How to Produce an Indie Film

Series Summary

The development of film came alongside the rise of America as a world empire. The technology developed in the late 19th to early 20th century and quickly became a staple of modern culture and mass consumption. Many trace the beginning of film to a moment also considered the advent of the comic strip as we know it: Eadweard Muybridge's famous pictures of a horse's stride, which proved that in fact there is a moment when all four hooves are off the ground. This series of photos looked like a comic yet sparked a crazy idea in the minds of other artists: What if we took pictures like that and flashed them in sequence like in children’s flipbooks? The birth of celluloid film ten years later came in Louis Le Prince's "Roundhay Garden Scene." In this free video series, professional filmmaker Kevin Lindenmuth gives you expert advice on how to produce your own independent film. He leads you through everything! And his video quality is excellent! This guy knows his stuff and is a born teacher. He explains what you need to start a movie and how to budget, cast, shoot, edit, and distribute your finished product. Kevin has been there! He knows. He also shares ideas on how to choose subject matter, how to use music in the film, and much more. Watch these, and you’ll be ready for the Academy in no time!

Video Transcript

"I will be talking about filmmaking. With filmmaking you need, first three basic things. You need to have a camera. You need to have lights, and you need to have audio. With the camera nowadays I would say you would need a digital camera. If you want to make something for like a festival, a short, something for YouTube, or even an independent film. You want the quality to be as good as possible and as up to date, so no using old SVHS cameras or Hi 8 or anything like that. Just make sure you use digital whether it be mini DV or even a disk. It'll just hold up the next decade or so at least. And as far as cameras, you can buy the consumer one, you can get them as cheap as four-hundred dollars. You could up to HD where you're spending four-thousand dollars. It just depends on what you want to be doing, if you're going to be making a short film just for yourself, just to show your friends, it's a little bit different than if you're making something specifically for a film festival or if you want to make a feature or documentary that's going to be seen by a wide group of people. So you have to know kind of what you're going to be doing. In terms of lights, you just make sure if you're doing an interview, that your subject is well-lit. There's different styles of lighting but it's just kind of a given that you have to be able to see clearly what you're taping. Another thing with the lights is really important is when you're interviewing somebody or have somebody on the camera that you actually see the light reflected in their eyes. It just makes them a lot more engaging and it's an important thing. It just makes it more watchable for whatever reason. And audio, camera mics are good in some cases if you're close to the person. Otherwise external microphones, like a wireless microphone like what I have on now, or a boom mic or whatever. Audio has to be clear, and in fact audio is probably one of the most important things. This sounds kind of weird, but people would more likely watch something that doesn't look so good, that has really good audio, as long as they can hear it, they're fine, rather than have something that looks really, really good and the audio is all crackly and they can't hear anything. That seems to irritate people more and that is more unacceptable. That is probably the biggest mistake doing any production is having bad sound, you just do not want to have bad sound. So the three things, camera, lights, and audio."