharge maintenance cycle every once in a while. Who’s got the time to think about all that when you’re trying to record clean sound? The hassles weren’t worth it and most of us switched back to alkalines which (although they were killing the planet) were more reliable and wouldn’t make you eat your day rate when a battery failed during a crucial once-in-a-lifetime-can’t-be-interrupted-for-any-reason scene or make you have to hassle talent every hour or two to swap batteries (can you hear Christian Bale now?).
In the past 5 years or so though, battery technology has progressed to the point where many sound departments (myself included) have made the switch to Lithium ion rechargeable batteries for wireless microphones.
The only knock against rechargeable is that they still have a marginally poorer performance than alkalines but the cost savings and environmental benefits so far outweigh this issue that it is negligible. Just buy another battery so you’ll have a spare and change them slightly more frequently. This is a non-issue IMHO.
OK, that’s all well and good, tree-hugger, but show business is a business first. How does this affect my bottom line? You can’t create a change in attitudes by just saying “We should be greener… we are the world…” you have to put it in terms that decision makers will understand and buy into.
Point taken, let’s analyze going green in simple economic terms:
It’s not even worth the time to seriously try to work out the cost savings of a digital hard-drive-based workflow over an old school tape-based workflow because I don’t know anybody who still does it that way anymore and there are way too many variables for a mere sound monkey like me to wrap his fuzzy head around but considering that an average production would likely use 200 reels at $10 per ($2000 if you could find them) which would easily fit onto a 1 Tb drive for editing and 100 DVDs for archiving ($189 and $22 respectively) not to mention the cost of mag stock, cost of resolver equipment and the storage hassles and I think that issue was settled, financially, a long time ago.
Productions ask the sound department to submit a consumables budget at the beginning of production. I always tell them how much they will spend on batteries (based on purchasing alkalines), then present them the alternative to buy rechargeable with the caveat that at the end of the production I get the batteries. They ALWAYS take the deal (who wouldn’t?). They save money, we don’t have to deal with recycling dead batteries and I get a new set of batteries at the end of the day. Then I give the older ones to the kids for their toys. Everybody wins! I might even let them think it was their idea!
Here’s the math:
Rechargeable Lithium ion batteries vs. One-Use Alkaline:
A rechargeable 9V gets 1000 charge cycles for $25 ($100/4-pack)
A rechargeable AA gets 500 charge cycles for $7 ($28/4-pack)
You can buy AA alkalines for $0.75 each in bulk
$0.75 x 500 = $375 vs. $7 for rechargeable
Assume you have 16 rechargeables ($112)
Lifetime savings $375 x 16 = $6000 – $112 = $5888
Total savings on batteries: $23,600 + $5888 = $29,488
At the end of the day you only have 16 9V and 16 AA batteries to dispose of by recycling vs. 16,000 9V and 8000 AA alkalines. (you DO recycle the dead batteries, don’t you…?) When I switched over to rechargeables I had 120 POUNDS of dead batteries in my garage to recycle. Fortunately there are companies out there who specialize in recycling batteries and will shred them, recycle the scrap metals, neutralize the chemicals and dispose of any waste safely.
Save almost $30K and don’t have to kill the planet? That’s a no-brainer.
Remember: nobody thinks about sound until it’s not there and nobody really thinks about going green until you can show them a tangible benefit.
Here’s the next installment in our Green Production tips.
Saving energy will save you money and with a small production, every penny counts.
Tomorrow we will have a guest Blogger. One of our producers, Amy DeCorte, will be talking about her experiences with the 100 mile diet. Should prove to be very entertaining as well as informative.
As you might be aware, Producers from My Million Dollar Movie get to choose which environmental charities their profits go to. It’s all about each of us doing our part to keep the planet beautiful. We’re not only making a film, but ensuring that the making of our film does as little damage to the environment as possible.
Well this week I bring you the trailer for “NO IMPACT MAN”.
Colin Bevan and his family have undertaken an amazing project and are sharing the results with all of us. Check out the trailer below and follow Colin on his blog here. They prove that we can all make a difference. You can too.
On a side note: the founder of OSCILLOSCOPE Laboratories and THE BEASTIE BOYS, Adam Yauch, was recently diagnosed with cancer. Adam, we’re all rooting for you to pull through. Get well soon.
Ok, so back when I started this project, my first “Celebrity” endorsement came from Times of London correspondent, Chris Ayres. He found me on Myspace after I listed his first book, “War Reporting for Cowards” as one of my recent favorites (I’ve read it twice since). He bought 5 frames and wrote a great little blog piece about what I was doing.
Fast forward, Chris has written a new book. I just finished reading it and I have to say, CHECK IT OUT!
“Death By Leisure” is hilarious, insightful and so self-deprecating that you can’t put it down. A cautionary tale of excess that every member of Gen X & Y can learn from. Chris hit the nail on the head with this one. (On a spoiler side note, he and I both met our significant others through the magic that is Craigslist.)
Pick up a copy, you’ll learn a thing or two about while being thoroughly entertained.
I ripped the following off of his website because I’m not that eloquent in paraphrasing such a superb story.
From the publisher:
Can one man, acting alone, melt the ice caps and bankrupt the global economy? He can try.
All Chris Ayres ever wanted was everything: a supermodel girlfriend, a clifftop bachelor palace, a fleet of chrome-rimmed SUVs. The way he saw it, nothing could stand in his way. Nothing, that is, except for being broke, prematurely bald, and living in a remote sheep-farming village in Northern England.
So he moved to Los Angeles—just in time for a man named Alan Greenspan to invent cheap money. Really, really cheap money. Before he knew it, Ayres had a million-dollar home and a credit-fueled life of leisure and luxury. Not to mention a cushy job as the showbiz correspondent of a London newspaper.
But, uh . . . those idiots you keep hearing about? The ones who brought down the economy by maxing-out on easy cash? The ones who never knew when to stop, who indulged in such mindless self-gratification it would take the combined atmospheres of twenty-five planets just to absorb their carbon emissions? Yep, that was Ayres.
For a while, of course, everything worked out perfectly. For a while, Ayres looked almost like a success. He crashed Michael Jackson’s final, epic birthday bash at Neverland Ranch. He took a supermodel to Hollywood’s biggest gala in a decade. He drank foie gras pina coladas, smeared caviar in strange places, commuted to a thousand-dollar-a-night bunny ranch in Nevada, and bought a TV so large it could beam messages to extraterrestrials. He even met a wife—through an ingenious internet scam.
You could say that Ayres’s excess was almost Gatsbyesque, except that Gatsby never had an adjustable rate, negative-amortization mortgage from a bank that was recently seized by the feds, or a car that was leased from a company that specialized in borrowing depreciation from the Chinese.
But of course none of it could last. Ayres tap-danced around one catastrophe after another, but finally, the apocalypse caught up with him. It’s funny how the 2000s turned out, isn’t it? Or maybe not so funny, now that the banks are going down faster than the oceans are rising and the Great Depression II is here.
Still, as Ayres says, in the long run: there is no long run. So why not enjoy what’s left while you can?
Some of them are obvious or secret or genius or lame. But they came out of the mouths of the experts at last weekend’s “Produced By” Conference during panels devoted to the financing, production, and distribution of independent films and documentaries. Here are the 35 tips compiled by a DHD stringer:
Change the title of your indie film to begin with an “A” or a number to get higher placement on iTunes.
Experiment and try new ways of getting your indie film out there.
Clark Hallren, Managing Director of the Entertainment Industries Group for JP Morgan Securities warned, “Guys it’s tough. Phenomenal events that statistically cannot happen did happen: we’re at an interesting point in the business.
Lisa Nitti of Greenberg Traurig offered a financing checklist and the necessary groundwork that indie producers must complete to have a shot at getting money: a preliminary financing plan, a solid budget and schedule, and an understanding of Hollywood guild requirements.
Foreign pre-sales are not as readily available as in years past.
Established indie producers with a successful track record have a somewhat easier time than newcomers in getting attention from international sales companies.
Genre always makes a difference. Forget costume dramas and spoofs.
Indie producers must have names that mean something to TV worldwide; [before pre-sales can be made] international distributors need time to talk to TV folks who are covering 60%-70% of minimum guarantees,” said Edward Noeltner, President of Cinema Management Group.
The number of banks involved in indie film financing has constricted and greatly impacted funds available. Previous to the financial market meltdown, there were 30 to 35 players. That number has been cut by 2/3s.
Financiers basically want a return on their investment. “I encourage indie producers to understand their film’s audience as much as they can. Understand what you mean when you pitch project. I want to support a film, but I care about capital and return on that capital. I just want to get my money back,” explained banker Hallren.
Risk tolerance by investors is at an all-time low. “We’re all in a back-to-basics environment,” advised Danny Mandel, Managing Director of Newbridge Film Capital. “We won’t return to where we were; now investors are all about preservation of capital.
Mandel predicted that by 2010 indieprods could see more capital available.
In indie producers favor: distributors will always need new product to fill pipelines.
At the Cannes Festival, Mandel met five international distributors who wanted a movie with “Wedding” in the title.
New financing models are having some success, says Danae Ringelmann, Co-Founder of IndieGoGo. She cited documentary producer Robert Greenwald as an example of a new paradigm: Greenwald needed $200,000 to finance his Iraq For Sale. He turned to his substantial email distribution list. Nine days and four emails later, he had raised $276,000. Think of it as “raising money Obama-style,” suggested Ringelmann.
Build a fan base for an indie film before it’s even made.
The disappearance of a number of local and regional film critics is a major concern because it makes it tough to launch an indie movie, noted Lawrence Bender, the Oscar-winning indie producer of Pulp Fiction, An Inconvenient Truth, and the upcoming Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds. So Bender said indie filmmakers must now be content with “tweets and the craziest things,” but not the critical insights of years past.
Roger Corman, the quintessential indie producer (Death Race 2000, Grand Theft Auto, Rock N’ Roll High School) sees the Internet as a “ray of hope” for indie producers.
Corman envisions a day when distributors and theaters are gone and an ASCAP-type organization collects revenues for indie producers.
Concensus advice on how to get an indie film made: never give up.
Finding a documentary subject that’s worth a two to four year commitment comes down to “you know it when you see it,” related Marina Zenovich, Director/Producer/Co-Writer of Roman Polanski: Wanted And Desired, Director/Producer of Who Is Bernard Tapie?, Director/Producer of Independents Day Zenovich.
“Always good to get an idea from a financier,” quipped Davis Guggenheim, Director/Producer of It Might Get Loud, Gracie, and Director/Executive Producer of An Inconvenient Truth. Guggenheim was lucky enough to be pitched by financier Thomas Tull who asked, “Do you like the electric guitar?”
RJ Cutler, Filmmaker and President of Actual Reality Pictures (The September Issue, The War Room) noted that marketing and outreach for every documentary film is something of a riddle, but advised producers to investigate ancillary revenues. He pointed to Morgan Spurlock who had significant returns in the educational marketplace for his feature Super Size Me, which he cut down to an hour and created an accompanying curriculum and guide.
Before an indie film gets to the marketplace, producers must know who the audience is for the film, counseled Dennis Rice, Founder of Visio’ Entertainment. “If you can’t market your film, you shouldn’t make it. If there’s no audience, you can’t get a return on investment.”
Once an indie producer knows who the film’s audience is, reaching them cost effectively is the next hurdle.
There’s no longer a one size fits all model for indie distribution; patterns and windows are changing as are the means of distribution. New strategies include video-on-demand, checkerboard release patterns, digital downloads via iTunes.
“There are at least 10 distribution structures out there, and new companies popping up,” offered Liesl Copland of William Morris Endeavor Entertainment’s Global Finance and Distribution Group. Among the new companies she cited: Big Beach, End Game, and Zip Line. All have been smart about marketing spends, she says.
Indie producers need to move past the old distribution model and learn from experimentation.
Copland advised indie producers to think about own their own consumer habits when making movies in this kind of market “though clarity hasn’t surfaced in new revenue streams”.
Ted Mundorff, CEO of Landmark Theatres, sees video on demand pre-release and then theatrical release is working for some indie titles like Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. (Bubble ignited the trend. But Mundroff worries about cable companies saturating the market with titles.)
David Straus, Co-Founder and CEO of Withoutabox (a division of IMDb.com), implored indie producers to find ways to connect directly to audiences. “You don’t have to throw a ton of money to push a film to an audience; in an ideal world, the audience pulls film to them.”
Aggregating an audience is the lynchpin of this new world order. But is it something that impresses banks enough to lend money? Doubtful.
It’s not all doom and gloom despite the disappearance of studio-backed indie film divisions like Warner Independent.
There is opportunity for indie producers as long as they don’t get hung up on a 35mm theatrical film release. Ira Deutchman, CEO of Emerging Pictures, explained: “With digital, we can begin to play around with release patterns.”
Deutchman also recommended that indie producers “aggregate your communities.” He finds that his network of theaters does well with Jewish, gay-themed and French films as well as those that are spiritual and have “Wedding” in the title.
Well if you’ve been following the news for the last 5 days, you’ve probably seen Billy Bob Thorton’s ‘Blow Up’ on CBC’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi.
Well proof that you should be kind to us Canadians came full circle on the HOLLYWOOD ACTOR/SCREENWRITER and apparently musician.
He was greeted at the intro to his Massey hall show with boos and taunts of “Here comes the gravy”.
Was Booed out of a Baseball game, and then his band “The Boxcutters” (is that a reference to a 911 weapon? how un-appropriate) canceled the rest of their Canadian tour. Apparently some of the members had “The Flu”. More like Canadians were sick of them.
So in the spirit of Jest (and shameless self promotion) I doctored up this video.
Take it with a grain of salt and come be a producer on the film. http://www.mymilliondollarmovie.com
