In early 2020, my wife took a job at a regenerative farm at the foot of the Rockies. A regenerative farm, if you’re not familiar, is a farm that stresses harmony with nature to improve the health of the soil. 

I went with her — not as part of the farm crew, but as a writer and filmmaker trying to find my way through a script I’d been struggling to finish. The place changed the way I thought about food, land, labor, and belief — and eventually, that change turned into The Threshing, a psychological horror film set on a farm much like the one where the idea was born.

Three years later, we returned to another working farm, Esoterra Culinary Garden, to shoot the film. From the very beginning, we knew we didn’t want to fake it. The goal was to embed the production inside a functioning ecosystem, and that meant working around its rhythms rather than imposing our own.

The farm’s owner, Mark DeRespinis, was incredibly generous. He not only gave us access to the land, but also helped us shape our schedule around the farm’s operational flow. Wednesdays and Thursdays were peak harvest days, so we kept our footprint light then. Fridays were delivery days to restaurants, so we tried to pack in as much as possible while the crew was off-field.

To keep from disrupting the crew’s workflow, we borrowed shade tents from a local brewery and set up our production headquarters and crafty beneath a row of trees, tucked out of the way. Mark also shared extra vegetables with our crew, helping us stretch our food budget and build a deeper connection to the place we were filming.

In a key sequence in the film, we see the lead character learning to trellis peas, surrounded by farm staff. The man teaching her in that scene was the actual farmer who taught our actor how to do it in real life.

Throughout the shoot, Esoterra’s farm staff worked with our cast, showing them how to speak confidently about vegetables and execute the kind of subtle physical actions—like harvesting greens or tying off rows—that can’t be convincingly faked. The result is a kind of lived-in realism that audiences may not consciously clock, but will  definitely feel.

We shot during the rainiest June on record in Colorado, which meant we were dodging storms almost every day. There were no surprise frosts, but the rain came down nearly every afternoon like clockwork. It created mud, rescheduling headaches, and — honestly — some really beautiful atmosphere on camera.

Because the farm was active during daylight hours, we scheduled many of our shoots for the late afternoon and overnight, which gave the film’s night sequences a real-world stillness and eerie authenticity we could never have created on a soundstage.

The Threshing: Small Support, Big Impact

We were fortunate to receive support from Boulder County’s Agricultural Land Lease Program, which helped make our location access possible. We also partnered with Longmont Public Media, whose equipment lending program provided critical tools for getting the film made. 

And through the MovieMaker Production Services program, we gained insight and infrastructure that helped us stay nimble on a microbudget.

The Threshing is a horror film, but the horror grows from soil we knew well. It’s about how systems — ecological, ideological, communal — can seem nurturing until they tip into control. That idea was born on a farm, and it needed to be shot on a farm.

My advice to anyone considering a location-based film like this? Don’t fight the place — let it shape the movie. Respect the rhythms. Eat the vegetables. Don’t schedule a big scene on a harvest day.

And don’t be surprised when your lead actor becomes the best radish picker on set.

The Threshing premiered in October at SXSW Sydney. We’re very proud to support the film through MovieMaker Production Services.

Main image: Esoterra Culinary owner Mark DeRespinis, with The Threshing director Sean Mannion and gaffer Corey Millikin. Photo by Hilla Eden, courtesy of The Threshing

"Poreless" is the story of a fabulous, queer Muslim beauty entrepreneur who must figure out how to compete in a Shark Tank-like product pitch contest after suffering an untimely allergic reaction. You can watch it above via Switchboard Magazine. And in the piece below, director Harris Doran, who wrote the short with Fawzia Mirza, recounts the making of the short film.

​​“Bad news. Amazon said the fuchsia chairs would be delivered tomorrow but now they won’t be coming until two days after we shoot that scene.” These were the words I heard my production designer Rashi Jain say when she had to let me down about my vision for the opening scene with fuchsia chairs in a white space. Rashi and I held hands and dove into the internet until 3am trying to find pink chairs in NYC, which we found quickly somehow did not exist. But she figured out getting pink into the throw pillows, before magically changing the white curtains to blue. 

I’m not really sure how she was able to create the constant magic she did, but this was the experience of the entire shoot — starting with a vision and then trusting your collaborators to take ownership of their part of the vision.

Let me take it back. 

It all started with Akbar Hamid, He had been a success in PR, helping to tell other people’s stories, while secretly wanting to be an actor and tell stories himself. He had a vision and revealed this to Fawzia Mirza, a successful filmmaker who I have been friends with for years. She knew that I have coached actors over the years and she suggested Akbar and I work together. 

The first time I met Akbar, I was struck by how he was a total fashion plate — handsome, impeccably dressed, and with a bright personality. I gave him some sides to read and he instantly leaped off the page. A natural with great comedic timing. I was like, “you could be the Pakistani Dan Levy,” and he smiled joyfully. 

Because Akbar has such a unique and delightful personality, I wanted to avoid spoiling that with him getting too in his head with formal acting lessons, so I said — “You are ready. You should just start. You should make a short film."

He and Fawzia decided to make a short film together, but Akbar kept suggesting very heavy dramas. And Fawzia was like, “you’re funny. Lead with funny.” Akbar ended up suggesting an idea that happened to be an idea that I already wrote, and I said, “I will write something else for you guys to make together.”

This led to Fawzia and I brainstorming. I'd had success with my short film "F^¢K '€M R!GHT B@¢K" that premiered at Sundance a few years ago, which was inspired by the real life of DDm, the lead actor, and I thought that approach might be a good one here.

Fawzia and I both have similar silly senses of humor so we started riffing — beauty, fashion, identity. Fawzia had an idea of identical gay Muslim triplets, and I love classic farce, so I suggested he be hiding something — which is how the allergic rash plot came about.

It was fun, but I thought it needed to be about something deeper to ground the comedy and I suggested the scarcity that people of color sometimes feel about getting that one “diversity slot.” 

Akbar, who had never produced a movie before, got to work — and if you want to see a human set a goal and achieve it, spend five minutes with him.

Fawzia and I had decided that whoever was available to direct at the time would direct, and as she was on a whirlwind tour of her fantastic feature Queen of My Dreams, I was the one available to direct.

We brought on the wonderful Rabia Sultana to help produce. 

In order to nail the specific comedic tone, we needed the visuals support it. We all pooled our resources to bring on the best people we could. Rabia brought Rashi as well as the amazing Bill Kirstein to shoot the film, who was just coming off being the cinematographer of the Mean Girls musical movie. He used camera movement create the heightened tone. Allison Calhoun brought the high fashion looks and Andrew Sotomayor the chic makeup. 

We needed a cast that would be able to nail the comedic tone: Diane Guerrero through Akbar, Parvesh Cheena though Fawzia, Allyce Beasely, Lucy Owen, Sophie von Haselberg through me, Henry Russell Bergstein, our casting director, brought on Gia Crovatin, and Sureni Weerasekera was the only person we auditioned. She was so perfect that Fawzia and I offered her the role in the room. 

One of the main issues we faced was how to do the “glow up” where the “Poreless” product really works — and so we had a group meeting including Bill, Andrew, and Jeff Kyle, who was our colorist and also did the VFX.

We went through all kinds of ideas like the camera diving into one of Akbar’s pores and seeing some kind of cartoon inside the pore, but we realized we don’t have the budget for those shenanigans, so went with a push in, where when you when pull out the person’s face would be glowing — Andrew added shimmer and lashes, and Jeff gave an extra glow in post.

Another issue was the face rash. Andrew did all sorts of tests. I was advised that the rash might be time consuming if it melts off and has to be reapplied. Fawzia and I had already put masks in the script, so I ended up adding masks throughout a chunk of the movie to avoid the makeup melt mess. This ended up being an asset to the film as there are a zillion masks! 

It’s been a wild wide. And has been a pleasure to see audiences falling for Akbar the way Fawzia and I hoped they would. We ended up having our NY premiere at Tribeca and now here we are Oscar qualified. It started with Akbar having a dream and then one by one each person has added to that dream to make one big silly (with something to say) movie.

Main image: Akbar Hamid in "Poreless." Switchboard Magazine.

Linklater is at a creative peak, nearly 40 years into a career that started with the feature film Slacker (1990), which helped launch the indie film boom of the ‘90s. He continued with 1993’s Dazed and Confused, a story of mid-’70s Baby Busters driving and partying, populated by some of Gen X’s best actors. His Before trilogy with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke tracked a couple from youth through middle age, and he shot Boyhood, perhaps his masterpiece, over 12 years, earning a Best Picture nomination and a Best Actress Oscar for Patricia Arquette. 

All of Linklater’s films are characterized by a lived-in sense of just hanging out that can feel casual in the moment and profound in memory. As relaxing as his films can be to watch, he releases them at a strikingly steady pace, and aims to go all in, every time. Nothing is harder than making things look easy. Perhaps the deceptive simplicity of his films explains the Academy’s baffling failure to give him an Oscar. 

He has released four films in the last two years: They include last year’s sexy noir Hit Man, and “Hometown Prison,” a segment of the documentary series God Save Texas, about his home state, where he has lived throughout his career.

This fall he has two films about the creative process: Blue Moon stars Hawke as lyricist Lorenz Hart on the opening night of Oklahoma!, and Nouvelle Vague — out on Netflix today — recreates the making of Breathless.

The 1960 film by one of Linklater’s strongest cinematic influences, Jean-Luc Godard, helped popularize the French New Wave, and taught Linklater and others that films can be deeply personal. 

As prolific as he is, Linklater, like Godard in Nouvelle Vague, believes he started late. He went into filmmaking, as one of the founders of the Austin film scene, with a sense that he was making up for lost time.

And though he is looking back, he’s also very much looking ahead: He is shooting one of his current projects, a film adaptation of the 1981 Stephen Sondheim and George Furth musical Merrily We Roll Along, over 20 years.—M.M.

Richard Linklater’s 15 Rules of Moviemaking

1. Gotta be all in on cinema. I can’t think of a director of any stature or longevity that wasn’t a true film freak — well, maybe David Lynch. There are jobs in the industry, but writing and directing is beyond that – it’s got to be your whole life. If watching films, writing them, shooting them, editing them, reading about them, isn’t what you’d rather be doing than anything else in the world — if there’s something else you find more fun or rewarding or you’re looking forward to — then go do that, because you don’t have the unconditional love that’ll be required of you to get through all the many levels of challenges.

2. Build a thorough cinematic foundation under yourself. This should just come naturally as an extension of your passion for cinema, but it’s not a mistake to be conscious and intentional in your development.   Even if you’ve graduated from film school, you still don’t know much, and lack experience. Get ready to start putting in the years: Set your life up where you can be engaged with cinema for the most amount of your waking hours as possible. Again, if spending your entire life watching movies, writing, shooting, editing, and reading everything relevant to what you love sounds like a limited life, and you need to be doing other things, go do those things. Let’s face it – there’s a high incidence of neurodivergency in the director ranks. If you don’t have that all-encompassing deep-dive obsession, you can probably have a really nice life, and probably make more money, in one of the many other areas of the film world.

3. Gain experience by cleansing your system and discovering your voice. Once I seriously picked up a camera, in those first five years I did lots of shorts, maybe 20, and one featurelength film, mainly as technical exercises, not to express myself that much. I knew my cinematic ideas were so far ahead of my technical abilities. I was just trying to catch up a little and submerge myself in the physical and technical, not the dramatic. I’d do entire films for just one reason, like lighting, or camera movement, or as an editing exercise, trying on different suits, imitating things just to get them out of my system, knowing I’d eventually find what worked for me. It’s of course good to be able to do every element of a film, every technical position, just so you’re aware of the challenges and specific skills required. Down the road, this experience and knowledge will make you a better collaborator with others, and an appreciator of those more gifted than yourself in various capacities.

Richard Linklater on Acting

4. To be a good actor’s director, you should become an actor yourself. I knew I wasn’t a natural performer and had a distinct “behind-the-camera” personality, but I also sensed that what I wanted to do and express would be very performance-based. It scared the hell out of me, but I got into acting classes, which developmentally was probably my biggest leap. So I just incorporated this into my cinematic life. I’d be in evening acting classes, doing scene work with others, getting picked apart and challenged by a wonderful teacher who created a secure place to try things and often fail. I got over a certain shyness and found it a very creative and expressive space – truly fun. I read everything I could get my hands on about acting and started to develop my own ideas about film acting. But acting classes matured me as a person, helped me enormously as a writer, gave me a language to be a better communicator. I even somehow ended up going on a few auditions, which gave me a sensitivity to that process, having seen it from the actor’s perspective. I can draw a direct line from this period in my life to the methods I use in working with actors today.  

5. People want direct communication. Before that unnerving experience of having a crew waiting on you, wondering what the hell is going on, I had worked primarily alone on everything I’d done. I had to really learn how to talk with everyone and communicate my ideas. It’s easy to be vague when you’re still in process, but you have to know your film so well and how you’re going to make it so that you can answer as many of those questions as correctly as possible. In Day for Night, Truffaut says, “I answer questions all day long. Sometimes I even know the answer.” Even if you’ve written a very detailed script that describes everything happening in front of the camera clearly, constructing that in the real world will necessitate an enormous amount of questions and choices. You’ll drive everyone crazy and be disliked if you can’t give clear answers to people who are just trying to help you. A day of definitive answers to questions (“What’s in the shot? Where can we park the trucks?”) that’s followed by an occasional changing of your mind is much more respected than nothing but vague and contingent answers. Be a decisive leader.  

6. You’ve just got to jump in when you know the time is right. Only you will know when you’re ready to make your first big film. It’s usually much later than you think it should have been. The world hasn’t lined up and rewarded your passion like you thought it would… you’re behind, but hungry. But when the planets finally are lining up, you gotta go – no more consensus-building or asking permission or paying dues.  Jump.

7. You’re going to be a different person by the end, and you’ll have learned so much that you didn’t know you didn’t know. Such it is and will always be. The only thing that will carry you through your lack of experience, insecurity, and the day-to-day precariousness of it all is the pure enthusiasm and passion for your film and the joy that comes with creating it.  

8. Trust yourself on casting. You’re the storyteller here, you’re going to be the one working with the actors, so it’s up to you to decide if this actor is the embodiment of what you have in mind. Can’t lie to yourself here – it’s got to be a kind of love-at-first-sight situation where something tells you they’re perfect. Everyone will be expressing ideas, suggesting folks, and the casting director’s job is to put people in front of you and be your partner in this. But you have to go with your gut instinct, even if a consensus has formed around someone else.

9. There’s a perfect balance to strive for between the technical and the performance side of filmmaking. I want everyone to feel supported and able to do their best work, but I want the set to be most conducive to the actors, for them not to feel overrun by the technical apparatus, however complicated.

Richard Linklater on Money

10. Don’t think in careerist terms. Take it one film at a time. Like Bergman says, approach every film like it is your last, as if there won’t be another – you have to put it all on the table now. You live and die with your latest film – there’s nothing else. Never make a film because you think it will lead you somewhere else or open up other opportunities – it’ll likely do the opposite. Tarkovsky talks eloquently about how if you ever step off your true path (and only you can know what that is), for even one film, it’ll take you a number of films to find your way back. 

11. You can’t prep and rehearse enough. I love the process, how the best film slowly emerges. In my collaborations, I’ve got my ear to the ground, ready for anything that could be an improvement, but the next good idea I’m most searching for, looking forward to, is my own — but you have to put yourself in a position to have it. The more prepared you are, the more relaxed you and your set can be. I think that’s a better environment for people to work in.

12. Be good with money. On one hand money is bullshit, the most alienating thing in the world. It shouldn’t be a motivator or steer your decisions at all. But you have to try to regulate your life so you don’t have to do anything just for money. But there are these things called budgets, and the professional responsibilities that go with them. Work hard and don’t go over budget. Be responsible, frugal, and fair. Looking back, and I don’t remember being conflicted about it at all at the time, but after Dazed, I remember turning down various studio deals that guaranteed me $1 million for the development of a few films that may or may not have ever even gotten made, in favor of one-tenth of that amount but a green light and final cut. That was on Before Sunrise, which was just the film I knew I needed to do next.

13. Stay in shape, physically and mentally. If you’re in it for the long run, you can’t have any bad habits that debilitate or tax your system -— life’s tough enough just naturally. Your own energy and functioning brain are all you have. I try to live like an athlete who’s in the off season — you don’t have to be full-on obsessive about your health, just know you’ll be paying for and having to make up for anything too excessive. And you shouldn’t have much of a social life while in production – when you’re not on set you should be either continually preparing to make the best film possible or getting as much sleep as you possibly can.

14. Don’t make a film where you don’t feel for sure you are the best director for it — maybe the only one who knows how to pull it off.

Arrogant maybe, and technically wrong probably, but it’s a necessary headspace to be working from.

15. Timing is important. You have to be able to sense if it’s the right time to be making a certain film.  Sometimes it isn’t… backburner isn’t a death sentence – things come back around.  Master the art of the balancing of urgency and patience. There’s a time when the opportunity is there to go forward, and a time when it isn’t — to pull back and wait. You have to have good instincts on this – forcing something into the world at the wrong time can be costly and a waste of time. Listen to what the film gods are telling you.

Nouvelle Vague is now in theaters and streaming on Netflix.

Main image: Richard Linklater, photographed by Huges Lawson-Body for Netflix.

The critic-turned-filmmaker's 2014 debut, Beyond Clueless, studies the influence of teen movies. His 2016 Paint Drying, a depiction of drying paint that he made as a protest against censorship, became a Letterboxd sensation when fans began using their reviews of the film to share life updates. His 2021 The Afterlight, consisting of scenes of dead actors from old films, exists on a single print that degrades with each screening.

The new Zodiac Killer Project deconstructs true-crime documentaries by peeling back the tricks and tropes that convince us of a person’s guilt — it’s filled with what he calls “evocative B-roll” of crime-scene tape, a single footprint, blood pooling, and  guilty buildings. In the piece below, he explains how the film, which premiered at Sundance in January, came to be.—M.M. 

Charlie Shackleton on His Zodiac Killer Project and True Crime Tropes

My first and only attempt to make a true crime documentary came to an abrupt halt in 2022, when negotiations fell through for the rights to a book called The Silenced Badge: The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up. A memoir by former California Highway Patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty, the book details his lifelong quest to bring the infamous killer — or at least, the author’s preferred suspect — to justice.

The grisly facts of the case are all in the public domain, but without the rights to Lafferty’s book, it simply wasn’t practical to bring his story to the screen, filled as it is with dramatic details exclusive to his text. And so I resolved to lick my wounds and forget about the project, consigning it to a folder on my laptop already brimming with other films which — for lack of funding, enthusiasm, or basic coherence — never came to be.

Instead, I found myself lastingly preoccupied by the unrealised prospect, playing out imagined sequences in my head, and before long, reciting them to friends in various pubs around London. Soon, the mere question, “How have you been?” would reliably set me down a path to describing, in granular detail, the climactic set-piece from a true crime documentary that I would never get to make.

Eventually, it occurred to me that this strange habit of describing a film that doesn’t exist could itself be an interesting subject for film. If it could sustain a feature runtime, I reasoned, the result would be a mirror image of the film I never got to make: a real-time recitation of its every narrative shift and emotional beat—minus, of course, all the proprietary plot details I was legally prohibited from mentioning. In other words, the scaffolding of a true crime doc, with none of the actual content.

This was the genesis of my new film Zodiac Killer Project, which, for better or worse, is essentially 92 minutes of me describing a true crime documentary in pedantic detail. 

That the film would be led by my voice seemed clear from the outset. I had, after all, been unwittingly rehearsing the narration over third and fourth pints for months. 

What was less clear was what would actually be on screen while I was yapping away. What does the absence of a film actually look like?

I thought back to a research trip I had taken to Vallejo, the small Bay Area city in which the Zodiac Killer’s crimes were centered. Having read about the place in countless true crime books and news articles, and seen it on screen in David Fincher’s 2007 film on the case, I arrived with a preemptive feeling of unease. 

One of the true crime genre’s most ingrained received wisdoms is that the places where such macabre crimes take place are indelibly marked by them, and I expected to feel a chill in the air.

Instead, I found a place like any other, with hundreds of intersecting communities vying to define its identity, and thousands of inhabitants going about their lives with little concern for events that took place there some five decades prior. On the ride in from the airport, my cab driver told me he’d never heard of the Zodiac Killer, before launching delightedly into a laundry list of the various rappers to at some point call Vallejo home.

In collaboration with my cinematographer, Xenia Patricia, this formed the basis of the film’s visual approach: not an attempt to conjure the sinister atmosphere of a true crime documentary, but a confrontation with the humdrum reality behind such contrivances. 

As carefree pedestrians strolled through “sinister” alleyways, and car stereos blared in “deserted” parking lots, we simply shot what was there: the everyday blank canvas onto which the true crime genre paints its version of the truth.

Zodiac Killer Project arrives in theaters November 21, from Music Box Films.

Main image: Charlie Shackleton, director of Zodiac Killer Project

The prevailing wisdom is this: don’t do it. 

“It’s insane,” they’ll say.  

“A waste of money and time and resources,” they’ll whisper. 

Don’t make that short film. Don’t go to film festivals. Don’t pour your heart and soul into a bite sized piece of cinema when you could do anything else.

It is, admittedly, in all estimation, a very bad idea.

But when faced with all the reasons not to make a short, and there are many, I did the damn thing anyway — and my journey, taking a small idea scribbled on a scrap of paper in my bedroom, to screens all over the world, from Beloit to Bulgaria, might have been the best decision of my career. Little did I think that this little-movie-that-could would land on the Oscar long-list and end up being considered for the Academy Award. 

In the spring of last year I flew my cast and some crew to Waco, Texas to film “The Heart of Texas,” a 15-minute live action short film about Janie May, an aspiring singer-songwriter stuck in the paycheck-to-paycheck grind who has a life-changing encounter on her way to a career-making opportunity that forces her to examine the cost of her American dream at the expense of another’s. If that seems a bit vague, it is, as there is a central twist that I would hate to spoil here. 

Production was a challenge, from the blazing Texas sun, to the classic not-enough-time-not-enoung-money scenario, to a myriad of other challenges. But we pulled it together and got it in the can in three quick days. Battered, burnt, bruised, and broke I flew home wondering if I had made a huge mistake. Maybe they were right, maybe you shouldn’t make short films. 

I’ll admit, there is a strong case against it. In this day and age you’re up against shortening attention spans, indifferent executives, and the whims of the almighty algorithm. You can’t really sell a short film. Sure, maybe you’ll get it onto a streamer, or onto an airline headrest playlist, but you’re not going to make your money back, not really.

It’s expensive to make and market a short film, and even more time and money goes into sharing it at festivals. Once you factor in travel, hotels, food, car rentals, printing postcards, and posters, festivals can add up quickly, not to mention the opportunity cost of missing out on other work. Shorts can often disappoint or fall short (apologies for the pun) in other ways for emerging filmmakers. 

More often than not, shorts don’t become the features they were hoping to incubate into or they don’t move the needle of a budding filmmaker's career, even with prestigious film festival laurels pinned to the poster. Heck, sometimes it’s even a challenge to get your friends and family to drive out to a screening, so much so SNL did a great sketch about it, or to sit still long enough at their computer to get to the good part (we have the Vimeo receipts, we know when you digitally duck out early), which is, perfectly understandable. Your audience owes you nothing. I believe if you’re going to ask someone for 15 minutes of their time, you better earn it, buster. 

So why do it? Why put yourself through the pain, peril, stress, and strain of making a short, especially if, with today’s tools, you could have just made a feature? Honestly, I don’t know. All I can say is that my journey has opened the door to a relentless bloom of opportunity, discovery, friendship, and wonder I never would have experienced had I not said yes. 

So, I humbly submit to you, dear reader, my flawed and subjective: Six Reasons to Make a Short Film

Short Films are Do-able

Maybe you don’t have the time, budget, or resources to bite off a feature film. Maybe you only have a weekend, a two-person crew, or 1 location. Make the short. It’s better to have a completed short film than a non-existent feature film.  And yes, you can make micro-budget features, but those inevitably take time to shoot and edit. A short can be done, it’s doable, so do it. 

Short Films Build Muscle

Filmmaking is a sport. You need to have the strength and stamina to do it. Shorts help you get there. When filming a short you have to do all, or most, of the things you would have to do on a feature, but on a smaller scale. You might learn how to pull a permit, or use a new piece of gear. You get to be on set working with actors and crew members. You have to problem solve, make creative compromises, and manage resources. Making shorts is like going to the gym for filmmakers. No pain, no gain. 

You Get To Go to Film Festivals

This is a big one. Going to festivals is a massive opportunity for emerging and established filmmakers.

First, there are people you’ll meet: fellow filmmakers, audiences, producers, writers, cinematographers, people who own cameras or work at rental houses, people who want to work on your film, people who don't owe you anything and will give you real feedback.

I met several collaborators at film festivals that I continue to work with today. The people who travel to festivals to screen their film are your people: the true, dyed-in-the-wool filmmakers. 

Also Read: ‘Rat King’ Reflects a Chilliwack, BC Film Scene That Takes Young Filmmakers Seriously

There are also the films: You get to the good, bad, ugly, inspiring. Festivals are the place to see what your peers are making, what’s winning, what’s not working. You’ll discover actors you want to work with, shots you want to emulate, music you want to Spotify later. This is the place where you will see something new and different, sitting in the dark, cell phone off, with an audience that has no idea what’s coming up on the screen next. 

Then, there’s the unforeseen opportunities: you’ll be touring and learning about different locations all over the world. There are contests, grants, trophies, prizes, gift bags. You might walk home with some funding for your next movie, or a tote bag you can use everyday for grocery shopping that starts a conversation with another filmmaker while you’re picking out avocados, and boom — you’re off to the races. There is no telling what unknown benefit will find you between the screenings. Which leads us to…

Short Films Build Your Reputation 

All the greats started making short films: Scorsese with "The Big Shave," Spielberg with "Amblin"... heck, some still make shorts. Wes Anderson just won his first Oscar for a short film this year. Yorgos Lanthimos put out a short film called "Nimic" in 2019. Shorts are an extension of your brand — a visual business card. As you share your short you will learn how to talk about it to audiences, colleagues, the press, and fellow filmmakers. Your shorts become breadcrumbs that people can follow to see where you are headed as an artist and where you’ve been. 

Short Films Set The Groundwork for Future Projects

Shorts are a proving ground for a future feature, sure, but more than that they are a place to figure out what works, both in terms of your creative voice and your creative team. By making your own shorts, and (listen up) working on other peoples shorts, you will meet the people that will eventually help you make that next thing.

Every good thing I’ve achieved in my career started with making something. By making something you build the foundation for what's next. 

Short Films Are Fun as Hell

If nothing else, shorts are fun to make, they are allowed to be fun to make. They are not a commercial product built to make back their investment. The creative stakes can be high, but the financial stakes can be low. Making something creative with your friends or family can teach you something about your voice, what you want to say and how you want to say it. You may learn you never want to make a movie again, and that’s valuable too. In the end we are all going to die, so why not spend some time making art. 

There you have it. A short list of reasons to make that short film. There are many, many more reasons why you should do it, but I’ll leave those for you to discover and share on your own. 

Making 'The Heart of Texas'

And look, my film "The Heart of Texas," is living proof. The film was written in a moment of inspiration and then sat idle in a drawer until I made a different short called “How to End a Conversation.” That film was shot in one day during the pandemic with very little resources and a couple friends. We did it because it was do-able. We had to book locations, adhere to covid safety protocols, and have a tight production plan.

When it came to post, we cut and re-cut the picture, we re-wrote the film with a new voiceover, and composed an original score — in other words, we built the muscle. Then we got to go to film festivals, like the Waco Independent Film Festival, where I met Lauren Noll — a writer, director, and actress with a fantastic short called “Honor.” I loved her short, she loved mine. We were both there building our reputation and our network in the film community.

We got to talking, and together we pulled out the script for "The Heart of Texas," re-wrote it together, sent it in to the Waco Indie Film Fest Screenplay Competition, and won a grant — an unforeseen opportunity that we made the most of. We assembled a cast and crew of friends, professionals, and many local talents in Texas. We shot the film and started building the groundwork for a feature film version of the short.

And the cycle continues. Now we are wrapping up our festival run after playing at Hollyshorts, In The Palace, Sidewalk, Mammoth, Lighthouse, Beverly Hills, and many others. And we were in consideration for Best Live Action Short Film at this year’s Academy Awards. While I’m hard at work on the feature version of "The Heart of Texas," I’ll tell you this, I’m already working on my next short as well.

So sure, novels sell, poems don’t, but the world needs poetry and poems are worth writing. Go write the script, get the crew together, make the short. I promise you won’t regret it… too much. 

"The Heart of Texas" plays Friday as part of the Coronado Island Film's Creative Crossroads program. The festival is one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee.

Main Image: Lauren Noll in "The Heart of Texas." Courtesy of the film.

I never intended for my first film as a writer-director to be a Christmas movie. The goal was to sell the script and make a little money for the next project. 

But when the production company that offered to purchase it ghosted me, I got annoyed and decided that if they weren’t going to make it, I would find a way.

That’s when my now-producing partner, Mindy Raymond, jumped on board. Mindy is a fierce advocate for Texas production through her work with the Texas Media Production Alliance. Together, we produced, for under $500,000, the film A Christmas In New Hope, a heartwarming holiday film starring Katrina Bowden, Ryan Cooper, and child actor Mia Armstrong, who lives with Down syndrome. My dear friend Adrianne Palicki (Friday Night Lights) popped in for a supporting role. 

We loved the experience, but the last thing we wanted was to be pigeonholed into the Christmas genre space. So in our last week of principal photography, I pitched an idea to Mindy: a micro-budget horror film we could shoot entirely on my six-acre property.

I’d been developing a horror script with my cousin, co-writer Zachary Raber, loosely based on true events that occurred during our childhood. The result was Texas Cult House, a terrifying story about a group of teenagers whose rebellious night in an abandoned home of a former cult leader spirals into a deadly fight for survival. This movie was our chance to prove we were more than just holiday cheer. 

We wrapped A Christmas In New Hope in March of 2023 and filmed Texas Cult House four months later on a $50,000 budget. We wanted to prove what we could do with a micro-budget. Our goal was to maximize the potential for a high return on investment. With Mindy at the helm as producer, I knew we could make it a success.

A Christmas Crew for a Horror Film

The core of our strategy was to re-engage the crew from our Christmas movie. This is how we began to build our "village." We had great working chemistry, and that was our most valuable asset. Unable to pay full-day rates, we offered lower pay with backend points to entice production heads to join the project. Everyone bought in, and the rapport we had built during the Christmas film gave us a huge head start, as we were all already in sync.

With a skeleton crew and a tight budget, we had to get creative. My husband, Van Tracy, handled the practical effects out of our home. As an on-camera acting teacher, I had access to teen actors, so we cast some of my former students. This project also allowed us to reunite with key talent. 

Adrianne Palicki was eager to get in on the grassroots project, so I wrote a role for her in the script. We also reunited with Ryan Cooper, who had played the hunky neighbor in our Christmas movie. This time, he was anything but hunky, transforming into the terrifying cult leader and joining us as a producer on the film. Just like the crew, we had to be scrappy with every aspect of production. Curtis Heath (Peter Pan & Wendy) had created the upbeat score for our Christmas movie, and I wanted to hire him again — but our budget didn't allow us to use him in the same capacity. 

He kindly offered to provide unlicensed stems from his work, which I stitched together to create our haunting score for Texas Cult House, along with some of his original melodies for key moments in the film.

Texas Cult House and a Truck Full of Meat

We leaned on our local Austin community in a big way. Local restaurants and coffee shops donated meals and day-old pastries to keep our cast and crew fueled.

Then came one of those wild, serendipitous moments. While Mindy was traveling to a meeting, a large cooler filled with frozen meat, including ribs, sausages, and more, fell off a truck right in front of her colleagues. When the question was asked, “Does anyone need 60 pounds of meat?” Mindy’s hand shot up. The meat was brought to set, and a local restaurant volunteered to cook the bounty for our crew. It was the perfect, wild example of how our entire community, our village, rallied to make this movie happen.

What started as an experiment to keep our careers from getting stuck in a snow globe turned into unexpected success. “Texas Cult House” premiered on opening night at the Austin Film Festival, where it caught the attention of The Coven Sales Agency, known for hits like Terrifier 2 and 3.

This success is validating, but for us it's about the business model. People can look down on lower-budget projects, but we are focused on creating the highest possible ROI. A Christmas In New Hope, is already profitable, sending dividends to investors and paying actor residuals. We applied that same lean, strategic approach to Texas Cult House, proving that a $50,000 film can have premium production value and secure worldwide distribution. 

Our proven track record is what's fueling our next feature. While our next project is a significantly higher budget, we are still eager to keep the ROI in mind for investors. Texas Cult House led to an incredible partnership with The Coven for our next feature, 1989, a thriller-horror I wrote that is set in a Texas commune. It tells a sister-wife story of women coming together to take control from a male-dominated cult. 

We couldn’t be more thrilled to continue our journey and prove that we’re far more than one-genre filmmakers. We're producers who build sustainable careers for our community right here in Texas.

Texas Cult House is now on Amazon Prime Video and is coming soon to Tubi. 

Main image: Rolling Reels co-founders Julia Barnett, left, and Mindy Raymond.

It’s 4 a.m., the morning before principal photography begins on my feature film, Violent Ends. Crisp wafts of Ozark Mountain air brush against my cheek from a window too old to fully close. As a rain lets up, moonlight slips through the clouds—bright enough to cast strange shadows across tattered curtains hanging from a piece of resin-speckled pine someone nailed to the wall.

I haven’t slept. I’m floating between dream and anxiety. This is the day—the one I’ve been chasing my entire life. In a few hours, I’ll step on set as writer-director of a real movie, with a real budget and a cast of actors who’ve been collectively working longer than I’ve been alive. Fear shoots up my spine in waves of heat. The imposter voice appears. They’ll see through you, it hisses. They’ll smell fear, fraudulence. You’re a cinephilic huckster who’s conned his way here!

Through bleary eyes, the folds of the curtains begin to look like Roy Scheider. He’s squinting at me in gold-rimmed glasses, cigarette dangling from his lips.

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat, kid.”

“What do you mean?” I whisper.

My alarm shrieks. I slap the phone until it quiets. When I look back, Roy’s gone.

Minutes later, I’m driving through the Ozarks, thinking about Roy’s warning—wondering if the people waiting on set are the mother of all sharks ready to eat me alive. As dread creeps in, Aerosmith comes on the radio. Joe Perry’s guitar growls. Steven Tyler belts out, “Some sweathog mama with a face like a gent,” and for some reason, I feel confident. I got this.

The Shark and the Boat of Violent Ends

I pull into basecamp—poof, confidence gone. There’s a small army and trucks, so many trucks! My first film cost the price of a used Honda Civic with a crew the size of a basketball team. There are a hundred people here. I spot an eighteen-wheeler by a gas pump and don’t even ask what it’s for. Remember the fraud thing? Yeah. I tell myself: just make it to lunch and it’s a win. I might not be Rocky Balboa, but maybe I’m Jake LaMotta: “You never got me down, Violent Ends. You never got me down.”

Our first scene has Kate Burton, best known for Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, playing a gritty small-town deputy—a role she’s always wanted. At craft services, I ask if Kate’s here.

“Running late,” someone says.

“No worries.”

I immediately start worrying.

My shot list is insane—too many setups, not enough daylight. Before I spiral, my production designer, Christian Snell, drags me to the Ford Bronco we bought and converted into a sheriff’s cruiser. Turns out, when you buy cars on Facebook for an indie film, you get… character.

“The transmission’s a little wonky,” Christian says. “You’ve gotta roll into second to get her moving. Oh—and there’s a small oil leak.”

“Is it safe?”

“Sure, but the cabin fills with smoke if you run it too long.”

“How long’s too long?”

He thinks. “Two takes, maybe.”

It’s 40 degrees out, and I’m sweating like it’s August.

It’s not even 8 a.m., and Jen Gerber, my 1st AD, already has a thousand-yard stare. When she says, “Kate’s having some issues with wardrobe,” I know it needs attention.

I bolt toward the hair and makeup trailers, lined up like a traveling carnival. As I stomp through, PAs glance at me and scatter like pigeons. Probably not the calm, confident energy I meant to project. Maybe I should’ve sent Jen. Too late.

Kate bursts from her trailer, two coffees deep and buzzing. We cast over Zoom, so this is our first face-to-face. She’s polite but I can feel the nerves beneath. I get it—she joined only three days ago after the SAG strike scrambled our schedule. She’s still learning lines, and the wardrobe isn’t helping.

My costume designer, Kristen Kopp, presents options: a beige shirt, a striped shirt, a brown one. Everyone stares at me. In my head: shirts. In my heart: trust. This is the moment I realize what directing actually is—making decisions.

I point to the striped one. “This is it.”

Kate studies it for a beat, then nods. “Yeah. I like that one. Let’s go with that.”

Crisis averted. One down.

Back on set, my DP, Elijah Guess, asks what lens I want just as Jen warns we’ve got four minutes to roll or I lose shots. My producers, Undine Buka and Vincent Sieber, appear, checking if I’m about to implode. I am.

I fake calm. “We’re good,” I say, then turn to Elijah. “Let’s start on the forty, move to the eighty.”

He nods. Jen exhales. For the first time all morning, things start to click.

When Kate arrives, the Bronco coughs to life. Cameras roll. Jen eyes me. I nod and she calls, “Action!”

As Kate rumbles in that beat-up Bronco straight toward camera, time slows. The chaos, the noise, the doubt—it all fades away. Suddenly it hits me: 

The cast and crew aren’t the shark, you idiot. They’re the boat.

They’re what carries me, keeps me afloat, gets me to shore. All I have to do is be the captain. I am Roy. I am looking death in the eyes and gleefully saying, “Smile, you son of a bitch!”

“Cut!” I yell. Silence. Everyone looks at me. For the first time all day, I feel it—clarity. I’m right where I’m supposed to be.

That night, back in my little apartment with the crooked window and the sap-stained pine holding up those cheap curtains, I collapse through the door, exhausted but alive. I made it through Day One. Rocky would be proud.

I want to tell Roy everything—that I understand now. That I’m not a fraud. That I was born for this. But Roy’s gone. It was just a dream.

I’m not alone though. I’ve got a cast and crew who believe in Violent Ends, and that’s everything.

And tomorrow, we roll again.

Violent Ends is now in theaters, from IFC Films.

Main image: Billy Magnussen in Violent Ends, written and directed by John-Michael Powell. IFC Films.

We were nearly finished hanging paper tablecloths from a menagerie of fishing line and gaff tape when we heard the first CLANG!

As far as we knew, my producer and I were alone in an auto body shop. A garbage can must have tipped over, or perhaps the wind lifted some distant sheet metal. It was after-hours and the place was dark, save for a few flickering overhead fluorescents. We took the momentary fright as a supernatural encouragement, given our goal: to create an apparition.

Our ghost would come alive on camera, with the help of fans and a little puppeteering done by our co-director, Carly Jakins. As I stepped back to look at our billowing sheets, their peaks evoking eerie white hoods, the team and I knew we had nailed our visual conceit. That moment raised my confidence that the story we were telling was meant to be a documentary short film.

That film, "Rat Rod," is a portrait of a family friend named Jorge Ramirez and his experiences immigrating from Mexico City to rural Utah in the 1990s. Jorge is a mechanic who got his start building stunt bicycles, and ultimately found his passion in building cars. He’s an accomplished builder of “rat rods,” Frankenstein cars built from scratch by harvesting parts from other vehicles.

As a fellow immigrant myself, I found in Jorge’s process an embodiment of the American promise of “e pluribus unum” — out of many, one.

The Backtory of 'Rat Rod'

Jorge and my father are longtime friends, and over the years he shared stories about life as a young immigrant in America. I was struck not by the stories themselves, traumatic and affecting as they were, but rather the hauntedness with which Jorge told his life’s story. This tone, more than the content of his stories, demanded further investigation. I wanted to explore the specter of trauma left lingering and unresolved.

The pursuit of that feeling was a goal I believed would be best met through a short film. Whenever I begin a project, I ask a simple a question: “What medium will best serve this story?” Far too often, I believe filmmakers default to telling stories through film even though the story could be better explored in another artistic form. They do not explicitly seek ways that film might specifically illuminate a subject.

Film has the capacity to delve deep into our interior experience and memories, but it shares that quality with the written word. More unique is film’s ability to capture presence. It is a time-based medium which allows us to be present with a person and their thoughts. It fosters a temporal connection unbound by proximity; in a film, we can share time and experiences with a distant, or even a departed, person.

Even more remarkably, that shared time can be derived from the complexities of memory or the fleeting recollections of dreams. I believe the documentary short film is the corner of the medium where these strengths are best exemplified, yet under explored.

The short film is often regarded as a practical exercise, or demonstration that a filmmaker may be skilled enough make a feature film. This approach tends to condense the structures and interests of a feature-length project into the body of a short, a miniaturizing process. This approach, though not necessarily detrimental in terms of raw information delivery, often results in a shallow but broad experience with a subject. The short begs to go deep and narrow.

I make no claim to having mastered this art, but I strive to incorporate these ideas into my own work. In the case of "Rat Rod," I questioned my approach until I reached a satisfying conclusion. I understood that I could share Jorge’s stories in any number of mediums, but I could only traverse his haunted memories in a short documentary.

Our task was not made easy simply because we determined a short film was the right medium for Jorge. He is not an actor, and we couldn’t expect him to express the nuances of his feelings through a performance. After discussions with Jorge about how he experiences his memories, we settled on a visual gambit: Jorge’s trauma would be externalized via a ghostly apparition.

We could borrow from the horror genre (John Carpenter’s Christine became a core influence) and lean into the history of practical effects to dramatize our spooky doings.

We felt that this idea — depicting an apparition onscreen to represent trauma — would wear thin over the course of a feature-length film, and it certainly wouldn’t translate to written or audio storytelling. We moved forward, emboldened that a short documentary was still the best medium for this story.

Soon, we were hanging sheets from a ceiling, hoping for the best. When the apparition finally took shape, and the “real” ghosts haunting Jorge’s shop gave us their blessing, we knew we were capturing something special. In the months since we have finished the film, audiences experiencing Jorge’s story have shared an enthusiasm for and connection with this core visual metaphor.

To our great relief, our idea worked. We are hopeful that even more viewers will see the film through our partnership with Switchboard Magazine and our Academy Award campaign.

As filmmakers, we can’t control how our work will be received, but we are empowered to discern the right medium for each message. A terrific story can lose its very essence if executed in an improper form. In the case of Rat Rod, we feel that our careful process was worth its time and energy. It resulted in a work that we believe could only exist as a short film.

Main image: "Rat Rod," courtesy of Switchboard Magazine.

As a field producer on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, I was tasked with the improbable. Every week I’d wait for scripts to come in, often on Thursday or Friday, and would then have 48 to 72 hours to produce, shoot, and edit segments to be ready for air on Sunday. When you successfully work in that environment, it creates a false sense of security. That anything you want to make is achievable. 

So when I set out to write and direct " The Traveler," a Victorian ghost story shot in New York City with over 60 VFX shots, pyrotechnics, and a shoestring budget, I had no idea what I was in for — and how far HBO’s money had helped me make miracles.

Location is Everything (That Went Wrong)

Set in the late 1800s, The Traveler follows a widow who is haunted by a supernatural presence while grieving in her remote farmhouse. Not only did the film require period-accurate exteriors and rural backdrop, but also a living room with a functioning fireplace, an office, a kitchen, and the ability to connect all three in a "oner."

To make matters worse, we couldn’t afford to lodge the cast and crew, which meant keeping our location within a 90-minute radius of New York City.

Like all screenwriters writing creative checks your production can’t cash, I never considered finding this location would pose such a problem. Growing up in New England, I knew lots of people with old houses, so naturally, our first approach was to film at the homes of friends and family.

Immediately that became an issue. No sane person lives in an unrenovated colonial home equipped with brick ovens, untreated floorboards, and zero electrical wiring. Wall plugs can be concealed, but my aunt's tacky Moroccan backsplash is much harder for VFX to paint out (sorry, Deb).

History Nerds Are Tough Landlords

Our next brilliant idea was to film at historic houses around New York, as they’d maintain their period aesthetic with the added bonus of being fully furnished. Given our budget, we couldn’t afford to dress an entire space, so leaning on existing furnishing and props became essential.

I contacted the film commissions for Nassau County, the Hudson Valley, and New Jersey for recommendations, while scouring Google for options outside their radar. At first, it seemed promising, with several locations excited at the prospect of filming a movie… until they learned what that actually meant.

See, historic houses are run by people who love history in a deeply passionate, almost obsessive way. While scouting one property, a curator told me the house contained a 300-year-old Bible that could not be moved, touched, or even looked at. He canceled the rest of the scout right then and there.

Museums are all about preservation and control, while film sets are unpredictable. Dozens of bodies, working in small spaces, and operating heavy equipment on fast timelines can create chaos, which can be a tough gap to bridge. For five years, we struck out with every historic site between Freehold, New Jersey, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

The Staten Island Miracle

Out of options, and a fast approaching our shooting window, I pleaded with a location manager friend (shout out to Brad Reichel) for help. He mentioned a place he’d visited with his kids: Historic Richmond Town on Staten Island.

As luck would have it, they were looking to re-enter the film world to generate new revenue, and decided a self-funded short film was the perfect place to start.

The layout wasn’t what I’d written. The house sat just 32 feet from one of Staten Island’s busiest streets, with more than a thousand cars passing every hour. Worse, the fireplace, the heart of the story, wasn’t functional.

But we had to make it work. 

The Fire That Wasn’t There

Our production designer, Amber Unkle, loved the space. Our DP, Fletcher Wolfe, was less enthused about the stream of light from cars whipping past the windows — about 17 a minute. To solve the problem, we rented a 30-foot stage backdrop and placed it outside the house. It doubled as quick tenting for night shoots, and during day interiors, we softened and slightly overexposed the window light to disguise the abstract pattern on the fabric.

But the biggest challenge was the inoperable fireplace. Our lead character sits by the fire for most of the film — lighting it, tending it, and ultimately burning her belongings in it.

As production neared, everyone wanted to know how we’d handle it. I put on my producer hat and did what any good producer would: I lied. I said we’d build a replica fireplace later, deciding those were problems for another day.

Amber and our VFX supervisor, Chris King, scanned the fireplace and took detailed camera notes. Unfortunately, once we wrapped, we’d burned through our budget, and our SFX coordinator had moved on.

So I took it home — literally. I pitched my stepfather, a retired firefighter, on the idea of building the fireplace in his work shed. Ever the craftsman, he agreed.

Four months later, on Easter weekend, I went with Fletcher and producers Meghan-Michele German and Matt Ruscio to my mother’s house in New Hampshire, where we rebuilt the fireplace and shot all the fire inserts. Those shots cut seamlessly into The Traveler, and the producer's lie turned into truth!

The Lesson

Naivety is one of the greatest strengths we have as indie filmmakers. It shields us from doubt and gives us the courage to chase the impossible. You won’t always know how you’ll pull something off — and that’s okay.

Just stay creative, stay stubborn, and when in doubt, put your producer hat on and say: “Those are problems for another day.”

"The Traveler" plays Sunday at FilmQuest, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee.

Main image: Actress Natalie Knepp, who plays Hannah in "The Traveler." Courtesy of the filmmakers.

Here’s the problem: it takes too damn long to make movies.

By the time a nonfiction story gets reported, optioned, developed, and maybe — if it’s lucky — turned into a film or series, years have passed. Too many great stories stall in that gap between discovery and screen. And the ones that do make it through? For far too long, they’ve come from a narrow perspective, resulting in a lack of diversity in both the stories told and the voices amplified.

We started Switchboard Magazine to close that gap. The idea was simple: create a pipeline that works faster, more effectively, and gets stories in front of the people who can move them forward. But also — and this is crucial — do it in a way that values what the stories are, respects ownership, pays the artists who do the work, and ensures a wider, richer range of voices is heard.

The Problem With 'Good Intentions'

One of our board members put it bluntly: “You can have the highest ideals, but if the model doesn’t work, people will dismiss it as a feel-good experiment, not a viable path to success.” That stuck with me.

Sometimes in Hollywood, ethics and success are treated as opposites — as if valuing artists and their work is antithetical to making money. At Switchboard, we wanted to prove the opposite: that you can build a profitable model and get artists paid for their work. You can do good and succeed.

Also Read: Making a Movie? MovieMaker Production Services Can Double Your Budget

That’s why we structured Switchboard around a 50/50 profit share with our writers and filmmakers. We also make sure contributors know what they’re signing onto (this is non-fiction, these are real people!).

Before a story runs, we secure appearance releases for documentary adaptations. And life rights for scripted adaptations — not as empty paperwork, but as real agreements that ensure the people whose lives inspire these stories have a financial stake if a narrative film or series moves forward. That way, there’s a clear path from page to screen — and no one wakes up a year later surprised their life is on the market. Transparency is built in from the start.

Why Switchboard Magazine Stories Travel

Using our experience as filmmakers, we treat every piece of nonfiction like potential IP. Our articles are written like films — arcs, characters, tension — and the shorts we acquire are character-driven and market-ready. The goal is to give each story the best chance to live beyond the page or the festival circuit.

Already, this approach is working. We’ve optioned multiple pieces to industry leaders and seen real interest in the stories we’re surfacing. Not because we compromise, but because we package stories to move faster, more clearly, and more ethically through the system.

The Collective Experiment

This fall, we put one of our models into action in a concrete way. Switchboard acquired four shorts in consideration for the 2026 Academy Awards — “Freeman Vines,” “Poreless,” “Rat Rod” and “Saving Superman.”

But even with this expansion, the films remain squarely aligned with Switchboard’s mission: all rooted in true stories or lived experiences, and all carrying themes that stand for something larger than themselves.

For us, the films are more than releases — they’re proofs of concept. Just like our written features, they serve as IP that can be carried forward into new forms, whether as series, features, or other adaptations. By pairing festival-proven shorts with Switchboard’s infrastructure, we’re showing how nonfiction stories can move faster, more transparently, and with artists at the center.

Instead of sending them out to battle each other in an overcrowded awards season, we mounted a collective campaign. Together, these shorts have played more than 100 festivals worldwide, winning jury and audience prizes at Tribeca, HotDocs, Palm Springs, Indy Shorts, and more. Rather than competing for scraps of attention, the four teams are lifting each other up — pooling resources, sharing visibility, and pushing as one.

We’re also releasing them across Switchboard’s YouTube channel, leaning into a digital-first model designed to democratize access, broaden visibility, and reach audiences well beyond traditional distribution.

The goal isn’t just to prove that collaboration is nice. It’s to prove that this pipeline — from article or short film to visibility, awards, adaptation — actually works.

Lessons for Other Filmmakers

Building Switchboard has reinforced some lessons I think are useful for any filmmaker:

• Speed matters. Don’t let your story sit in limbo. Build pipelines that move it quickly to the right eyes.
• Think like an owner. Your work isn’t just content. It’s IP. Protect it and plan for adaptation from the start.
• Ethics and profit aren’t enemies. A fair model can also be a successful one.
• Collaboration scales. When artists share resources instead of hoarding them, everyone gains.

The Future We See

The future of nonfiction film and IP won’t be dictated solely by studios or streamers. It will come from models that democratize ownership, move stories through faster pipelines, and center collaboration instead of competition.

At Switchboard, we say every story is a signal waiting to be amplified. Our job is to catch that signal and ensure the people who create it still have their hand on the dial.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: Ideals don’t have to be at odds with outcomes. We can build a system where artists are valued, stories move quickly, and success is shared. And if that works — it’s not just a feel-good experiment. It’s a new model.

You can learn more about Switchboard Magazine here.

Main image: Scenes from the Switchboard Magazine shorts “Freeman Vines,” “Poreless,” “Rat Rod” and “Saving Superman.”

Love, Brooklyn, is a testament to the idea that the most beautiful things are created when you let go of your idea of perfection and embrace the messy, human reality of making something with someone you believe in. 

Making my first feature film, Love, Brooklyn, was an exercise in trust and a crash course in communication. I wanted to create a movie with a calm, inviting rhythm — a deliberate counterpoint to the relentless tension so often found on screen.

The moment I met my Director of Photography, Martim Vian, I knew we were kindred spirits—we were fast friends. We shared a passion for honest storytelling, and both wanted to create a film about Black people that felt familiar and also unlike anything made before.

There was just one fundamental problem we ran into during our initial pre-production: we spoke completely different creative languages. 

I’m the kind of director who draws my shot lists. My notebooks are filled with sketched characters in frames. I speak in poetic metaphors, describing a scene as feeling like a “step on an exposed nail that sits in a pool of honey.”

Martim, on the other hand, is a lighting genius who works from a place of artistic, technical talk. His language is one of lumens and color temperatures.

To complicate matters, I was making a film with mostly Black characters, and he was a white man who hadn’t shot a film like this before. The challenge wasn’t just about bridging a communication gap; it was about finding a shared visual language that could honor a lived experience that wasn’t his own. 

Our miscommunications happened in the pre-production phase. I’d point to an example of coloring and lighting that I wanted to avoid and say, “I do not want them to look muddy or lost in darkness, but I still very much want to see the darkness of their skin.” Martim would nod patiently and ask about soft keys and I’d only think of music.

We were both trying, but our words felt like they would bounce off a wall. The initial spark of our creative connection was now being tested by the high-stakes pressure of an impending shoot. It was in those moments that I learned a vital, practical lesson for any filmmaker: your ego is a luxury you cannot afford. 

How a Break in Love, Brooklyn Led to a Breakthrough for Rachael Abigail Holder

The solution came not from one single, grand idea, but from an unexpected shutdown. Nicole Beharie was my first pick to play one of the lead roles. She was a huge get and had a schedule change with her Apple series, The Morning Show, that inevitably also changed our production schedule.

It was more than worth it — she is who we wanted for the part. With filming on hold, the pressure was off. Martim and I stopped trying to translate each other’s words directly and just talked. I made several decks with picture references of what I wanted the warmth and feel to look like, and Martim responded in kind, with his own decks, to see if he understood.

It was in that pause that we committed to a visual language that had a set of strict rules to create my vision. One of them being a refusal to intrude on the characters' space; we were observing, not invading. I also wanted to see Brooklyn in every shot and not rely on anamorphic filming or cutaways to the city to have it be a character in our story. By the time we were ready to prep the movie again, we were perfectly in sync, and our on-set collaboration was seamless. 

The results were transformative. The camera became a participant in the city, always keeping Brooklyn visible, allowing the surroundings to feel like a co-star rather than a backdrop. Together, we didn't just light our movie’s spaces; we imbued them with a gentle warmth that feels like a memory, creating a visual language of its own that makes a modern-day story feel both intimately familiar and freshly seen. 

In the end, our collaboration was a microcosm of the film itself. We didn’t just make a movie; we built a bridge. We created a unique visual language from two different creative dialects and found that when you get past the technical talk and the metaphors, what truly matters is trust.

Love, Brooklyn, is a testament to the idea that some stories are not about Herculean journeys, but about the profound weight of everyday existence. It is a work that asserts that softness isn't slight, and that art can be a defiant act of healing.

Love, Brooklyn is now in theaters, from Greenwich Entertainment.

Main image: Andre Holland and Nicole Beharie in Love, Brooklyn. Greenwich Entertainment.

I’ve seen a lot of Indigenous filmmakers explore healing through their work, but I find myself exploring rage. I’m from Kahnawake, near Montreal, where my people, the Kanienkehaka, have fought colonialism for 500 years. During a well-known stand-off in 1990, my family was protesting plans to expand a golf course onto Native land when my sister, then 14, was bayoneted in the chest by a Canadian soldier, while protecting me. I was four. 

As a mixed race, white-passing Kanienkehaka woman, I never believed I would be cast to play an Indigenous person. Growing up, I was disillusioned: I never saw any Indigenous people on screen who didn’t have two braids and a heavy broken accent, either drunk or mystical. Here I was, blue-eyed and light-skinned, so I figured I better focus on being the best performer possible and building a diverse resume.

I knew I wanted to make my own things eventually. I had dabbled in filmmaking when I made my 2012 short “The Smoke Shack,” with Big Soul Productions, about my time working in a cigarette store on Kahnawake. Then I auditioned for the late Jeff Barnaby’s short film called “The Colony,” which was looking for a dark-skinned, curvy Native woman. 

I went in extremely prepared, and knocked the scene out of the park. He cast me, and being young and insecure about my identity, I asked if he wanted me to darken my red hair — “you know, to ‘look more native.’” 

He said, “If anything, dye it even more red. You’re a fuckin’ Indian and that’s it.” 

That was my first taste of a Native person being at the helm of a project and making the decisions. Real recognizing real. Fuck yeah. It also lit a fire in me to make my own projects. 

I remember the day things changed. I was smoking a cigarette with some crew while filming Ted Geoghegan’s 2017 film Mohawk. It was a particularly grueling shoot all over the woods in upper New York state. I thought, I just want to make a film with friends in one location, do some stunts and practical FX, kill people, and have some damn fun. Inspired by Home Alone, Shaun of the Dead and the Canadian classic Clearcut, I wanted to make the kind of fun ride I saw as a teenager, for this generation. I craved seeing a smart, relatable, kick-ass Indigenous female lead who I could cheer on, and a soundtrack I could rock out to. 

Kaniehtiio Horn on the Bringing Seeds to the Screen

The pandemic gave me time to think, and put my thoughts into a script that became Seeds. I developed the story and found the tone, then showed it to executives, taking in their feedback. 

A producer, Leonard Farlinger, liked the idea of a story about a Native woman returning to her roots and finding out that the company she works for is taking advantage of her people, again. We took an early draft to the Frontieres film market in Montreal, as part of the Fantasia Film Festival, and met with executives, financiers and producers who weighed in on the script. We worked on it and took it to Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office, which became our first investor. The fact that I was Native was a positive in a time when the world was finally recognizing who we are as a culture.

I drew on some of my own lived experiences of leaving and returning to the rez, and the idea of figuring out what it means to be an Indigenous person in this day and age, but remaining tied to our past and to the land we were put here to care for.

I wanted to make an Indigenous film that relates to everyone. Having the antagonist go after money seemed like a cliché to me, and I wanted something that was precious to my people in particular. That’s how I landed on the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash. They are seeds, or sustenance. The company in the film tries to control these seeds, and the metaphor just made sense. I never intended to write an anti-colonial, genre-bending, food sustainability film. I just followed my creative instincts and where they led me organically.

My character, Ziggy, carries strength inside of her, and rage passed down from centuries of intergenerational trauma due to colonialism. My advice to other filmmakers in the independent world is to channel your rage, find your voice, bring your perspective to your project and don’t shy away from being who you are: Trans, Native, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Mexican, White, whatever. All of you have a voice that needs to be heard. Make it so. But it’s okay to laugh.

Some of it is luck. Around the time I was developing this film, I booked the role of the Deer Lady in Reservation Dogs, which felt serendipitous. She is a being who was hurt but now has a mission, and I felt a deep connection to her. I have realized over my lifetime that a lot of rage exists inside me: Being a woman, and on top of that, Indigenous, there are a lot of things on the daily that just piss me off. I used to inflict my anger on myself by abusing drugs and alcohol, but now I have this medium to explore it in a healthy way. To become myself.

In addition to Leonard, I found another lovely, eccentric producer, Jenn Jonas, who allowed me to explore, who encouraged me to get/be weird. I didn’t want to direct the film, but the producers, along with my friend Jacob Tierney, assured me that my voice mattered, and that I could do it. So we made this crazy film with practical FX, stunts and, I hope, comedy. Seeds mixes humor with a dark and grounded visual style, and I wanted to let the audience know that they are allowed to laugh from the get-go.

Leonard helped me get more financiers on board, including Telefilm, Ontario Creates and the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund. Without them we never would have been able to make this film. Some of this government money was in the form of grants we didn’t have to pay back, which limited our need for private equity. 

Also Read: With ‘kamikaze,’ Ray Smiling Makes Sure Nobody’s Bored

Additionally, we are fortunate that the Canadian film industry protects us, making sure we have a home on TV. We were able to secure a Canadian distributor, Level. They helped us secure a linear cable and VOD life in Canada for some money right away.

Directing yourself in a feature is strange and arduous, but I had many people looking out for me, including my cinematographer, Jonathan Cliff, who realized my vision beyond what I hoped for. After production came editing, with Lindsay Allikas, a woman who seemed to just get it. She picked up what I was trying to put down and amplified my voice while perfecting the structure of the film.

We were fortunate enough to raise enough money to make this a union film, but we shot quickly and efficiently in 18 days. That allowed everyone to make a good wage, but for the film to still be reasonably priced. 

My advice to anyone making a film is to look for and find any advantage, be open to collaboration, and have faith in yourself. Find your voice, trust your instincts, and be creative in financing — but never give up your voice.

Seeds arrives in theaters  August 22 from Indican Pictures.

Main image: Seeds writer, director and star Kaniehtiio Horn in Seeds. Courtesy of Indican Pictures.

I suppose Somnium has been growing in me my entire life. When I was a kid, my dad made a sensory deprivation chamber out of fiberglass in our garage so he could seal it shut and float into the abyss during his nightly meditations.

And as my parents wore out their yard sale copy of The Secret book on tape, I learned the law of attraction. But how could I, a 22-year-old with no industry connections and no money, manifest getting to make my million-dollar first film about, well, manifesting? 

Racheal Cain and the Countdown to Somnium

2012. I boarded my one-way flight to Los Angeles with a messy new script and a solid plan: I’d crash on my friend’s futon in the corner of his dining room (yes — dining room — the living room had already been claimed by an aspiring actor) until I figured things out. My first love had just broken my heart and all I knew was I needed to get to L.A. 

I secured my first room with a door (!) in 2013. I bartended nights and spent afternoons splicing that script into index cards which lived, in various arrangements, on my bedroom wall for the next year. 

In 2014, I took my first paid gig from a promising ad on Craigslist. I should’ve picked up on the producer’s cryptic emphasis on “bikini movie” when he called to offer me the job, but my vision of raking in $200/day working poolside on a real film clouded my judgment. I spent the following weekend handing out ham and cheese sandwiches to an entirely naked cast.

The producer wanted me to work full time. I politely declined. Instead, I created an Instagram account for my film-to-be. I knew stating my intention would help to hold me accountable. There’s nothing like the risk of public humiliation to keep yourself on track. 

To my surprise, people started to follow along and, by 2015, I was connecting with creatives all over. A message from Lance Kuhns, along with a link to his cinematography reel, landed in my inbox one afternoon and I knew he was the one for the job. 

In 2016, with my little team growing, I started working at the coffee bar of an established film studio. When I wasn’t steaming soy cappuccinos for celebrities, I applied for grants and labs. I was mid-latte art when I found out I’d been selected for the Big Vision Empty Wallet “Kickstart Diversity” incubator program in NYC, a weekend intensive which culminated in a big pitch opportunity. 

I pitched the project and, by the end of 2017, managed to secure the first small portion of financing. But, by now, Lance and I were getting restless. Along with this little bit of financing, the film studio I worked for, which also had a branch in Atlanta, offered us a generous discount on gear.  

The script had always blended present day and flashbacks and, while I knew it was still finding itself, the flashbacks felt complete. I was excited to weave in the textures of small-town aesthetics and the real passage of time, and figured we could use the footage to cut together a sizzle reel. The Big Vision producers connected me with casting director Bess Fifer, and I soon had a list of actors in my inbox. Chloë Levine sat right at the top. My good friend and filmmaker, Xander Robin, had met Peter Vack at a film festival and sent me his email. We scheduled the shoot for March of 2018 in Georgia.

Meanwhile, 2,000 miles from where we’d soon be filming, I began the hunt for locations on Airbnb.com. I flipped endlessly through hundreds of listing photos across the entire state of Georgia, eyeing both exteriors and interiors (so many patterns of wallpaper), and managed to unearth some real gems. 

But even better than the homes I found were the Airbnb hosts who would rise to become the real heroes of our flashbacks shoot. When I needed a music-venue location, one Airbnb host just so happened to be the brother of the frontman of popular indie rock band, Twin Peaks, who also just so happened to be in town performing at the Georgia Theatre in Athens during our shoot. 

He made some calls and not only got us the location for free, but convinced the band’s manager to allow us to film them during sound check. And when a parking-lot location fell through hours before we were supposed to shoot it, another Airbnb host made some calls and secured us the most incredible abandoned cotton-mill exterior for free. The fee for my favorite location of the entire shoot, a beautiful 19th  century farmhouse, cost me $100 for the entire day. God bless the South.

Upon returning to L.A., Lance and I knew we had captured something special. And it’s a good thing, because I’d soon find myself clinging tightly to that something special through some serious turbulence. 

I spent the rest of 2018 working as my own assistant editor while prepping for a massive $60,000 Kickstarter campaign. Though we barely survived said Kickstarter, by the end of the year, we had somehow hit our goal. We had enough to keep moving. I hired my friend (and former futon lender) Kent Lamm to shape the flashbacks into a 25-minute storyline and to edit the sizzle. 

But by far the best thing to come from the Kickstarter was a three-sentence email from a mysterious writer/director/producer named Maria Allred. She concluded her message: “I am curious, what is your budget?” By now, I had received many messages like this, but her brevity stood out. I agreed to meet her for tea and left knowing she was someone I needed as a producer. With Maria’s fervor, we secured nearly half the financing by the end of 2019 and began making offers for the remaining roles. 

2020. N/A.

I felt an invisible clock ticking through all of 2021. Attaching actors started to feel like adding to a wobbly house of cards that could collapse at any moment. Any of our investors could pull out and it would all come crumbling down. Still halfway from our original budget, Maria and I knew we had to get scrappy. I opened up the script and started hacking. I figured, “if I’m not excited to shoot it, why should anyone be excited to watch it?” I deleted scenes. Condensed locations. Cut supporting characters… 

And, hey, you know what’s really cheap? Black. 

Entire sequences which originally called for elaborate set design would now live in an inky black nothingness. (I figured whatever was lurking in a viewer’s mind was probably creepier than anything I could put onscreen anyway.) 

With the new script and bare-bones budget, we were ready. 

The Los Angeles shoot was no easy feat. Week 1, a PA crashed the grip truck into a tree. Week 2, the picture car refused to start. Week 3, we had to cut and pause every five minutes after discovering a highly active train track steps away from our primary location. (Also, 99% sure it was haunted.) But Chloë, Peter, Lance and I finally reunited and, by mid-2022, we had the film in the can. 

So how did I, a 22-year-year-old with no industry connections and no money, manifest getting to make my million-dollar first film? 

Truth is, I think it manifested itself. I just had to learn to get out of the damn way. Sure, I was there to piece it together for 12 years. But it wasn’t until I allowed myself to let go of everything I thought it should be and instead just listen, that Somnium finally revealed itself from that dark and mysterious void. 

Somnium debuts in Los Angeles on Friday and arrives in New York City on September 6, from Yellow Veil Pictures. Beginning September 9, audiences across North America will be able to rent or own Somnium on Digital HD, including Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.

If the trend right now is bells and whistles, tentpoles, AI, and Big IP… Break Room flies a small, unembellished flag for simplicity. Break Room is about censored and uncensored pain. It’s about how you never know what someone is going through… and that’s it. And that’s enough. 

There’s a freedom in short-film-making that I love. There’s no set structure, no box office pressure, and no need (usually) to return on investment. There’s not far to fall. So why not give yourself the space to find out what the thing you want to make is… and make it? 

Specifically, on the festival circuit with Break Room, I’ve heard a lot of conversations about finding the right container for your idea. Can you make your pilot into a feature? Is it a short or a proof of concept for a series? I think a 45-second micro short is the right container for the story I’m telling, and here’s how I got there. 

I was hit with an extreme depression in 2021 after I got a new IUD put in. The hormones, in all fairness, didn’t invent anything that wasn’t there, but they turned it up to eleven. (I got that sucker yanked out a year later). I bet you know what it feels like to be fully going through something and simultaneously watching yourself go through it. While I felt trapped in this new-to-me depression, I was also fascinated by it. I couldn’t exorcise my emotions. I understood what it was to want to destroy… It could be a movie set in one of those rage rooms. 

As many people with mental health issues will tell you, there was an unsettling dissonance between my private reality and the public perception of myself. That feeling, that phenomenon, felt like a story, a movie… but was it enough? What did I have so far? This woman is sad. Pretty much everything I’d ever seen told me there had to be more… but what if there didn’t? 

If my goal is to make a film that leaves an audience a little more human than they were before, I think it can be that simple. A micro short can still bring an audience into contact with the human experience, and the intense brevity of the film can impart an even more powerful impression.  My favorite movies are the ones that don’t fill in all the gaps, that feel like a conversation the movie and I are having together. A micro short can encourage a high level of audience engagement by handing a lot of decision-making/interpreting power over to the audience. And a minute-long movie might not outstay its welcome.

Emily Goss on the One-Page Script for Her 45-Second Powerhouse, 'Break Room'

I sat down and wrote the script. It was one page. It was liberating, empowering, manageable, affordable. Break Room is still a story in three parts but it’s not so much a Beginning, Middle, and End as a Setup, Punchline, and Question. I’m so satisfied with those three chapters that it’s baffling to remember it wasn’t always that way.

The thing about this 45-second film is that it was originally a 60-second film. There was a final scene in which the character leaves the rage room and encounters another woman (played by the wonderful actress Kwana Martinez), on her way in. The women exchanged a meaningful moment, they saw and were seen, and then they went on with their lives. Not healed, but with a little hope. 

When my producer, editor, friend, and all-around-genius Shayan Ebrahim and I shared our first cut with a test audience, we were met with universal confusion. Like universally, everyone was confused by the final scene. Who was this woman? What was their relationship? It had nothing to do with Kwana’s performance. It just didn’t work. That final scene had been the original message of the movie: we save each other by seeing each other. But I wanted a film that worked more than I wanted the film I set out to make. We cut the scene. Now I’m convinced our 45-second cut is the strongest version of the story we could have made.   

The biggest benefit of a 45-second film is that people watch it! It’s not a big ask on your part or a big commitment on theirs. I’m finding that people are intrigued and will ask to see it even before I offer to send a link. I’ve been able to share Break Room with showrunners, producers, festival directors… and they’re digging it. People are open to short form storytelling. Vertical series are taking off and this is essentially a vertical movie. Along those lines, our distribution plan is to release on social media, with the simple hope that it will get seen.   

One last thing. The idea that working with SAG is too difficult, and going SAG will break your budget, is out of date. My first short A Little House In Aberdeen used the Short Project Agreement and I used the Micro Budget Agreement for Break Room. The Micro Budget Agreement was created in 2020. You submit your project on sagaftra.org and then you get an email granting approval. That’s it.

A key difference between the SPA and Micro Budget Agreement is that a producer does not have to make pension and health contributions with the Micro Budget. It’s really, really important for producers to make those contributions if they can. The recommended minimum SPA day rate is $249 and the P&H contribution is 21%. So if the cost of an actor is about $300 per day, odds are that’s still less than you’re paying a good chunk of your crew.

However, if a production cannot swing it (like Break Room) the Micro Budget Agreement is there for you. The bottom line: there is no reason not to use a SAG-AFTRA contract. 

So experiment away. Stretch (or shrink) the medium. Trust your audience to fill in gaps. Exposition is not always necessary and closure is not always yours to give. 

Main image: Emily Goss in "Break Room." Courtesy of the filmmaker.

When I set out to create the Ethics Resource Library, of course I had altruistic reasons, but it was also about my interest in true crime – and how that genre has contributed to my own pain and healing. 

Typically, I’ll watch a documentary the day it’s released, recording the movie in my Letterboxd diary with where and who I watched it with, but without a review. I’m not ready to share unedited thoughts like, “the mother’s description of the lack of remains she received from the crime scene really hits home.” My compulsion to bear witness comes from a place of personal understanding. I feel uncomfortable about this, like maybe I should give others the privacy I’ve sought in my own life, and yet I can’t stop consuming it. 

Sarah Rachael Wainio Remembers Her Sister With the Ethics Resource Library 

My big sister, Honor Elizabeth Wainio, was murdered on September 11, 2001. She was a passenger on United Flight 93, the fourth of four planes that were hijacked that Tuesday morning. Suddenly my family was thrust into a media landscape that was barely chartered in the early aughts, before the “Golden Age” of nonfiction. In a pre-Facebook internet, I received DMs through MySpace and an AOL email address sleuths managed to find. 

I was featured in several documentaries, asked to relive the moment I learned of the death of my sister. Since I know firsthand the ramifications of having my personal tragedy also be national news, I find myself asking: Why am I so obsessed with seeing my own pain reflected in the eyes of others? I think it’s because I feel least alone when I watch other trauma survivors in the exquisitely intimate way that only the documentary form allows. 

I was 14 when my sister was murdered; hardly an adult, but also not a child. It was my second week of high school, during that terrible in-between stage of life that is tough even without a personal tragedy. I didn’t have the language to talk about the pain I was feeling, so I turned to my TV. 

I felt a bizarre kind of hope as I heard the truly shocking, horrifically unique experiences others were articulating, because I understood them without needing any explanation: The interviewees, they survived. Look at them surviving. It was not always an easy choice for me to go on, and I suspect it was not easy for them either. But I was not alone.

Also Read: Care and Consent: How the Life After Team Navigated Ethical Disability Filmmaking

So although I find the desire perverse, I also understand why I find myself seeking out this informal televised trauma survivor support network. While I felt an intimate sense of connection to the documentary participants, I would also wonder how they felt about the films that featured them — not just how they were depicted, but what their experience was like throughout the process. 

Almost 10 years ago I was invited to give a lecture on Visibility and Validation in Nonfiction Storytelling. While preparing for the lecture at Fordham University’s Center for Ethics Education, I came to a realization that stunned me: There is no code of ethics to govern or guide documentary filmmakers. How could this be?

Eventually I found the work of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University. Its study, Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work, found that while filmmakers were extremely interested and motivated by doing the right thing, they were understandably resistant to a codified code of ethics. 

I asked myself: Could I create a central location where filmmakers could access the work that already exists from thought leaders like the Documentary Accountability Working Group (DAWG), Kartemquin Films, Peace is Loud, Represent Justice, the IDA, FWD-DOC, and DocuMentality? And if so, what would it be? 

My answer: a library.

Libraries have always been about access to information and culture. If I could create a free library, filmmakers would be empowered to create the best possible work with the least harm. As a producer, I understand the role. Often the producer is responsible for the care of the team both in front of and behind the camera. And in situations where you’re dealing with trauma, life, and death, that’s an immense responsibility. 

The Documentary Producers Alliance, with its tireless advocacy for filmmakers, was the perfect home for the Ethics Resource Library. Having this tool available for producers has the potential to raise the standard for our entire industry. 

And so a task force of “librarians” was assembled from the Ethics Subcommittee: Steffie van Rhee, Charles Box Jr., Dawn Mikkelson, Simon Mendes, Chantal Encalada, and Risé Sanders-Weir. We began collecting podcasts, articles, videos, and frameworks for ethical filmmaking. The primary question the librarians ask themselves when considering a resource for inclusion: If faced with a choice point, would this help a filmmaker to make a decision?

If a film team is discussing compensating their participants, they could select "compensation" from a menu in the online library and see what others have done when faced with the same challenge. 

A person doesn’t become ethical with a single decision. Ethics are a practice, and showing up for your practice makes you better at it. The library is intended to spark discussion and provide opportunities for practice, so when a filmmaker is faced with a decision, they feel more prepared. 

I hope that participating in the documentaries I’m watching brought interviewees some kind of narrative justice. And for those whom that isn’t the case, I hope the filmmakers from those movies learn something from the Ethics Resource Library. 

I hope you explore the library and visit it often. You’ll leave armed with new perspectives that will make your filmmaking better and help others like me. 

You can visit the Ethics Resource Library here: www.docproducers.org/erl.

Reid Davenport is the director and Colleen Cassingham the producer of Life After, an investigative documentary about the moral dilemmas and profit motives around assisted dying. The film, which premiered at Sundance, will be released Friday at the Film Forum in New York with additional screenings to follow across the country. In this piece, Davenport and Cassingham explain how Multitude Films, where Cassingham works, enlisted a clinical psychiatrist to support and protect participants in the doc.—M.M.

Our documentary Life After exposes the ways that disabled people’s autonomy is limited by systemic failures, including poverty, barriers to healthcare, and histories of institutionalization and eugenics. The film brings together the missing voices of the disability community in the contemporary debate about assisted dying, uncovering chilling stories of disabled people dying prematurely — and challenging the idea that assisted dying always represents a free choice, when it can sometimes be seen as the only option. Resources like https://goodcompanyds.com.au/ highlight support and services that empower people with disabilities and advocate for greater independence. If you're interested in health and looking for the latest updates, then you may check out news about qNano technology here.

Given the sensitive nature of the documentary subject and the vulnerability of our participants, it was paramount for our team to ensure we operated with care and integrity into every stage of the filmmaking process.

The relationship between filmmaker and participant is nebulous — it’s simultaneously personal, professional, and something in between. We operate on intuition and good intentions, but we’re not inherently endowed with a clear framework and guiding principles to rely on to mitigate harm and foreground care. In creating Life After, we were asking and selecting inherently vulnerable people to participate in a film, so we felt a deep sense of accountability to our participants.

Life After and Documentary Ethics

To guide us in our approach, we engaged clinical psychiatrist Dr. Kameelah Oseguera (“Dr. Kam”), head of care at Multitude Films. Dedicated to operationalizing our film team’s commitments to care, Dr. Kam is a leading expert in trauma-informed considerations and practices in documentary filmmaking. Her role is to support both the film team and the participants in navigating the ethical dilemmas and other challenges inherent in nonfiction filmmaking and the toll this can take on all parties.

During production, Dr. Kam helped us structure emotionally charged interviews with care, clarity, and anticipation for the needs and concerns of our participants. One of the perspectives we sought to include in Life After was that of a Canadian disabled or chronically ill person who considered access to Canada’s Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) in response to poverty or barriers to healthcare or accessible housing. 

Also Read: Fighting, Making Friends at Camp and Selling Cookies Are Subjects of NFMLA’s Disabilities Program

Given the risks of intervening in these folks’ lives, we developed an internal rubric to help us gauge who it was safe to reach out to, upholding our guiding principle to “do no harm.” Factors considered included whether they had already spoken to the media, what stage they were at in their MAID application, and their health and financial circumstances as well as their external support system. 

As we selected our participants, Dr. Kam acted as a third-party liaison, offering them care sessions before and after interviews to help them process the impact of participation as well as periodic support extended through the launch and rollout of the film.

Throughout our work with Dr. Kam, she also reminded us that ethical storytelling isn’t just about protecting others; it’s also about resourcing ourselves with foresight, confidence, and integrity. We learned from this experience that the trauma extremely vulnerable participants carry with them has the potential to challenge a mutually respectful and meaningful production. 

To address this, we consciously cultivated a working environment that prioritized patience, understanding, and accommodation, without being paternalistic. Having a degree of partnership with our participants was foundational to our ability to navigate conflict in healthy ways.

As documentary filmmakers we must recognize our relationship of accountability to our participants, but Dr. Kam helped us understand that the scope of that responsibility also needs boundaries - it isn’t, and shouldn’t be, all-encompassing. Those boundaries might look different for each filmmaker, project, and participant. For us, it meant making sure the burden of care didn’t create “role strain” by falling solely on the producer, and being transparent with our participants about the ways our communication frequency would shift with project stages. 

We also set the expectation that the film team had creative autonomy, and offered clear, contained opportunities for participants to provide feedback on, and re-affirm their consent for, our representation of their story.

Filmmaking ethics are sharpened through practice. We didn’t execute them perfectly every time, but Life After strengthened our muscle to center care and integrity at every stage. The importance of a strong film team in creating a successful environment for both filmmakers and participants cannot be overstated and having professional guidance from Dr. Kam on Life After made all the difference.

Main image: Life After director Reid Davenport and producer Colleen Cassingham. Courtesy of Multitude Films

It was just before 8:30 a.m. on Day Four of shooting our indie horror film Sight Unseen. We were in the Augusta, Maine Walmart for the fifth time in as many days, clearing them out of oat milk (an unexpectedly large line item in our budget), when a text from our DP came in informing us that  the gaffer is leaving due to a health issue.

Panic! In the Dairy Aisle!

Our crew could already have been charitably described as “skeletal”: Us, our DP, the production designer (doing double-duty as our ghost), a boom op, a camera assistant, a grip, a hair/makeup artist, three actors, and the aforementioned gaffer. A shocking amount of our time was spent setting up crafty, filling out SAG-AFTRA Exhibit Gs, acting as the 1st and 2nd ADs, plunging toilets, hauling trash — the usual micro-budget stuff. 

And suddenly we were losing not just a person, but also their entire lighting kit. For a horror film shooting mostly at night deep in the Maine woods. The closest G&E rental house was two hours away, and getting a replacement gaffer up from New York or Boston would cost us days (and budget) we didn’t have.

We had to make a decision right then and there: Fight, or flight? Oriana wanted to drive straight to the rental house to squeeze whatever gear we could into the old Prius we’d borrowed for the shoot. Steve wanted to book it back to set to convince the gaffer to leave us enough equipment to finish the movie.

Lots of relationships face their first big test in an Ikea, arguing Songesand vs. Stjärnö. If you survive Ikea, the next big test may likely be the wedding. This was our Ikea and our wedding.

The exact phrase, “Let’s spend our wedding fund making a horror movie” was not in our vows. When we got married at the height of the pandemic, on a beach with three people six feet away from us, we told friends and family we’d have a real wedding when we could. We had just over $65,000 saved that we could use to throw a hell of a party and maybe even cover the down payment on an apartment.

But in all our lockdown talks of what we’d do once Covid was over, we kept returning to one idea: Making a feature-length film. Our relationship had started with that litmus test every creative person does with a potential partner. After our first date, Oriana sent Steve a pilot script to read, and he sent her his horror short Near Sight to watch. To our respective relief, both were great, and we got married 18 months later. We made shorts together and started writing together. 

We’d both been on the cusp of breaking into the industry for years: Steve’s shorts had been to plenty of festivals, and Oriana was working through her first development deal at Warner Bros. TV. The wheels of Hollywood move so slowly, though, that we knew we could spend the rest of our lives searching for investors to fund our first feature. So, we agreed to forgo the big wedding entirely, and instead spend the money (plus around $18,000 from a Kickstarter) to make one of the scripts we’d written together. 

The natural bumps of writing and pre-production we handled by defaulting to the question: What’s best for the movie? 

Verbalizing that question ensured neither of us were projecting a relationship issue onto a filmmaking problem, and reminded us that we were a team trying to make the best film possible. This strategy filled us with unearned confidence and optimism as we made our way up from New York to rural Maine to shoot.

Solving a Sight Unseen Dilemma

Four days in and there we were, neck deep in oat milk, faces flushed, hearts racing, panicked and angry after days of delays and demands. Despite spending the money on Sight Unseen instead of a wedding, children, or a home, we had found ourselves dealing with all three, squeezed into a two-week timespan: Daily event planning, caring for a dozen people while sleeping only a few hours a night, and renovating a house.

It took a beat for us to deal with the intense emotional flare-up, but eventually, we were able to take emotion out of the equation and ask ourselves once more: What’s best for the movie? How could we ensure we could shoot today and stay on schedule? 

Also Read: How Running a Film Festival Helped Me Get Into Sundance

As with so many other problems, the answer was to work as a team: Oriana would have our grip on standby to head to Portland while calling the rental house. She rejiggered the schedule in the car as we raced back to set so Steve could negotiate with the gaffer before they left.

In the end, the gaffer left us enough equipment to finish the shoot. The crew rallied, cheerfully carrying and striking lights, and we made our days. For the rest of the shoot, we would mouth “What’s best for the movie?” at each other, whenever one of us was starting to spin out. 

Hopefully, Sight Unseen is just the start of our filmmaking career. If not, well, it was the best couple’s counseling $85,000 can buy.

Sight Unseen plays July 19 and 20th at the Maine International Film Festival.

Main image: (L-R) Dustin (Daniel Burns) is surprised by his sisters Beth (Kellie Spill) and Emma (Lauren Pisano) in a scene from Sight Unseen. Courtesy of Fixer Upper Films

I made the film American Comic for a number of reasons, but on some level, it all goes back to this:

“HOW ARE THEY GETTING THIS SO WRONG?!”

This is me every time I’m watching a movie or TV show that incorporates stand-up as part of the story. It’s one of many things I’m yelling, really: “That doesn’t look like a comedy club!” “Audiences in a room that size wouldn’t sound like that!” “That wouldn’t get a laugh!”

I’ve been a comedian for more than 15 years, and I’ve always been fascinated by how fictional narratives can never seem to figure out how to portray stand-up on screen. I started to think about this more intensely as I prepared for production on my debut feature film American Comic.

In writing the script, I had drawn on countless experiences from my career to create a This Is Spinal Tap-like mockumentary satire of stand-up. With that being the premise, it was crucial not only to show stand-up on screen but for it to also feel authentic. If history is any judge, I was setting myself up for failure.

Joe Kwaczala on the Pressure to Get American Comic Right

So the pressure was on to figure out a way to make this work. My tactic? To reverse-engineer it. By analyzing what doesn’t work, it would hopefully become clear what to avoid, and I could forge my path to success.

I thought about my main problems with depictions of stand-up comedy and landed on three areas: the setting, the audience reactions, and the material. When one of those doesn’t come across correctly, it all goes south. So I had to nail all three.

Among comedians, there might be varying opinions on the ideal setting for a stand-up show, but most will agree that intimacy is key. That means close quarters, low ceilings, the audience’s proximity to the stage and to each other. A lot of comedy clubs are designed with these qualities in mind.

Also Read: The 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World, Including Dances With Films

But what do film productions need? Lots of room! To fit lights, cameras, and anything else the crew requires. Naturally, if a scene takes place at a comedy club, they will want to find (or even construct!) a location that gives them the space they need to film, and as a result, you get an environment with negative intimacy. The solution to this problem was pretty obvious: We had to shoot at real venues.

But what about the crew? Some of these actual stand-up rooms wouldn’t be able to accommodate even a small film crew. So we didn’t have one. Well, kind of. I collaborated on American Comic with director Daniel J. Clark, who made one of the great fly-on-the-wall documentaries of all time, Behind the Curve. He and I decided that for these particular scenes, the crew should consist of just him and a camera, filming the action in a corner of the room.

That way, we could take advantage not only of the physical dimensions of these real spaces but also of their less tangible, lived-in qualities that would be impossible to recreate anywhere else.

Obviously we were not the first people to think, “Let’s film our stand-up scene at a stand-up venue.” But even if they’re also using a real location, a typical production is still likely to utilize fake audience reactions. And that’s the next thing about stand-up on film that just doesn’t work. Productions will bring in extras and try to conduct them like an orchestra: “Laugh hard at this part, giggle at this joke, boo at this guy.”

This process goes against human nature itself: Laughter is involuntary! So this forced nonsense is undoubtedly going to feel wrong. Daniel and I realized the only way around this was to film during real stand-up shows.

At this point, I’ll remind you that American Comic isn’t a documentary. It’s a narrative feature film with a story about fictional characters. I play the two lead roles, and they were written to be comedians with styles very different from my own. And if we wanted to avoid fake laughs, that meant these characters needed to earn real ones.

We also didn’t tell these audiences I was in character. For it to feel real on screen, we needed real reactions. So that means there were dozens of stand-up shows that happened in 2024 where audience members had no idea that one of the comedians they saw was actually me playing a movie character. Sorry!

Although in that regard, I guess the movie is kind of a documentary.

This leads us to the final piece of the “Stand-Up Authenticity Puzzle:” the material. Anyone can get on-stage at a stand-up show and bomb with a bad joke. But the comedians I’m portraying in this film are supposed to be up-and-coming with some potential for success, so I had to write jokes for them that would work in front of actual audiences.

To further complicate things, these characters are awful, uninspired hacks. So my task as a writer and performer was to come up with jokes that I personally don’t like but still could get laughs. A tricky needle to thread! So I did what any good comic does with new material: I workshopped the jokes at shows and open mics and tweaked them based on the response. In fact, these characters and their jokes started doing so well that I started to worry: “Oh no. Is this what people like?”

I’m really proud of what Danel and I accomplished with American Comic. In the end, the hunt for authenticity was simple. Instead of taking stand-up and bending it to fit our filming process, we took our filming process and bent it to fit stand-up. Obviously, I’m hoping what we do in the film will be appreciated by general audiences, but I’m hoping the extra care in our treatment of stand-up will resonate especially with comedians. The ideal reaction?

“HOW ARE THEY GETTING THIS SO RIGHT?!”

American Comic premieres Sunday at Dances With Films in Los Angeles.

Main image: Actor-writer Joe Kwaczala in a still from American Comic, shot and directed by Daniel J. Clark.

You’re probably asking yourself, how did “Peeping Todd” —  a musical about a pervert stalking a woman — get investors in the Bible Belt? The short answer is, it didn’t. Let me explain.

“Who wouldn’t want to give money to this?!” I declared loudly  and ignorantly in a pre-production meeting with our producers, Alexander Jeffery and Chris Alan Evans. To which we all nodded along thinking the South, specifically Louisiana, was ready for such a task. 

I mean c'mon, our film can’t be that raunchy! Just read our synopsis for yourself: "Peeping Todd" is about a peeper obsessed with a woman named Claire. Despite the HOA closing in on him and Claire’s ex-boyfriend getting in his way, Todd won’t stop until Claire belongs to him. 

Making 'Peeping Todd' With Friends

The synopsis doesn’t sound like anything that crazy, right? What if I told you Todd gets into a singing fight with his own hand for trying to pleasure him? Or that Claire’s ex boyfriend, Thad, has an unhealthy obsession with shoving things up his posterior? 

Southern hospitality drew its line in the sand with our film. 

“But Josh Munds," you may say, "your film 'Peeping Todd' is premiering at Dances with Films June 20th at 11:45 pm! How did you finally get it made?”

First off, relax. Don’t rush me. Secondly, with a little help from my friends. 

Once we realized the chips were stacked against us, we decided to just double down and bet on ourselves. 

We pooled our resources, used gear we already owned, borrowed equipment from friends, and finally, found the perfect people to invest. 

Our close friend and producer extraordinaire, Tamra Corley Davis, stepped to the plate and went to bat for us.

The family of our lead actor, the aforementioned Chris Alan Evans, decided to step into the gauntlet and throw down as well. 

Steven Hellmen, a close personal friend of Alexander Jeffery, saw the potential of 'Peeping Todd' and brought some sizzling heat to our beef sandwich. 

Man, I love a good beef sandwich. 

I’ll speak selfishly and excitedly about one investor in particular — my wife, Melissa Munds, who just recently reached 2 million subscribers on her YouTube channel, @MelissaKristinTv. She told me whatever we need to do to make this happen, let’s do it. 

And so we did. 

It took two months to write the songs, record the demos and finish the script. Fifteen days to shoot it. Badda bing, badda boom. "Peeping Todd" was done. 

At the heart of this entire project was friends and family making something together. Even if that something has a one-thousand dollar budget for sex toys.

'Peeping Todd' premieres at Dances with Films Friday at 11:45 p.m.

Recently, we attended a film festival panel on low budget filmmaking. We absolutely love hearing  filmmakers talk about the nuts and bolts. But it didn’t take me long to notice a pattern — the  panelists were intentionally concealing their budgets. On a panel about low budget filmmaking.  '

Also Read: Making a Film? MovieMaker Production Services Can Double Your Budget

Typically, it’s common practice to shroud your budget in mystery. If you reveal it, and it’s lower  than expected, execs and distributors might think you’re an anti-union, lying, cheating, penny-pinching cheapskate. Or their previously positive reaction to your film could sour, dismissing  your work as “amateur.”

On the other hand, if your budget is higher than expected, you’ll get a  version of, “You spent x amount on that piece of s---?!” Either way, not so good.  

But we like to buck convention, so we're about to tell you how the sausage got made. We firmly believe  that with a tight script, vision, resourcefulness, and a good crew, you can make interesting,  quality films irrespective of budget. It is my hope above all else that Stephanie Stevens sparks  a conversation about how films get made in today's increasingly strange industry landscape.  Indie film will save us. 

Stephanie Stevens and the 666 Method  

We didn’t have much time or money. We’re working artists, so money being short is self explanatory. Time was short because Kelsey Ann was awarded a screenwriting mentorship that  would necessitate our family moving to Los Angeles in May. This was February. We were briefly living in Chicago, outside our regular network of friends and collaborators.

But to hell with it. We needed to make a movie. Here. Now. With what we had and who we knew. We were stuck in groundhog day on several other features in development. And we were sick of waiting on other people’s go-ahead.  

So it was an experiment: shoot in six days. With six people. For $6,000. 

We didn’t intend to make a tongue-in-cheek Luciferian reference. We just aimed to execute our  vision for as little money as possible. Making a few executive decisions about what was worth shelling out for, we ended up with our $6,000 budget. Budget dictates time and personnel, so we  kept our shoot days and crew petite. 

Thus, following the tradition of the minimalist filmmaking movements Dogme 95, cinema  vérité, Cassavetes, and mumblecore — Stephanie Stevens was born. A lo-fi, two-hander dark  comedy built around uninterrupted thirty-minute sequences. An uncomfortable walk-and talk between a suicidal comic and his now pregnant ex-girlfriend along the shores of Lake  Michigan in Chicago’s early spring. 

$6K 

We needed a cinema camera, lenses, memory, microphones, and editing software. We  decided to purchase rather than rent, part of our new long-term vision as filmmakers who make stuff. Our strategy was simple — don’t buy top of the line, buy two steps down.

We  shot our movie on a BlackMagic PocketCinema 6K G2. Th package cost about $3,200. The rest of our budget went to Costco crafty, rentals, a pregnancy belly (the film was shot in between Kelsey Ann’s real pregnancies), a composer, and our sound guy, Ronnie  Blake. You always pay your sound guy. Our meals were donated from local restaurants because they were excited about the film. 

Don’t let the budget snowball: We were dogmatic about this. Whenever a problem presents  itself and the solution is money, take a breath. A creative solution will appear. Creativity  thrives under constraints. 

6 People 

We assembled a crew of four talented collaborators eager to work on a feature film for no  money (or next-to-no money, re: sound guy): Melaina Koulos (AD, producer), Jacob Waldrop  (DP, camera), Ronnie Blake (sound), and William Premo (PA). And the two of us made six. 

Please don’t lose friends over this! Asking people to lend their talents for free is no small  favor. Cultivate an immaculate vibe on set, and take care of them always — for us that meant  finishing early every day. 

6 Days 

The entire process demanded immediacy. In service of this, we embraced a vérité aesthetic  and did not light a single shot. We captured our scenes in public and on-the-go without  permits. Everyone in our film who doesn’t have lines is a real person going about their day.  Long takes allowed us to focus on human behavior and avoid lengthy set-ups and break downs. 

Shooting a feature in six days also meant we had to get it right the first time. We shot no  more than two takes of anything; Indecision and lack of focus are death.  

Embrace the Style

We got away with a 666 approach because we put story first and embraced the imperfections of the lo-fi style.  

In an era of ultra-polish, we're obsessed with reality creeping into artifice. On Stephanie Stevens, we gave our DP license to explore. The camera shakes. The moment you try to hide  the nicks and chips that a micro-budget brings, the audience feels tricked. They are smarter  than you. And we think there’s something alluring about this exposed aesthetic.

It’s easy to end up with a film that is technically beautiful and well-produced that inspires no feeling.  Happens all the time. But audiences will forgive technical impurities if they’re invested in the  story. And we think there’s a tendency among us to romanticize a first feature. There’s a buildup of  pressure, a crescendo. Short films can be experimental, but a debut feature?  

We reject that. If you have a story to tell, and you want to make a film, you can. Embrace  limitations. Say yes to yourself.

You can follow the journey of Stephanie Stevens on the film's Instagram.

Main image: Nathan Simpson and Kelsey Ann Wacker in Stephanie Stevens.

My eldest brother Jimmy died unexpectedly in Vietnam in June of 1972 at the age of 24. He was the oldest of our family of six, and I was the youngest, just five years old. At that age, I didn’t fully understand what had happened; however, nearly four decades later, the mystery surrounding Jimmy’s death led me to begin what would become my first feature documentary, Jimmy in Saigon.  

In 2010, with several award-winning short films behind me but with no formal film school training, I decided to uncover the true story of my brother’s life and death and capture it on film. I was living in Brooklyn, newly in-between jobs, and creatively restless. But I was struck by the possibilities of HD video, still a relatively new technology at the time. With my last $2,000, I bought a used HD camera and sound gear and began interviewing everyone I could find who had known Jim.

I hit the road with my camera and a sense of mission. But I quickly realized that I needed money fast. I began recruiting friends as volunteer camera operators and eventually hired people to shoot key scenes. Without access to personal wealth and very aware of the challenges of winning grants (many grants have a less than 1% success rate), I created a website and secured a fiscal sponsor.

I also posted about Jimmy in Saigon on social media, utilizing my friends and family to build my support network and generate donations to fund the project. It’s a misconception that you have to start seeking funds from strangers off the bat — your core supporters, even if they are not wealthy or philanthropic, can become a key lynchpin in connecting to the right funders. Your top donors will eventually be individuals whom you never knew, but they are nonetheless connected loosely to you.

My background in fundraising helped keep the momentum going. I thanked donors often, shared updates, and made people feel like part of the journey. By 2016, I knew I’d need to fund my first trip to Vietnam to retrace Jimmy’s steps and assemble a mosaic of his identity. I launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign with a short teaser and enlisted friends — some paid, some volunteer — to help run it. 

We raised $20,000, just enough to get us to Vietnam. That footage changed everything. Now we had something tangible: exciting material that energized supporters and gave the project new life.

In 2018, after a few promising but unfruitful “salon” screenings of a 15-minute teaser, I hit on a turning point. What if I hosted five fundraising events in five cities where I had lived or had connections? I chose Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and my hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. With the help of local host committees, I organized events in free or low-cost venues. Each included a teaser screening, food and drinks, a silent auction, a short musical performance, and a live interview between me and a locally known figure. These events raised $30,000 and brought in 300 new supporters, fueling a critical phase of post-production.

Throughout the process, we applied for grants, but rarely received them. Instead, I leaned fully into individual giving. I cultivated relationships, kept supporters in the loop, and invited them to grow with the project. I started a $1,000 Angel donor program, and mailed out a physical progress report — actual paper! — to donors and prospects. Many of our top donors gave multiple times over the years. 

Also Read: Making a Movie? MovieMaker Productions Services Can Double Your Budget

I created levels of recognition — “Champions,” “Contributing Producers,” “Co-Executive Producers” — but more than that, I treated them as friends. We shared life updates, spoke about the film’s evolution, and celebrated every milestone together.

The Benefits of Making Jimmy in Saigon With Individual Donors

Now, after nearly 15 years, 40 festivals, and 16 awards with Jimmy in Saigon, I can say without hesitation that raising money from individual donors was worth it. It wasn’t just a financial strategy — it was a creative and communal one. The support I received didn’t just fund the film, it shaped its soul. It taught me how to build a network around a story, how to keep people invested over time, and how to make something deeply personal feel universal.

These days, I teach others about the path I took — one that relied on relationship-building, creativity, and persistence more than institutional backing or major grants. For any filmmaker struggling to get their project off the ground, I highly recommend this path. It’s not easy, but it’s deeply rewarding. You won’t just be raising money — you’ll be building a community that believes in your story.

Peter McDowell is Director and Founder of Peter McDowell Arts Consulting, and is currently Interim Development Director at L.A. Dance Project, having previously worked at American Friends of the Louvre, Eighth Blackbird, and other arts organizations. McDowell's storytelling reflects his training as an performer, curator and producer, stemming from a childhood surrounded by opera and the arts. Previous films, including the acclaimed I Dream of Dorothy, have been shown at festivals around the world.

Following a theatrical run in Los Angeles, New York, and Santa Fe, Jimmy in Saigon is now available on VOD from Dark Star Pictures.

As a recovering musical theater geek, I have discovered that you never quite escape the genre. My first feature as a director, Nora, follows a mother who leaves her dreams of being a singer/songwriter behind as she returns to suburbia to focus on raising her precocious six-year-old daughter.

It wasn’t until late in the process that I realized I had unwittingly set out to reclaim the musical, complete with an original indie-rock soundtrack. Whenever Nora, who I play, finds herself in a heightened moment, the film erupts into a song that emotionally connects to Nora’s real-world state. Six of these songs become full music videos, challenging me with six opportunities for this deeply enthusiastic first-time filmmaker to play with techniques that I had never touched before.

Initially, I didn’t have the confidence to approach anything as grandiose as the music videos I adored on MTV. I stormed confidently into principal photography, knowing I could work with the actors to tell the story that I had crafted, but giving myself permission to play with the entire canvas of my overactive imagination was overwhelming. I told my producers I would hire “big-time music video directors” (who I thought this would be in 2022, I don’t know, let alone with what budget.)

I was lovingly supported by an incredible local crew in Portland, helmed by my fearless cinematographer, Kevin “Fletch” Fletcher. At some point roughly a year after we had finished principal photography, it was time to make music videos, and I still hesitated. Fletch and I spoke, and he asked me what I was imagining.

“She’s smashing the world that confines her. Like, a 1950s housewife smashing a kitchen,” I told him. “She’s trying to be something she’s not, like a human trying to fit in with mannequins.” I could hear him smile through the phone.

Fletch took every nonsense image I presented, either verbally or splashed across crowded mood boards, and translated fantasy to film. It’s the kind of artistic partnership that a non-technically savvy director dreams of — a match in excitement and passion, and the same epic level of “what if,” and never “we can’t.”

Anna Campbell on 'Smashing My Very Own Tiny Patriarchy' in Nora

Slowly, I realized that I had distinct ideas about every video and that each was a visceral response to images that had haunted me as a woman. The women in the Archie comics fighting over the boy became the teenage rocker bucking societal norms and the cheerleader’s judgment. A romance novel brought to life with a twist, where our heroine strides off the beaten path and chases not a man, but her own independence. A blunt interpretation of an 80’s music video where the leading lady doesn’t ever bother to control her own desires. I really did turn myself into a mannequin. I was smashing my very own tiny patriarchy.

My core design crew followed me delightedly into crafting these six mini-movies. Carrie Jordan, my art director, met my enthusiasm head-on, transforming dusty trails to red carpets by lining them with 30 yards of cheap red velvet and buying precisely measured vintage wallpaper to keep costs under control. Savannah Gordon crafted an epic red dress with fabric I frugally sourced from LA’s garment district. Michelle Stoyanoff and I learned together how to craft a dozen new hairstyles and found a language for the make-up that stretched the boundaries of our world.

Also Read: Forever Creator Mara Brock Akil on Falling in Love With Screenwriting

Each video is distinct both in style and sound, and I collaborated with talented artists and great equipment to bring them all to life. Our favorite images for “Tiger,” the '80s video, were captured with the classic in-camera effects of a vintage Panasonic PV-GS400, shot with the incredible eye of Fletch’s teenage daughter, Nina.

I also turned into a mannequin, playing with movement in low frame rates, wearing nothing but shapewear and obscene amounts of fake hair. Finally, we flew drones to capture the epic journey in “Left Behind” with our carpets and bespoke dress in the Columbia River Gorge.

One by one, I absorbed techniques I was incredibly fortunate to access. I learned how to think in multiple directions simultaneously and to meticulously storyboard, then be ready to effortlessly pivot in the moment while maintaining a semblance of cohesive storytelling. I added artists to the team, working with animator Joshua McCartney in England for “Cruel,” and bringing in motion-artist Heather Cardone for the animation finishing and the blue screen layering for “Good As Gold.”

We spent every remaining dollar like it was precious, and every moment on screen is 98% passion. With just enough Type-A maniacs working together, we pulled off what should have been impossible — a feature film with six distinct music videos interwoven into the narrative. To maintain this level of creative control on a first feature is almost unheard of today, and I am so grateful that my first directing experience was so full of creativity and magic.

Nora will be released digitally on May 24th on VEEPS.com.

Main image: Anna Campbell as the lead character in Nora. Image by Kevin Fletcher.

The premiere was held at Linnemann's Riverwest Inn, a bar and music venue in Milwaukee, because I could not find a single theater in the city that was willing to host a six-and-a-half hour experimental documentary about a local icon who, with each year that passed, was remembered by fewer and fewer people. The event received some local press and promotional help from Snopek's longtime friends and collaborators the Violent Femmes. I can't claim that we had lines around the block, but people came, and some even stayed for the whole movie. It was an anticlimax of sorts, but a successful event nonetheless. 

That night, I released the entire movie online for free on YouTube and Vimeo, broken into seven episodes. 

Two days later, the horror blog Bloody Disgusting posted an article about another movie of mine. My wife (Rachel Kempf) and I had co-directed a microbudget found footage horror feature called It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This that had been playing festivals, winning some awards, and slowly gaining interest. One of the quirks of this movie's release was that we had decided to only show it theatrically and never release it on streaming (which also precluded a Blu-ray release since that would result in it being immediately pirated). 

It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This had been getting press for about six months, but most of the articles had focused on the movie itself. The Bloody Disgusting article changed that, with an increased focus on the fact that we were only releasing it theatrically. This is when the trolls took notice. 

I love our trolls. 

The trolls who have called our movie garbage sight unseen have done more for us than I could quantify. The internet rewards negativity, and our decision to keep this movie offline has been met with a high amount of negativity. This engagement resulted in articles about us being promoted on Google and Yahoo News, culminating in TIFF's decision to include us in their Midnight Madness program, a theatrical run in Alamo Drafthouses around the country, a writeup in Variety, and numerous international screenings that never would have otherwise happened.

Thank you, trolls. We couldn't have done it without you.

Trolls, a Horror Movie and a Documentary

The irony, of course, is that the entire time It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This was being shat upon by angry avatars online, my Sigmund Snopek documentary was freely available for them to watch. One year later, there hasn't been a single person who has made this connection. So I'm writing this article to make the connection for you.

The Complete History of Space/Time (Destination Milwaukee) may be the best movie I've ever made. Yes, it has a stupidly long title. Yes, its length is gratuitous. Yes, it is about someone you've never heard of. 

But also, yes, the movie does reward your effort. And yes, I do want you to watch it.

Also Read: David Shields Wrote the Book on Interviews. Nick Toti Made the Movie

Think of it as a challenge: Do you have what it takes to watch this movie? Can you endure a docuseries that isn't designed to provide a slow-drip of dopamine like all those equally-long Netflix docuseries that people binge without giving it a second thought?

The past year has been unusual. My experience with these two movies has tested the logic that the widest possible release is also the best release. The movie that we limited access to has gotten exponentially more attention and led to a number of new opportunities. The movie that was made immediately available to anyone with internet access has been seen by maybe 100 people. 

Of course there are other factors. Horror is an easier sell than a weird, long doc. Found footage, especially, has a rabid fan base. 

Also, existence is random and any sense that can be made of it will break down the longer you look at it. Maybe I just got lucky with the one movie and unlucky with the other. Who knows?

Regardless, now that a year has passed with very few people watching it, I'm redoubling my efforts to get the Snopek doc seen. So watch it! Watch an episode today and then another tomorrow. If you make it through episode three, you'll be hooked and want to keep going. (It ends with a bang.)

Writing this article is embarrassing because it's essentially a public declaration of failure at a time when I would probably benefit more from letting people perceive me as a success. Who cares though? Life is complicated and success is fleeting. 

This idea—that life is complicated and success is fleeting—was the very thing that drew me to Snopek as a subject to begin with. His career has gone through ups and downs and multiple reinventions. But he's also always just been Sigmund Snopek III. His documentary asks the question: What does it mean to be a success or a failure? It's only appropriate that the movie's release and reception have inadvertently asked that same question.

Main image: Nick Toti while making The Complete History of Space/Time (Destination Milwaukee). Courtesy of the author.

My biggest weakness as a filmmaker has to be impatience. Waiting for permission is not something I’m good at, which can make it tough when it comes to writing, developing and finding funding for a project in an industry built around hurry up and wait. The number of ideas I’ve let die on the vine because I didn’t have it in me to play the long game is hard to think about sometimes. 

It took some years, but eventually I’d come to realize that if I ever wanted to actually make a movie — and I did! — then I was going to have to find a way to make one on my own terms. If I waited for someone to give me permission, I would be waiting for the rest of my life. So when I set out to make Self Driver I knew I was going to have to do it alone or I would never do it all.

I had a five-month window between gigs as an editor, which felt like just enough time to write, prep and shoot something if we played our cards right. So one January night, armed with little more than a half-baked first draft, I texted my good friend and frequent collaborator Kire Paputts, “Hey man, if I made a no budget feature this year, what would you say to producing it?” 

He responded in under a minute. “I would say yes.” 

My plan was simple: work around an idea that could be executed with the smallest crew possible and fill as many roles as I could myself to keep our costs down and crew light. Fly under the radar, work nimbly, without the weight that comes with a traditional crew and focus on the most important elements of a film, story and performance. The concept of Self Driver — following one main character, in an isolated location, over the course of a single night — lent itself to this type of production.

I figured if we leaned into the limitations of our budget and embraced the lo-fi aesthetic, we could make a movie that may not be pretty, but would at least be interesting to watch. 

When I showed Kire the camera I intended to shoot the film on — the Sony ZV1, a minuscule point and shoot designed primarily for vloggers — I was prepared for him to tell me I was crazy. He didn’t. (Though I had a feeling he might have been thinking it.) Either way, he was in and we set our sights on going into production in a little over three months.

Making a film is always an uphill battle, especially at the start of a project when inertia is working against you. But for films like Self Driver, with very little in the way of resources, that hill can feel pretty steep sometimes. It’s a lot easier to collect collaborators when you’ve got the money to pay them what they’re worth.

Not to mention that because of the untraditional approach we were planning to take, a lot of the people we met a long the way, from DPs to actors to funding agencies, were pretty skeptical that we could pull it off. Who could blame them? Our set wasn’t going to look anything like most movie sets, even low-budget ones. And, despite my confidence, I had no track record. There was good reason to believe the whole thing would go off the rails before we even got started.

But for every few skeptics we came across, we dug up one true believer who seemed genuinely excited by our guerrilla approach. Nathanael Chadwick (D), another good friend, was the first on board. I think he said “yes” before I even told him what the movie was about. Slowly but surely we put together a troop of the most talented, dedicated and passionate artists I could ever hope to be a part of.

I’m not exactly sure how it worked out this way, but because of some odd scheduling choices, our very first scene (first setup!) had us rolling up to the pickup-zone of the local international airport and stealing a shot on the arrivals platform. Not only that, but it involved actor Adam Goldhammer (who plays Nic) screaming at someone off camera before getting in the car.

Also Read: 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee

I was sure that even if we managed to get through the take, we’d have security descending on us as soon as we pulled away from the curb. When we made it to the end of the scene and were coasting down the highway without any flashing lights pulling up behind us, Adam leaned in to ask, “Should we go again?”

 I figured, might as well. Let’s just keep going until someone tells us to stop.

We ended up circling back for four or five takes that morning, getting bigger and bolder each time, pushing the boundaries of what we thought we could get away with. By the time we wrapped the day I was feeling pretty confidant that maybe, just maybe we had a chance at pulling this whole thing off if we just keep going.

That’s not to say there weren’t many moments of doubt. The morning after our forth or fifth night of shooting, exhausted but unable to sleep, I was scrubbing through what we had just shot. I felt sick. The footage was dark, it was grainy, and because we often just let the cameras roll instead of stopping to slate every take, I had hours upon hours to sort through for a three page scene.

I knew this had been all part of my plan, but seeing the reality of what that plan looked like was giving me serious second thoughts. I remember trying to fall asleep as the morning sun cut through the gap in our curtains, thinking, “Was this a huge mistake? Should I call it now, before I embarrass myself?”

Self Driver Director Michael Pierro on Overcoming Doubts

The urge to abandon this project, like I had with so many projects in the past, became very real. But backing out at that stage, despite how much my body wanted me to, wasn’t an option. Not after convincing all these people to help us. Not after all the work they had already given us for free. I owed it to them to see the thing through. I had to figure it out and just keep going. 

That became my mantra throughout production.

When security shuts us down outside a location, find somewhere else to finish the scene and just keep going. 

When the prop gun we rented looks like shit, get creative with some bubble wrap and just keep going.

When the sun is about to come up and we’ve got one more scene to get through, just keep going until the sky gets too blue to film. Then pack it up, get some sleep and come back again when it’s dark. 

Our last night of production was also our most complicated. We had stunts, special effects, fake blood, a fight, and had to shoot the entire climax and final scene of the movie. Nearly fifteen pages in twelve hours. And on top of all that, the forecast was calling for intermittent rain all night. The only night we absolutely had to be outside of the car and it was going to rain! Once again I was tempted to call it.

Thankfully Kire talked some sense into me. Actor Catt Filippov (who plays Angel) was driving back to New York as soon as she wrapped. If we didn’t get it in the can that night, then when would we? Just keep going.

We did.

The urgency of the night was infectious. Everyone understood the stakes and rallied to pull it off. Even the weather played along. Through some miracle it only ever rained when we wanted it to, helping to make the final images of the film some of our most cinematic.

The sun came up as we were rolling on our very last shot of the night. What had seemed impossible twelve hours earlier was now sitting in our rearview mirror thanks to the talent and hustle of our small but mighty cast and crew.

That morning, after everyone else had gone home, I could feel the come-down setting in as I packed up our equipment for the last time. The adrenaline I had been running on for the past few weeks was quickly leaving my body and that familiar feeling of doubt began to creep back. So many people had given so much for this project, trusting that, despite our unorthodox approach, I knew what I was doing. What if I didn’t? 

But what other choice did I have? Just keep going.

Self Driver is available on VOD on May 8 from Cinephobia.

Main image: (L-R) Director Michael Pierro and actor Nathaneal Chadwick on the set of Self Driver. Courtesy of Pierro.

I knew when I was planning to make Filthy Animals in the South Bay of Los Angeles and show the beautiful landmarks in the place that I grew up, my leads had to look good getting around. What I didn’t know, however, is the car I chose would almost kill my lead actors multiple times… and then disappear. If you’re also looking for a specific car model, you may find it at a dealership that sells a wide range of used cars in hesperia.

I was originally going to use my friend's Dodge Challenger because I wanted a car with some muscle. But a month before our shoot, I was in a grocery store parking lot when an old-school 1973 Mercury Brougham pulled into a lot. I took this to be a sign from the film gods, so I went up to talk to the owner, Geo Dayrit. I could tell by the way he was dressed he was likely a mechanic.

Right away, Geo was open to sharing the details of his car. I could tell this vehicle definitely had some grit, and aesthetically I thought it is exactly what the movie needed. I assumed that since Geo was driving the car that it would be fine for the shoot. So, I asked, “How do you feel about putting this beauty in a movie?” He was gracious and very open to the idea. So, we began planning his involvement — and using the Brougham. 

What I didn’t consider in my excitement over the Brougham was how much attention older cars get—not just from fans of vintage rides but also from mechanics, gearheads, and curious onlookers who know a classic when they see one.

Of course, with all the admiration also came the occasional headache. Vintage cars don’t always behave predictably. One day the door wouldn’t unlock without a bit of finesse, and on another, the ignition acted like it had its own agenda. It’s one thing to deal with a finicky lock during a film shoot, and another to be stranded in real life because your key’s gone missing or suddenly stopped working.

A standard locksmith might hesitate with a vehicle like the Brougham, but Gold Coast Car Keys stands out precisely because they handle situations like this with calm expertise. From dealing with vintage lock mechanisms to reprogramming key fobs for newer models, having the right locksmith on call changes everything. It keeps your project on track, your stress levels down, and your vehicle in working order, no matter its age. In a way, just like casting the right actor, choosing the right support—whether it’s for a film shoot or daily life—makes all the difference between a smooth ride and an unexpected halt.

There's just something magnetic about a car with history etched into its frame. Whether it’s the soft rumble of the engine or the wide, polished chrome grille reflecting the California sun, these old vehicles carry stories that new cars simply don’t. But all that nostalgia comes with upkeep. That’s when I really started thinking about how important it is to have a reliable go-to for repairs, especially if you’re handling a car that isn’t exactly fresh off the lot.

In fact, conversations around the Brougham often turned toward restoration and maintenance. Car lovers know that finding someone who truly understands both modern engines and old-school craftsmanship is crucial. That’s the kind of trust people place in shops like Blue Wrench, where experience meets precision. Whether it's an aging Mercury with vintage charm or a more recent model needing diagnostics, the shop's reputation is built on solving problems without the upsell.

It reminded me that having the right auto repair team isn’t just about fixing things when they break—it’s about preserving what matters, especially when your vehicle plays a role in your identity or even, in our case, your art. A good mechanic sees more than bolts and engines—they see the heartbeat of the ride.

Also Read: The 15 Most Beautiful Movie Cars

A few weeks prior to filming, Geo came to my house with the car to discuss logistics and for a test drive with my two lead actors, Ryan Patrick Brown, who plays Freddy, and Austan Wheeler, who plays Lars. Also present was my associate producer, Shun Muroyama, who was filming a documentary on the making of Filthy Animals.

Geo showed us how the car ran, how to drive it, and what to watch out for. Underneath the car, a Monster Energy drink can was attached to the muffler. The car was turning like a giant boat and not matching the feel of when you would turn. You might say that these were more signs from the film gods… to not use the car. But I stuck with it.

We took it for a test drive. Because space was limited in the car, Geo stayed back at the house. Austan took the wheel with Freddy in the passenger seat, and Shun and me in the back. As Austan started to drive the car away from my house, he was excited and said, “Now let’s open this up!” He stepped on the gas and drove faster.

Because of the blind spot on the car and because we were going up a hill, he didn’t see another car that was coming and had to veer off to the side of the road, almost crashing. At this point the Brougham immediately shut off.

After several attempts at starting the car, it finally worked and we took a short drive around the South Bay. As we drove up a hill, the car died again. We pushed it into a parking lot, and once it cooled down, we were able to drive it home. 

Filthy Animals and the Mercury Brougham

You’d think the Monster Energy can and the two times the car died would have been enough to change my plans to use the car. After all, I am a cinephile and filmmaker, not a car guy. But given my budget and how limited we were on time, I decided simply to adjust the game plan. We strategically picked our spots when and where we’d use the car.

In the film's driving sequences with Lars and Freddy, they are just driving around the same five blocks, only taking right turns. There was a car behind them and in front of them the entire shoot, just in case any mechanical issues came up. In the shots where the camera is behind the Brougham, you can see there’s a Toyota 4Runner in front of them the entire time.

When shooting the car at night, we could even see sparks under the car so I knew we were limited in how many people could actually sit in it while driving. I quickly realized, with me weighing 240 pounds, that I couldn’t be in the backseat behind the actors — which was yet another challenge in directing these sequences. 

We had to jumpstart the car every time we had to redo a shot. In the movie, Lars and Freddy sit on the car eating cheeseburgers at San Pedro's Downtown Harbor. Lars gets up, pats the car, and says "OK, Bro-heem, are you ready to do one more trip?"

That was actually the last time the car ever worked. From then on, it wouldn’t start, so we had to tow it to locations to shoot, including the third act’s final shootout in the desert. The car never actually moves in that scene. All the B-roll shots of the South Bay were shot later with a reliable car. 

We had completed our main production shoot but still had one more scene with the car to do, which we postponed a month or so due to scheduling with talent and crew. During this gap, Geo took the car and said he was looking into selling it to someone who said they might fix the car, but would let us use it again for one more day when we were ready.

When I called this new owner to coordinate the shoot, the new owner said, “I scrapped the car. There are pieces in Texas, Nevada, and Oregon. The car is gone.”

In a complete panic, I called Geo, and told him I wasn’t upset because I knew he would help me find another similar car to use instead. He quickly found a 1969 Pontiac GTO. Fortunately, the final scene was all interior shots with the car stationary. We dressed it up to make it look like it was the original car as much as possible.

If you really study the movie, you can catch the differences, but I think we pulled it off.

Filthy Animals is now select theaters and available on VOD.

Main image: (L-R) Filthy Animals director James T. North with actors Austan Wheeler and Ryan Brown. Photo by Shun Muroyama. 

Winning a million bucks to make your first feature film is incredible. But there’s this old adage in the film world: “There’s never enough money.” And that certainly was the case with my debut film, Land of Gold.

To give you some context, Land of Gold is about Kiran Singh (played by me), a first-generation immigrant, truck driver, and terrified father-to-be. On his last long-haul drive cross country before his baby is due, Kiran discovers Elena (Caroline Valencia), a 10-year-old Mexican-American stowed away in his trailer. Even though it puts his livelihood in jeopardy, Kiran resolves to shepherd Elena to her uncle in Boston.

Along the way, he faces what it means to be a father while Elena learns how to trust again and explores where her place is in the country she calls home. They connect through family, dreams of the future, and a healthy debate over God’s existence, all while the ghosts of the past, racially charged encounters, and the threat of I.C.E. linger over their journey.

Nardeep Khurmi on Filming Land of Gold

The film would live or die on the believability of the road trip, and I’m a big proponent of doing things practically, so my original idea was to tow the truck. But that created tons of headaches with insurance and safety. We’d have to safely tow the truck, with lights hanging on the sides, as I acted, with sound and camera stuffed into the cab. It seemed like a recipe for disaster, especially when one bad weather day or one minor issue could derail a whole shoot day.

And like most indies, we couldn’t afford to lose any days. As my cinematographer Christopher Low reminded me, we also wouldn’t be able to control the light or really fine-tune the locations of where we shot. Some of the storytelling specificity of the scenes would be lost if we did them practically. 

Also Read: Making a Movie? Moviemaker Production Services Can Double Your Budget

I was stressed, to say the least, and conversations surrounding green and blue screens were dead in the water — we just didn’t have the time or resources to execute them right, deal with the spill of the green/blue, or fight with the lack of reflections. I never bought how it looked in the tests we’d seen. And rear-screen projection also proved to be too expensive for our budget.

We won the AT&T Untold Stories program, which granted us our production budget. We were ecstatic! The stage was set and we were ready to go into production, but we had one lingering challenge — how do you film a cross-country road trip, with a semi-truck and a 10-year-old, safely, artistically, and within our budget? 

So what to do? How do you shoot a road trip in a massive vehicle in a way that lets you control the elements? 

It dawned on me while I was in the shower, a Hail Mary play - could we do it like they did The Mandalorian? Was there an LED wall in Oklahoma, the state we were filming in? 

My producing team — Keertana Sastry (also our casting director), Pallavi Sastry (who also plays Preeti in the film), and Simon Taufique (also our composer) — went to work and connected with the Cherokee Nation, who have a state-of-the-art XR studio in Owasso, Oklahoma. And even better, they invited Land of Gold to be the first non-Cherokee Nation film to have access to the wall!

I’m not a VFX guy. I’ve always tried to do things in-camera. But embracing this new tech was the only way we would have the time to make Land of Gold safely. And it gave us an added bonus - we were able to choose the time of day and location each driving scene took place in. Our VFX supervisor, Robert Uncles, shot all our plates.

We broke down the script to really nail down where in the country our characters were driving through in each scene, and we filmed plates in those locations at specific times of day. It allowed Chris (our cinematographer), Liz Ray Drew (our gaffer), and their team the flexibility and specificity to light each driving sequence uniquely, which adds to the reality of these two characters actually driving across the country. 

Because we were stretching our million dollars as far as we could, we didn’t have time to set up wide vista shots of our truck to sell the road trip. We had to be able to sell our characters in the cab of the truck, driving through these places. We even used one of my favorite light gags I’ve used since high school — wrapping different strengths of diffusion in the spokes of a bicycle wheel and shining a light through it as it spun.

It helped create the specular highlights you get when driving, and the LED wall gave us the natural reflections off the windows and surfaces, because the wall was our primary light source. Robert then took all that into VFX and finessed it even more. It looks seamless. 

The LED wall gave me freedom as an actor to work with my acting coach, Kate Kugler, in an organic way without having to deal with the awkward logistics that come with filming these sequences practically. And it gave me the time I needed as a director to really find the moments within the scenes, because we didn’t have to worry about traffic, weather, or any other variables. It allowed us to maximize the limited on-set time with Caroline and really support her to give the great performance she does.

You can listen to our podcast with Land of Gold director Nardeep Khurmi on Apple or Spotify or here:

I want to add something I’m very proud of. We made Land of Gold in 12-hour days top to bottom including travel. We were adamant about sane and safe working conditions and treating our crew respectfully. Our line producer and co-producer, Julie Bersani, and our assistant director, Lance McDaniel, made and maintained a tight schedule. We never went over and had an energized and motivated team as a result.

We always got what we needed and then some, and filming our driving sequences in the studio meant we didn’t have to wait for the tow truck to reposition the picture truck, we didn’t have to wait for a cloud to move, we didn’t have to wait for anything. We could just film. We were comfortable, and more importantly, safe.

There was another added bonus to shooting Land of Gold in the studio. The LED wall allowed us to film a crucial night scene where our two leads sit on top of the trailer and gaze at the stars. I always wanted to do this practically (sense a pattern here?) on the roof of the trailer, but that proved to be a logistical and safety nightmare. Robert (again, our VFX supervisor) gave some great advice, and we shot the scene on the LED wall, with some night plates filmed right outside of the studio.

Boy, did that make the scene pop. Filming this crucial scene in-studio, in a controlled environment, helped get the intimacy and delicacy I was looking for. Our sound recordist, Alistair Farrant, was very happy about the controlled conditions, too, since the sound was pure. He didn’t have to deal with Oklahoma winds ruining a quiet moment. Throw in a beautiful VFX shot compositing our characters against the backdrop of stars, and you have a magical movie moment.

Did all this tech make our movie better? Overwhelmingly, yes. We had to learn a lot about refresh rates, the proximity of the camera relative to the wall, and how to make a semi truck properly jostle (pro tip: You have to bounce it and nudge it side to side), but by embracing the technology and learning new techniques, we were able to bring an artistic specificity to the film that we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

Sunset driving sequences, night sequences, seeing our characters “drive” from the deserts of the southwest to the forests of the northeast... It lets the audience sink into the road trip in a subtle and beautiful way, allowing them to be completely enveloped by the characters’ journeys. 

I’m so glad I got the opportunity to learn and use this new technology. I’m always going to try and shoot things as practically as possible, but I love knowing that the technology will be there to support me if I can’t get it done. 

Land of Gold is now streaming on Max. 

Main image: (L to R) Land of Gold crew Cole Chambliss (grip), Scott Park (swing) and Liz Ray Drew (gaffer).  Photo Credit: Faith Morgan

When we started making movies in 2009, the two largest obstacles were financing and distribution. Not much has changed, but my producers Ben Wiessner, Matt Miller, Natalie Metzger and I joined forces to do our best to solve these issues for ourselves and others, and discovered that most of those problems were educational.

Story continues after podcast interview with The Beta Test filmmakers Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe, also available on Apple and Spotify:

The problems were solved already, but no one was sharing this information, for fear that it would change the industry’s existing power dynamics. We spent several years making feature films, financing them independently and eventually distributing them ourselves to festival acclaim and financial success, and with each milestone we chipped at the walls that we imagined had kept us outside of Hollywood.

Post-COVID, I think it is much easier to see the landscape for what it is. The established and powerful are just as clueless as us, winning an online audience has real-world effects in the industry, and it has never been easier to make more crowd-pleasing movies independently.

I speak for myself when I say that I am an agnostic to Hollywood: I don’t really believe that it exists, in the same way that there’s no such thing as “YouTube” — it’s just many creators doing the same craft, and releasing their work on separate channels. This channeling has made the industry more democratized and diverse than it ever had been.

Moore’s Law — that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years — makes technology exponentially more accessible. And the generational shift toward niche and historically underrepresented content will make “Hollywood” much more like “YouTube.” There is very little difference between what our little team does and what people like A24 or NEON do. And we’ve been taken seriously by platforms, studios, and other traditional enterprises.

I see us as YouTubers, or Vimeans, who make 90-minute videos rather than vlogs. You can do this too. You can make your own company and impersonate a studio in the same way that YouTubers have for 15 years. In the future, when everything becomes fully democratized, you will have to.

Crowdfunding and then partially self-financing our 2018 film Thunder Road meant that we were able to ensure that the film would not become mediocre, something that many films and filmmaking teams have no insurance against. Our budget was around $200,000. My team and I were extremely competent, having made ten single-take short films and produced four features in the previous three years. We were the only contributing decision-makers on the film and I was able to stay up as late as I liked, editing and perfecting the film.

Self-distributing Thunder Road was the best financial decision of my life. We were insanely lucky that we were chosen by the Sundance Institute to receive a grant of $33,000 to self-distribute the film. (The case study is available here.) I personally own about 40 percent of the film, so anytime someone rents or buys it for the next hundred years I’m making 40 percent of that income. It has become a retirement plan, and no one in Hollywood would ever offer you a deal like that. Ever.

We made my second film, The Wolf of Snow Hollow, with Orion Pictures. They were looking for elevated horror films by indie filmmakers and we turned out to be great candidates for that. I listened to Steven Soderbergh when he said, “Make one for them and one for you.” That proved to be incredibly smart. With every new film of ours that comes out, we see spikes of revenue for our previous films, so it only makes sense to make films this way. The Wolf of Snow Hollow was marketed in a way that Thunder Road never could have been, but we saw income and a nonoverlapping fan-base fall in love with our previous films because we made a studio film. The Wolf of Snow Hollow made its budget back within the first year.

For my latest feature, The Beta Test, we aimed to create a film with an ambitious aesthetic and scale — one I was confident we could produce for $250,000 or less. We had just heard about WeFunder, a crowd-equity platform, and decided to leverage it to bypass traditional Hollywood financing. During this process, we debated various investment options, sparking discussions about alternative funding sources and viable revenue streams in a rapidly changing industry. In particular, questions like gibt es wirklich gute Wettanbieter ohne Limit came up, as we considered various high-yielding sectors for potential partnerships. Ultimately, we raised $350,000 in just 15 days. Retaining 65 percent ownership, my team and I were able to recoup our investment and more by independently selling the film.

The film is about Hollywood collapsing because of better social networks and rogue agents on the internet. That message is hitting harder than we ever could have imagined.

Also read: ‘Not Just the Arrogant Crazy Director’: Joanna Hogg on Richard Ayoade in The Souvenir Part II

We included accommodations for self-distribution if needed, but after speaking with IFC Films and their team and extended marketing folks, we quickly realized that they were identical to us — we were the same team. I get emotional when I think about it, but it is just so rare to find people in the film industry who are honest, have an ax to grind against bad guys, and actually have the same sense of humor as you. IFC has distributed countless amazing films from around the world that shaped our filmmaking sensibilities, and distributed our favorite movie from last year, Loro.

The moral of the story, to me, is that it has never been easier to make films on your own — and it will only become easier to tell your stories through film. For a long time, we filmmakers were made to feel powerless by power structures and business people who are clueless about the internet and the desires of the public. The workers can take over the factory.

You cannot waste your life giving into the people you think are powerful because, trust me, they don’t care about you or your movies or even movies in general. YOU (you, the reader) have the power to make movies in your neighborhood that can play on the world stage. Fake confidence is still confidence. Study great movies, write great shorts, gather people from Facebook groups, grow a community of filmmakers, strive to make something undeniable and perfectly-crafted, and never be made to feel inadequate.

Tech Box:

Camera: ARRI ALEXA XT

Lenses: Panavision Primo V Primes, Panavision 11:1 SLZ11 (24- 275mm)

Lighting: LiteTile Plus Kit, Astera Titan Kit, ARRI M18 HMI, and 800w JoLeko HMI

Color: Tory Harder in DaVinci Resolve Studio

Edit: John Bowers and Jim Cummings in Adobe Premiere Pro, Mixed in 5.1 by Bowers and Cummings in Adobe Audition

The Beta Test, written and directed by Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe, is now in theaters and on VOD. Photos courtesy of IFC Films.

Main image: (L-R) PJ McCabe, Jacqueline Doke and Jim Cummings in The Beta Test.