Category: Film

Lights, Camera, Action! a Guide to Film Locales in Orlando

Ryan Wiseman asked:

Although Central Florida has never quite lived up to its reputation as “Hollywood East,” many classic – and some extremely medicore – movies have been shot in the Orlando area over the years. The brief list below highlights some of the more notable films that were partly or wholly shot in Central Florida, as well as one cult movie that boasts a significant connection to the Orlando area:

Parenthood [1989] – Directed by Ron Howard, Parenthood starred Steve Martin, Mary Steenburgen, Jason Robards, Tom Hulce, Joaquin Phoenix, Dianne Wiest and Keanu Reeves. Although this comedy/drama dealt with the trials and tribulations of a “Midwestern” family, many scenes were shot in Central Florida, including Orlando, College Park and Altamonte Springs. The birthday scene was shot at the now-defunct Mystery Fun House across from Universal Orlando.

Lethal Weapon 3 [1992] – The building that gets blown up in the opening sequence of the film is actually the old Orlando City Hall building, which had been scheduled for demolition anyway. The rest of Lethal Weapon 3 was filmed elsewhere.

Trekkies [1997] – This hilarious documentary on obsessive Star Trek fans profiled a Central Florida dentist, Dr. Denis Bourguignon, who had opened a “Starbase Dental” office full of Star Trek memorabilia and whose staff wore Star Trek uniforms.

The Blair Witch Project [1998] – Although this incredibly successful independent movie was filmed entirely in Maryland, its director and cast all graduated from the University of Central Florida (UCF). Made for about $35,000, The Blair Witch Project eventually grossed nearly $250 million worldwide.

The Waterboy [1998] – The “Bourbon Bowl” game at the end of the movie was filmed at the Citrus Bowl in downtown Orlando. Many of the extras in the scene were UCF students. The Waterboy starred Adam Sandler as “Robert ‘Bobby’ Boucher Jr.,” as well as Kathy Bates and Henry Winkler.

Monster [2003] – Charlize Theron captured an Oscar as “Best Actress” for her portrayal of ********** and serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was executed for a notorious killing spree during the 1980s. Monster, which also starred Christina Ricci and Bruce Dern, was shot entirely in Central Florida.

Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector [2006] – Larry the Cable Guy (real name: Dan Whitney) resides in Sanford, Florida, and his film debut was shot entirely on location in Orlando. Judging by the myriad of negative reviews, critics seemed decidedly underwhelmed by Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector and a sequel appears unlikely.

In addition, before Disney closed its Central Florida animation studio at Disney-MGM Studios in 2003, a number of animated films were worked on there such as Mulan (1998), Lilo & Stitch (2002) and Brother Bear (2003), among others. The space is now occupied by an attraction called The Magic of Disney Animation, a behind-the-scenes look at the animation process.

“Disney-MGM Studios still maintains a backlot tram tour that takes you past movie sets and props, as well as Catastrophe Canyon, a showcase for state-of-the-art special effects,” said Kyle Collins, Director of Interactive Marketing for HotelsCorp.com. “In addition, both Disney-MGM Studios and Universal Studios feature a variety of rides and attractions based on popular movies such as Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, Beauty & the Beast, Star Tours, The Great Movie Ride, Revenge of the Mummy, Men in Black Alien Attack, Back to the Future the Ride and Twister . . . Ride it Out, among others.”

Central Florida is also home to the Florida Film Festival, a 10-day event in early April that features American independent films, foreign films, documentaries, regional and family films, animation, narrative films and midnight movies. Past attendees have included Dennis Hopper, Steve Buscemi, William H. Macy and Oliver Stone. The Florida Film Festival takes place at the Enzian Theater in Maitland.

The Fantastic Films of Fellini

Russell Shortt asked:

Fellini was always something of a maverick – he never formally trained nor did he ever frequent the cinema clubs that screened the work of the dominant Italian directors. He was greatly more influenced by Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton, Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. He drew inspiration from many different elements, film being well down the pecking order with cartoons, radio comedy and caricature sketches being more dominant in his thinking. However, his greatest influence was himself or at least the memories that he possessed of his life was, his films were intensely autobiographical. In addition, Fellini maintained that it was his wife, Giulietta Masina, who was the biggest influence on his work. In 1945, he received his first break in film, when he collaborated on the script of Roberto Rossellini’s neo-realist masterpiece Open City. He made his directorial debut in 1950 with Variety Lights, this was followed by The White Sheik (1951) and I Vitelloni (1953). These films were squarely based in the neo-realist tradition, they were distinguished by their absurdist nature and their empathy towards their eccentric characters. He gained international recognition with La Strada (1954), the story of an innocent young woman (Masina) who is sold by her family to a circus strongman. Fellini diluted his neo-realist roots by peppering the piece with surrealist scenes. La Strada also marked the beginning of a life-long collaboration with Nino Rota who wrote the film’s powerful score. Fellini’s masterpieces arrived in the early sixties – La Dolce Vita (1960) and 81/2 (1963).

La Dolce Vita was shot beautifully, providing countless striking and lingering images, it was a worldwide success. It satirised Italian society and it’s hedonist obsessions, it was condemned by the Catholic Church for it’s casual treatment of ******* and it’s sexual themes; the Italian government also condemned it because of it’s criticisms of Italian society. The international film community now waited to see what Fellini would do next, he answered them with genius, he made a film about a director who did not know what film to make next. Surrealism dominated the work, with no clear demarcation between fantasy and reality. His first movie in colour was Juliet of the Spirits which once again starred Masina, who played a troubled upper class housewife. However, the film was not a success with the critics who for the first time attacked him for being self-indulgent. However, it aged well and is now viewed as a feminist film way ahead of it’s time. Elements of breaking with convention in Juliet were to be taken to the limit in his 1970 film, Fellini Satryricon, which at times is utterly incomprehensible. He completely abandoned conventional narrative and would continue to do so for much of his subsequent work. Satryricon split critics, some saw it as a continuation of Fellini’s self-indulgence while others viewed it as the embryonic stage of a new type of non-linear cinema that was relative to end of the sixties in that it examined an imaginary past as opposed to an imaginary future. However, his work after Satryicon was less acclaimed and his voice within world cinema was less and less heard. The one exception to this, was his 1974 work Amarcord which was his fourth film to receive an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film. But he began to find it harder and harder to guarantee financial backing and distribution, though he continued to make films until 1990 that in retrospect are influential as Fellini continued to follow his vision. At the 1993, Academy Awards ceremony he was awarded a special Oscar for lifetime achievement in filmmaking which he dedicated to Masina.

How to Write a Film Review

Jonathan Mason asked:

Writing a film review can be fun and a way of giving your opinion about a film you have seen. It will also broaden your appreciation of films and help people from wasting money on a bad film. If you are lucky you might even get the chance to have your reviews published and get paid for it.

The stepping stones for writing a film review

Step One

Watch a film. Even if you think it will be bad. You don’t just want to see movies that you know you are going to like. How will you be able to compare the good and bad movies then?

Step Two

Write down some things to remember during the film or do some online research – www.imdb.com has a lot of information about most films. Write down the names of the stars, director, screenwriter and the year it was made. Note how long the film is and give it a rating.

Step Three

Take time to let the film soak into your brain. Think about it for a few hours and then begin writing. Let your appreciation or distaste wear off a bit so you don’t write too emotionally. At this time you should think about the set. Were the costumes well made? Were the characters believable?

Step Four

Who do you think this film is aimed at? Will this be enjoyed by children, university grads or is it a date movie? It is the general public who will be reading a newspaper review, not a group of film freaks wanting you to dissect every inch of a film.

Step Five

Start with the introduction. Most film review readers like to be entertained by the review, so think up a good line to hook the reader or a theme for your review.

Step Six

Start writing the review. Include the basic plot of the movie and cover the major events but do not give away the surprise ending. People want to know about the film but not told everything. You almost want to entice people to go if it is good and keep them away if it is bad. Movie reviews are typically 250 to 500 words.

Step Seven

Discuss relevant parts of the film. Include your opinion of the direction, script, actors and photography.

Step Eight

Writing a movie review is perfect for blogging

For more tips visit www.happymotivator.com for free writing advice

Suv Owners What you Should Know About Factory Tint Versus Installed Window Film

Mike Feldman asked:

Most, if not all new 2008 Model SUV’s and Mini-Vans come equipped with a dark 15% visible light transmission “factory tint” on vehicle windows other than the front driver and passenger windows and of course, the windshield. Most consumers believe that since the glass is already tinted there is no need to install an after market window film other than potentially matching their front windows to the existing tinted glass. SUV owners are not aware that the factory tinted glass has a very limited heat rejection coefficient and in most cases virtually no ultraviolet; UVA or UVB reduction! Sure the glare is reduced by nearly 80% and your passengers have additional privacy, but the heat gain through factory tinted glass is very often extreme and the UV remains un-blocked!

There are two issues that a professional window film installer will consider when approaching a factory tinted vehicle. The first is the critical requirement to “match” the color of the aftermarket window film and the flat reflectivity; or rather non reflective, elements of the “factory tinted” glass. It makes little sense for an SUV driver to install a window tint that is shiny or a completely different color hue as compared to the balance of their vehicle’s glass. This issue is resolved by having a non reflective ceramic window film installed like the FormulaOne Series Pinnacle window films or the nano-ceramic Huper Optik German Technology Window Films. In both instances the front driver and passenger window will have a perfect color match to the rear glass. FormulaOne Dealers http://www.formulaone.com are all quite familiar with their local state tint laws and will only install front window visible light transmission films VLT that meet the statutes. In Florida that requirement is a 28% VLT for front windows. The installation of window film on a windshield is expressly forbidden with the exception of a strip that is frequently installed on the top of the windshield glass from the interior right up to the AS1 line. The aftermarket professionally installed films have nearly 99.9% UVA and UVB rejection and heat rejection at a factor of double or more compared to the “factory tinted” rear windows. Many SUV drivers will have a very light 50% VLT film or higher installed on their interior glass on the “factory tinted” glass to gain double the heat rejection and UV rejection without adding any additional reflectivity to the glass! In addition with the rapid growth of on-board electronics and BlueTooth technology these Pinnacle and Huper Optik Films will not interfere with EM signals that also relate to GPS, radar detectors or premium satellite radio like XM or Sirius. Several other window film manufacturers have or are in the process of introducing their own non metallic high performance window films.

SUV owners should recognize that they have only tackled one very small portion of their tinting requirements! This is a new age in technology and there are solutions available that will match any budget.

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Marketing A Film: The Movie Trailers

Victor Epand asked:

Trailers are film advertisements that are meant for films that will be released in the near future for public viewing. They are actually a sequence of selected shots from the films concerned. The main aim of any movie trailer is to make the audience aware of the film so that their interest and curiosity could be raised. The sequences that one finds in trailers are generally not in order, as it will appear in the film. Generally, a trailer lasts not more than two and a half minutes.

One interesting fact about movie trailers is that the sequences that one find in trailers are not inevitably to be used in the original movies. The trailers are embroidered in such a way that the audiences are charmed by its magic and makes sure that they are going to watch the film. Keeping this fact in mind the catchy, striking, electrifying excerpts of the films are taken and transformed into sequences of the trailers.

The above mentioned fact can be supported with two examples. In the film ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ the trailers included some sophisticated special effects scenes, that were never intended to be used in the film. But the trailers created a major hype among the audience and the film became a blockbuster. Hitchcock’s Psycho used this same technique in the year 1960. The trailer of the film featured that the famous director was offering a guided tour of Bates Motel and in the end arriving at the infamous shower. He throws the curtain of the shower and the chilling blood curdling scream is revealed.

Miramax’s Hero was released two years after the trailers started showing. During this period trailers were constantly broadcast in order to draw a huge audience.

Sometimes the people who make the trailers start on with their work while the film is still in its making process. This happens because the trailer editor can work right from the unedited version of the film. The editor can use any particular shot or footage that may or may not be used in the final version of the film or movie. Not only shots, sometimes the editor uses music also which is not necessarily used in the original soundtrack of the movie.

The contents of a trailer generally include the logos of the production company and the distributor, and a list of the names of major cast and crew. One can say that to some extent the trailers are the outputs of extensive market research that are conducted or based on the various locations. Now-a-days trailers are such an important part of the film publicity that one can find agencies called trailer houses that specialize in creating trailers.

Movie trailers form a very important component in the marketing of a movie. To some extent it determines the performance of a film in the box office. Like Academy awards there are two main awards that are meant for wonderful movie trailers. The Golden Trailer Award offered by the famous Hollywood Reporter is considered as one the most important award for movie trailers.

Promoting a Film Festival for the Long Tail: a Digital Marketing Case Study

Paul Burani asked:

Since the birth of the moving picture, film has played an important role in the way people experience culture worldwide. This is apparent at the 400 film festivals which take place around the globe each year. These events give talented artists a venue to promote their work in front of a qualified, interested audience.

Like any dynamic art form, film is forever changing. New digital media have placed unknown independent artists on the same playing field as their more established, commercially-backed counterparts. Moreover, as access to cyberspace has become more universal, reaching the right audience has never been so easy.

Why is this? Because of “The Long Tail.” Originally an abstract concept introduced in a WIRED Magazine article from 2006, The Long Tail is now a mantra of digital marketing. Applied to marketing in film, the pre-Long Tail mentality was to conceptualize an artistic work with a specific target in mind, and then develop it to invite as big an audience as possible. Marketers would then direct their resources toward the audience within distribution range.

The goal was to make the next big summer blockbuster. But according to Chris Anderson, the author of the article, “hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody.” In other words, a new day has come.

In a post-Long Tail awakened world, we’ve found that most people’s taste in film goes beyond just mainstream appeal. With the recent onset of a limitless distribution range, the audience dynamic is changing. An American producer whose film deals with even the most esoteric subject matter now has its niche audience at arm’s length. Using the right digital marketing tactics, the filmmaker can draw those people in without burning through resources they way they might have during the pre-Long Tail era.

Filmmakers, now freed from the shackles of heavy distribution burdens, can finally create that masterpiece that was once deemed implausible. And with a continued stream of artists looking for exposure, the film festival industry now has the scale to reach far and wide…and find willing consumers around every corner. This is why, according to Anderson, the “cultural benefit of all of this is much more diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit.”

Step-by-step: How to market a film festival to a Long Tail audience.

1) Create a home for your festival on the net.

Give your contestants a platform on which they can share a trailer of the film they plan to promote at your festival. Allow visitors to vote on the trailers, with a thumbs-up/thumbs-down or one-to-five-stars approach. This allows the best ones to rise to the top, creating a channel of the highest quality content, which can be used to draw in a large audience. This widens the timeline for audience engagement, and gives you a vehicle to convey supporting messages related to the festival itself.

You want a website where entrants can upload a trailer with minimal technical know-how. The easiest way to do this is to use YouTube as the host. Users worldwide simply create their own profile and/or channel on YouTube, submit their content, and then provide your site with a URL or embed code to the video. Each trailer then has its own landing page on your festival’s site, and should be accompanied by “Send To A Friend” and “Download To Your iPod” links, along with submission links for social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us.

(Note – It is important to limit the length of the trailer (two minutes would be a good round number), and make sure that the actual length of the YouTube video is clearly visible on your site. If a video requires a time commitment, a lot of people will click away without even looking.)

Make sure your site is scalable, in the event that you receive ten times the traffic you expected. Even if you are focused on quality content, be prepared for massive quantity as well. Your web developer needs to make you very confident that your site won’t buckle under pressure.

You’ll also want to add search capability (this is easy with Google Custom Search) do some user testing, or consult a usability expert on making your festival’s website as navigable as possible. Invest in good analytics software to follow trends in visits,

pageviews, referrals, keyword-driven traffic, and so on.

2) Give your festival a personality.

If your festival has a theme, make it very evident. Brand it consistently, from the copy writing to the graphic design to the outbound marketing communications. Everything must boil down to the seminal concept of what your festival is about. If it’s abstract, e.g. “good independent film,” that’s fine as long as you remain consistent.

Offer an incentive. Partner with local organizations in the host city, e.g. the Chamber of Commerce or a local Arts Council. Find a major event taking place which could benefit from a partnership; your contestants’ work might be a major asset to their program. The grand prize, apart from whatever you already decide to offer the winner(s), is the visibility of being associated with these organizations…and thus get in front of a large audience.

3) Define your stakeholders.

Your directors and producers are the ones supplying quality content–the lifeblood of your site and your best promotional asset leading up to the festival.

Your visitors are your primary source of feedback. Leverage their opinions wisely and you’ll find many ways to bring them back to your site, and to your festival–along with their friends.

The general public is the 6 billion people living on this planet. Some don’t have computers. Some don’t like film. But in line with The Long Tail concept, reaching just about everybody else is relatively easy…and the enthusiasts will come out of the woodwork.

Keep these people satisfied at every stage of your campaign, and your marketing engine will keep things moving with minimal intervention on your part.

4) Establish measurable goals.

How many directors do you think you could get to sign up? How many people would you like to visit the site and vote on trailers? How many views do you think a trailer of an eventual award-winner ought to receive? Arrive at a low, medium and high estimate, with a timeline of projections, and constantly measure your progress.

5) Leverage digital media channels to the fullest.

Social Networking. With a little bit of research, you can find the right social networking sites to target for your campaign. To leverage Long Tail potential to the fullest, use a network like Facebook or Myspace to co-brand content and engage new groups of people.

Facebook – Create a Facebook profile for each member of the organizing committee, and use this to administrate a dedicated Facebook Group. Have your developer create a Facebook application allowing artists to embed their trailer in their profile, with a module to solicit ratings on films. For viewers, the application should offer “on-demand” rankings of all trailers posted (across the entire Facebook network) to encourage healthy competition. It is also helpful to add calendar integration for notification of important dates in your mini-feed, and of course links back to the festival website and blog. If your festival features content from around the world, why not add a real-time updating

world map showing geographical location of all participating artists?

Myspace – On this network, you’re faced with a tradeoff. This is still the best place for artists (and art lovers) to nurture their passion. However, it may also be harder for you to cut through the spam and build a meaningful campaign. Compared to Facebook, spend far less time administrating the Myspace profile. It should simply be a “content dump” with regularly rotating trailers and blog content.

If you have a lot of manpower at your disposal, also consider a targeted approach to some of the industry-specific sites such as Flixster, MatrixMovies and Revver.

Search engines. Getting your festival to appear prominently in search engines requires an orientation toward dynamic content and inbound links. Start a festival blog in which organizers can collaborate to upload content on a daily basis. This will push a variety of relevant keywords out into cyberspace, tied to your website to bring people back for more.

For added juice, open the blog up to the general public — if the public is properly engaged, the volume of content will grow at a furious pace, along with the number of inbound links to your site. With a little creativity, you won’t have trouble coming up with original content: event news, featured films, press mentions, staff picks, etc. Make sure all blog content is accompanied by chicklets (links for easy posting) to popular social media sites, to increase the number of viral touch points.

If particular video content speaks to a particular audience, weed out the leaders of each category and make them aware of what you’re doing. Use Technorati to find the most prominent bloggers in these categories, and approach them personally and individually, offering them your content and/or reciprocal links.

Find every event site related to film, digital media, arts & culture, as well as the city where your event will be hosted. Create a reference sheet containing your event’s title, a short description, a long list of comma-separated tags, a shorter version of the same list, and other pertinent information which will need to be standardized across all submissions. Put on a pot of coffee and hammer away.

It would also help to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant to handle the keyword strategy and tactical implementation. This will make your pages friendly to the spiders sent out by Google, Yahoo! and the like.

Email Communications. Decide your strategy from the very beginning: do you force everyone (directors and audience) to register, thereby creating a nice long distribution list? Or do you scale back the mandatory registration, requiring registration only to post content? You can also find a middle ground, offering certain incentives for opt-in (such as winning a pair of free all-access passes to the festival). The registration module will allow you to also collect additional demographic information (city/state, age, gender, etc.) but if you go this route, make sure you have given some thought to your privacy policy.

Sponsorship. This will vary based on your resources and network. If you have advertisers on board for a lot of money, your marketing communications will give you a variety of venues to feature them (website banners, emails, plus your entire arsenal of offline marketing assets). If you have no major sponsors but still want to explore advertising revenue, you can always use a program like Google AdSense for a very customizable on-page sponsored link campaign.

Downtime. After your festival, you’ll be faced with a decision: do we want to do this again next year? You may not be ready to decide right away, but there’s plenty you can do to capitalize on the momentum of your event, to keep marketing your concept.

Ongoing global link sharing campaign with partners of various categories

Blog coverage of other major film festivals

In-depth profiles of festival award-winners

Discovery of worthy short films not originally submitted to the festival site

Film industry interviews (available as podcasts)

Conclusion

Once all these elements of your digital marketing campaign are off the ground, the last thing to do is convey your scope to your artists. You’re in the festival business, which in 2008 means you’re hardly concerned with the manufacturing and distribution concerns of the filmmakers. But this talented constituency is still waking up to the opportunities of the Long Tail economy.

If you have the numbers, give your artists a pat on the back by showing them the geographic reach of your festival. Repackage the most compelling feedback on submitted videos into a rotating “ticker” in the banner of your website. Do whatever you can to give these filmmakers–the authors of content without which you’d be in business–an extra incentive to keep going.

In a world in which, as Anderson says, “popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability,” we’ll all be better off because of it.

6 Worst Films in Cinema History

Jack Reider asked:

You will not find Citizen Cane in this list. You will read here neither about Academy Award winners nor about movies that have changed the world of films. You will read here about films that the only thing they are remembered about is how bad they are.

Here is list of the worst films ever hit the big screens.

1) Plan 9 from Outer Space

Thanks to its mumbled plot, unbelievably odd dialogue, clumsy acting, corny production design, and ridiculous special effects, the low budget film of 1956 was announced in several occasions, including in a Seinfeld episode, as the worse film ever made and honored its maker, Ed Wood, as the worse director in film history. Plan 9, in short, tells the story of space invaders who aim to take over the world and raise people from the dead. The leading role of an old man in a Dracula costume who is coming out of the dead was shared by still photos of the late actor Bela Lugosi and by the younger, taller and balder Tom Mason.

2) The Conqueror

Even though The Conqueror is the opposite of a low budget film, since Howard Hughes had invested in it about 12 million dollars back in 1956; Although it featured huge Hollywood star John Wayne as Genghis Khan, The Conqueror remains one of largest disasters in film history. When adding to its lack of reliability, poor acting, ridiculous dialogues and unbelievably stupid custom design the rumors that the shooting in an atomic testing range caused to the death of its cast of cancer. And when considering the fact that it was the last film production of Hughes who later became a solitary weirdo, the result has to be either a huge embracement or a cult movie.

3) Che!

1969 Che! is yet another failed biopic that prefers to ignore historical facts and to depict living people in a ridiculous manner. In this particular case, Omar Sharif poorly plays Che Guevara while Jack Palance demonstrates his comedy talent in the role of Fidel Castro. At the same time, the screenwriters have chosen to ignore trivial historic facts such as all the part of the formative pre Cuban revolution. In addition, Che! was considered an offensive film in the South America countries and the Argentinean audience welcomed it with Molotov cocktails.

4) Glitter

The debut acting film of singer Mariah Carey from 2001 had entered to the worst films list for setting new standards of sentimental kitsch in the anyway clich? genre of the rise to fame of a poor but talented girl. Glitter obviously targets her pre teens fans; it is the only way to explain the holes in the plot, the banal characters, not to mention the poor acting and directing.

5) Gigli

The huge media attention given to the leading stars of Gigli: Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, or Bennifer, did not help it from becoming one of the biggest box office flops of the 2000s. Theoretically, the original screenplay did have a potential of turning into a decent dark comedy. However, the screenplay was written and added unreasonably changes and some romantic scenes were added in order to entice celebrity magazines readers. The result was so bad that Lopez acting seemed like a demonstration of delicacy and talent comparing to the other performances.

6) Swept Away

By 2002, it was clear that only a miracle could save Madonna’s acting career from being remembered as a sequence of embarrassing flops. The remake of the 1974 Italian film of the same name directed by Guy Ritchie, her husband and up until Swept Away was released, a critically acclaimed director was not the miracle you were hoping for, unless you were hoping to name Madonna as the worse actress in film history.

You Must Live In The World Of Independent Film

Michael Connelly asked:

There is a general perception amongst the public that the art of filmmaking these days belongs to Wall Street and major studios with giant budgets. But the fact of the matter is that you really do not need millions of dollars to make an independent film. You can make a movie for a fraction of what most Hollywood films cost if the right people and film production methods are employed. However, if you want to make a quality low budget movie on a shoestring budget you must immerse yourself in the world of independent filmmakers.

Most people who watch movies never even consider the fact that they could actually make a film themselves. When they hear that Spiderman 3 cost about 250 million dollars to make and the latest movie about Billy The Kid starring Brad Pitt cost around 40 million, a low budget movie by Hollywood standards, who can blame them.

There are ways to circumvent the traditional movie making process to get your film made. For instance, if you can assemble a tight cast and crew of talented people who are just as passionate about independent filmmaking as you and are willing to do more than they are being paid to do, then your film production costs can be reduced dramatically. They keys to making an independent film with a small amount of money is finding people who love to make films and then selling them on your story.

To find independent filmmakers who are willing to give you more work for less pay in the name of artistic freedom, or just because they need work you need to go to places where they hang out. This can be done online at any of the film production based websites out there that post job listings and information about the film industry. You will find many of them by doing a Google search with keywords like independent filmmakers, independent film, or film production. These sites list jobs, production companies, cast and crew available, post production houses, film labs and just about anything that has to do with making movies.

You can find most of the information you need to make a low budget movie online, but if you really want to find a quality cast and crew you need to get down in the trenches where the independent filmmakers work. You need to go and meet them in person.

The best place to find potential crew members is to visit the equipment rental houses in your area. You can get their addresses by doing an Internet search using the keywords film equipment rental with the name of the nearest major city. This is where the camera people, sound people, grips and the like all go to pick up and drop off equipment for projects they are working on. Many of the people working behind the counters are also people who have their own equipment packages. They would love to get out from behind the counter on weekends to work on an independent film. Spending time at these places, whether you are renting equipment or posting your business card on their work board is a sure way to find quality crew members to work on your low budget movie.

The best way to find quality actors who are willing to work for much less than they are worth is to spend time at professional acting classes. You can find many of them by doing a Google search using the keywords acting classes with the name of the nearest major city in your area. Contact the teachers of some classes and ask them to allow you to sit in on a couple of their classes. Be up front and tell them you are looking for quality actors to be in your low budget movie.

If you really want to get to know potential actors for your film then it would be a good idea to enroll in a class or two yourself. You can forge a working relationship with the actors on a much more intimate level if you are in a class with them. If the class is large enough, you are always going to find at least a few good actors who would love to work on your independent film for very little pay. You may even learn a thing or two about how to act yourself. If you can play one or more of the roles in your movie then that will also save you money for it means less actors to pay.

Celebrating 25 Years of the Miami International Film Festival

Paul McIndoe asked:

Centered on the campus of Miami Dade College, the annual Miami International Film Festival began in 1983, promoting not only thought provoking film but also encouraging cultural understanding and tolerance; a fact made evident by the festival’s emphasis on Latin film making, set against the backdrop of Miami’s multi cultural communities.

Throughout the years, the Miami Film Festival has been the breeding ground for a selection of diverse films and events, offering not only new film makers the opportunity to showcase their efforts in a multi cultural metropolis, but industry professionals too. Influential film makers, including Spike Lee and Luc Besson, have screened their work at the festival in the past, while distributors such as HBO, Fox Searchlight and Miramax have taken part in the presentation of some of the business programs available at the festival.

The diverse and unique nature of the films on offer during the festival is reflected in the choice of screening venues, with three of the theatres used being historic landmarks, including the Gusman Center – a grand, elegant movie theatre ideal for the major red carpet events and the Tower Theatre, conveniently situated in the Little Havana neighbourhood of Miami and vibrant with different cultures. Other theatres include the Colony Theatre on Lincoln Road in the heart of South Beach’s Art Deco district, as well as screenings at the University of Miami’s central campus.

The 25th anniversary of the festival also marks the fifth year of the ground breaking Encuentros program; giving Spanish and Latin American artists the opportunity to present their latest projects to U.S and International industry professionals, helping to build connections and contacts in the industry. With the Festival boasting more than 1300 relationships with national and international press organisations, the Miami Film Festival is the ideal platform for new artists to showcase their talent.

Outstanding work is encouraged with a $25,000 prize going to the leaders in a number of categories, with prize-money donated by the Knight Foundation, an organisation promoting journalistic excellence worldwide. One of the biggest supporters of the Miami area in general, the foundation has invested over $148 million in the vitality of Miami since 1950.

Last year’s event saw the hotels in Miami packed with more than three hundred directors, actors, film makers and writers as well as 70,000 film fans who flocked to the city to sample the 120 films being screened. This year is set to be even bigger with an educational and thought-provoking experience on offer to all the visitors to the 25th Miami International Film Festival this February.