How to Make a Movie

Video Transcript

"OKay folks, in this clip we're going to talk about how to make a movie. Whether you've got five million dollars or you're shooting this on a shoestring budget with your home little video camera, the essential elements will be the same. You're going to first of all, need a good story, a unique story, a story that's compelling. Then that story is going to need to turn into a good script. You're going to either have to bring on a good writer or you yourself are going to have to write an incredible script. One that reads from beginning to end, people don't want to put it down, it's full of depth and full of characterization, and just really a well told story on the page. Once you have the page you're going to have to bring on a group of people to work with you. Now this is incredibly important as is, just as important as getting a good story. You want a good creative team, a good producer, someone who can essentially handle the business side of your movie venture. You're going to want to bring on a good crew to work with you in terms of camera, lighting, set design, costume design. Even if these are your buddies in your college dorm room, or in your high school audio video class, or you're actually hiring professionals. You need to get a good group of people that are A. devoted to you, hardworking, and are not flaky. This is incredibly important. You bring on flaky people, the whole thing is going to suffer. After you've got your crew in place the next step is casting. You're going to want to cast the right actors for the roles. Hold auditions or approach people that you might think are perfectly suited for a certain type of role in the film. Get the movie cast. This is incredibly important as well. Once you have all the pieces in play you're going to want to set up a production schedule that everyone is OKay with and start shooting your movie. If it's an independent film and you're shooting on a relatively small budget you're going to have to do it, obviously when people are free. But try and schedule everything as close together as you possibly can. If you spread it out over months, you're going to see a lot of continuity problems, and it will be really hard to edit together. So make as tightly a compact shooting schedule as possible. After it's wrapped, after you're done shooting, you're going to move into the editing phase. Hopefully you have either a good editor on your crew, or you yourself are a good editor because this is also incredibly important. This is essentially where the story, all the puzzle pieces come together. The editing phase. Take as much time as you need to get the edit right. The final cut needs to move people, needs to be exciting, needs to have life to it. Editing comes next. After that all the little areas of adding final sound effects, adding additional dialog maybe narration. Obviously you're going to want to find a composer or find some royalty free music online that you can add as the score to your movie because music is very important as well. Once this is all done, you can submit the film to film festivals and put it online on different websites. And the sky is the limit. And that is essentially, step by step, how you make your own movie."