Scott, do you have any tips on how an unknown writer/director could use this model in their favor? Like you said, Ed Burns has a following already that he can rely on. What about the rest of us?

"The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith" has a new episode (over 2 hours) with Burns on making his low-budget films. Main point is yes, you can get a film in the can for $9000 (or any amount, really...more or less than 9k) but it still costs a good amount to get the film to a "professional" level, with sound design, color correction, and other post services. (So, his 9k film wound up costing $109k.) @Marc, I'd suggest adding the extra step to your endeavor, of using Twitter (and other media) to get to the people that have the audiences. In the Q&A episode, Burns said people tweet him links to their shorts all the time. And if he digs it, he RT's it. Therein, YOU now have an audience of 30k. Tweet out to producers, other filmmakers, entertainment sites. Get help from friends to RT and post on Facebook. Mainly though, you have to have quality content.

It's great that Ed Burns is showing us how he's doing it. I believe that savvy filmmakers have come to this realization and are already mimicking this method. The film festival circuit is no longer the medium to showcase indie films. The costs for fee submissions and marketing is not worth it for a movie budget of $9k. If your film doesn't get picked up, your only choice is self distribution anyway. Self distribution is now easier for a filmmaker. They can sell their films on iTunes and Amazon. Deals can be made with Netflix, VOD and Hulu who are looking for original content. Youtube is also making it so that filmmakers can have some profit sharing through advertising. There are so many platforms to try. Now with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, this low cost marketing tool makes it easier to reach out to more eyeballs. The indie filmmaker has to change their mindset and think beyond just being an artist. A filmmaker needs to think like a studio exec. Even before writing a script, they have to find out who their audience is and find out if they will pay $X dollars to watch their movie. I think the key to this model is having a brand name, whether that be you being the brand and having a lot of followers, or paying money for the brand, ie paying for named talent to appear in the movie.

Marc, that is the rub. If you can create some sort of visible presence via social media, then that network of people who follow you becomes your potential springboard to a wider audience. But then what are you offering people to visit your site and in what format? For example, check out Val's Art Diary. This young woman just celebrated her 5th anniversary of being online and has been featured in numerous national publications including the WSJ. What's her hook? Every Sunday, she posts a vlog where she chats about life, then features a painting [shown being produced in high-speed]. She then sells the art. Val has 54K+ subscribers to her YouTube channel. Takeaway: (1) Have a hook. (2) Be entertaining. (3) Provide content on a consistent basis. That's the turtle approach, slow but steady. How about the hare? Here's an obvious suggestion: Come up with a killer story concept for your movie that has an absolutely-must-forward-link-to-friend feel to it. Paranormal Activity is the perfect example. Or riffing off The Blair Witch Project which was promoted as being real. Due to cost constraints and judging genre fans, I'd say horror and comedy are the two best areas in which to troll of these type of ideas. The thing is per the latter, you only have to succeed with this type of thing once. If you find a killer story concept, do a good job making the movie, put together a strong trailer, and it pops with an audience, then you're surely discovered by Hwood, and you can work with major studios [hopefully].

John, with all due respect, the "professional" level costs are just as arbitrary as the filming costs. You can certainly use a mac and software like adobe after effects, audition and premiere pro, to do all the tasks you mention, and if you can get the services of someone who knows how to use them for free, then you've only paid the upfront licensing/hardware costs, just like for the cameras. A big issue, in my mind, is whether these projects will count for the purposes of getting the appropriate guild card, which has traditionally been the means by which low budget productions have attracted talent (Corman, Andy Sidaris, Lloyd Kaufman, etc...)

Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ was self-distributed, using Netmarket Films simply to ship prints and collect money from theaters. That movie grossed over $600M worldwide. But for an example of a working alternative distribution model, check out the following article: http://www.movieline.com/2011/04/19/how-kevin-smiths-red-state-earned-back-its-budget-six-months-before-release/ imho, for theatrical release, Kevin Smith's model (i.e the traveling showcase) provides a way forward for indie filmmakers, provided they can band together. Back in the 80's, Mike and Spike's Animation Festival toured the world for many years, generating for its filmmakers word of mouth and local press exposure that they would not have otherwise seen.

Again, none of these models (Burns, Gibson, Smith) have anything to do with anything, because they're all based on established filmmakers in the waning days of their careers using name recognition to get people to watch their movies. This means nothing for you and me. And neither does a good Twitter campaign, unless you're the one person in a decade who manages to pull off the 'found footage' gimmick for American audiences. For every Paranormal Activity, there's probably four or five dozen features made with nearly the exact premise by unknowns. Why'd that movie succeed where others didn't? Having watched a ton of those movies (I'm a former festival screener) I'll tell you the difference: Acting. Good acting by talented people who can pull off a wide range of emotions. Because certainly there's nothing daring or original about the film's premise. The difference with Paranormal Activity is that you're not getting sucked out of the story every thirty seconds because of a ridiculous line reading. Since the 'found footage' film can't use camera to accentuate scene beats (because that would look 'directed') it relies primarily on performance to carry the moment-to-moment emotional life of the script. As for finding skilled post-production technicians to do pro-bono work for your $9,000 feature: good luck. It's incredibly insulting to craftspeople (color graders, sound editors/mixers) whose work tends to be extremely undervalued and even unknown by the viewing populace at large to also be asked to not get paid for their work. Grading a feature film is an endeavor that takes a massive amount of time and energy -- the idea of any real, worth-a-damn color grader or sound mixer spotting a director a 'freebie' is ludicrous.

Brendon, where to start?... First of all, your point about acting is spot on. But I'd venture to say that it applies across the entire spectrum of talent needed to make a movie. Secondly, I mentioned these distribution models to illustrate that it is, in fact, possible to get your work distributed via alternative means, and fame really has nothing to do with it. The Kevin Smith article, in particular, highlights the economic model he managed to leverage. HE made a $4M movie, recovered his budget and made a profit. Moreover, it's clear that the business model scales for low budget movies. As to the marketing, I'd agree that twitter by itself isn't enough. Doesn't prevent someone, though, from using it as the basis for an effective guerrilla marketing campaign. High tech startups do this *all the time*. All you need is to be as bold and creative in your marketing as you are in your film, and work intelligently. Third point... yes, if you have a $9k budget, you're not going to get Haskell Wexler to shoot your movie for you. No intent to denigrate the skills of the professionals in this business, but if you need those skills, you have to find a way to get them. How? Basically two ways. Either learn to do those things yourself, or find someone on a filmmaking forum, a friend, or if you're lucky enough to live close to one, the notice board/whatever at a film school. Bear in mind there are two reasons that anyone would work for free: either the project or the people associated with it are cool, or because they need the credit/experience/show reel. FYI, Andy Sidaris used to get his crew to work for scale in his T&A & Guns movies, because they were surrounded by Playboy models all day, and his actresses/actors because they'd get their SAG card. With all due respect to Scott: anything useful that you'd ever want to know about project/time management, bootstrapping a project (that's what making a low budget movie *is*), marketing, etc... can be found in the business section of your local Barnes & Noble. There's nothing special about filmmaking, per se, when it comes to these issues. As I said before, high tech startups deal with them all the time, and as with startups the most important quality to have is audacity.

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