2009 - my year in review

Last year was not a great year for me creatively. Stalled projects, false starts, fumbled paperwork and disillusioned collaborators litter the twelve months gone passed. But that's fine, because that's life. I set out to learn how to be an independent film producer on my own dime so that the only person these mistakes would affect would be me. And that's just how it happened.

Those are my mistakes. I own them. But they don't own me.

No-budget films, as anyone who's made one will tell you, progress at their own pace. Without the funds to channel into manpower, or to relieve yourself of the necessity of staying gainfully employed, time is your only asset - deadlines had to be flexible as I real-world issues demanded my time. The problem was, of course, that I'd set out with some false assumptions that shaped my strategy - a square peg, if you will, that I was trying to force into a round hole. As external pressures caused my personal deadlines to slip more and more, I wasn't giving myself time to reflect - I was just trying to hammer that same peg into the same wrong hole even harder.

Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I was absolutely driving myself insane.

That had to stop.

In July I'd had the foresight to plan a vacation - a visit with my family in Scotland to see in the New Year. The timing couldn't have been more perfect.

I left my work, and my computer, at home, and took a flight away from the pressure. And I didn't squander that time. I read Philip Hodgetts's "The New Now" and Jon Reiss's "Think Outside the Box Office." I reflected on the successes of my peers, particularly the ever inspiring David Baker, whose DVD of his feature "Mission X" I'd seen in December. And I spoke to other working filmmakers, like Kjeld Gogosha-Clark of Working Class Films notoriety, who gave me fresh and very welcome perspective on what's going on outside my own head in the world of independent filmmaking.

When you're too close to your work, too tangled in the problems to see what's causing them, you have to step away. You have to step back in order to see where the problem lies and to consider how to fix them. A short break can give you the time and the distance to assess your difficulties and formulate a new strategy.

By the time I got off the plane at JFK on January 11th I had a new treatment for "There Is No Drinking After Death" and a new set of goals for myself this year - new habits to make a clean, effective break with last year's disappointments. And since I returned I've also come up with a new strategy for the short film project, afilmabout.us. I'll be sharing those details soon. At the risk of overstating this, taking a break made all the difference.

James Joyce said that mistakes are portals to discovery. Well they are if you let them be. 2010 is going to be a great year. I hope you'll share it with me.

a film about who?

When you don't have money but regardless you want to produce something worthwhile, something that speaks to your ambitions of making indelible motion pictures, then the penalty is always time and pure sweat equity. Well, at least it has been in my case.

afilmabout.us is my experiment in visual storytelling - crafting compelling visual narratives within a set of limited circumstances using limited resources, but with an overriding ambition to make unforgettable motion pictures, and in the process become a better storyteller.

When I started this project my goal was to build a team that would produce 8 short films for $2,000 per title in one year. Each film would be a snapshot of who we are as filmmakers at that precise moment - warts and all - so that by the end of the production cycle we would have a road map of our storytelling growth. The company would use equipment owned by the filmmakers, who would also write/direct/edit/score everything themselves. Because my particular trade is post-production, I'd develop scripts that would lean heavily in that direction, to relieve some of the burden of production value during shooting. As supervising producer for the project, my unifying idea behind all these proposed shorts was nothing more than "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

As vague as this notion was I wanted to work with other talented filmmakers to make this happen. I was able to attract the incredible talents of Peter Haas, a working editor I had the good fortune to go to college with, Larry McGovern, an engineer by trade and a stellar grip and AD, and Ron Moreno, as hard-working an actor as anyone could want to meet. The four of us made up the core filmmaking team, each bringing a passion and commitment this kind of no-budget endeavor really requires.

In some post-KLF fit of whimsy, I believed that if the same people were involved in all the projects that were developed under the afilmabout.us banner, then our true, undiluted collective creative voice would emerge irresistibly from that body of work... maybe not discernible close-up, but step back a ways and you'll see it.

And this is still probably true, but in the last eighteen months the "we can do it" bravado has given way to a more sober reality about our initial targets. My personal goal was to grow as an independent producer - learn the mechanics of "proper" film production, which I initially believed specifically meant working with SAG actors.

What I actually learned from my producing experience was (1) the scripts I was writing were too ambitious for the scope of production within my immediate means, (2) not every person who displays emphatic enthusiasm when volunteering their services just for credit and experience are going to pull through for you, so you better have a back-up plan, and (3) you simply can't ever, ever give up.

I know now, for example, how much it will realistically cost to produce the 11 page screenplay called "Footcandles." I also know that the sci-fi scripts we've been developing are a tad out of our reach at the moment - but that won't always be the case. These days I write scripts intended to be affordable and compelling (to me, anyway) and that can be shot efficiently with the tools that we've already developed - the proof of that being the more contained but no less dramatically ambitious short script currently entitled "On The Table."

"Undone," the web series that started it all, is in the last leg of post-production. I'll tell the story of that long, long production cycle some other time. But as the final stages approach it's tempting to frame that as an ending, but that's not the case. As it was always intended to be - it's a beginning.

2010 will be a very different year for afilmabout.us

...this was all intended to be a preamble to a discussion about another short film anthology project I had the good fortune to see, a project called "Wonder..." - but that'll have to wait till next time. So until then... good night, and good luck.