When I made my first feature, I spent tens of thousands of dollars on it and I never really got it back. I guess you could say it was a bad idea.
But it’s been really beneficial for my career. It helped foster relationships and opportunities that have allowed me to stay in the game. How is that a failure?
Time and effort invested in yourself is never wasted.
With filmmaking and the arts in general, rewards come back to you in other ways, and even financially it’s not a linear path.
Artistically I made Bad Animal because I had to put something out in the world. It was both the execution of a dream and an expansion of my vision beyond what I actually thought I was capable of.
As it turned out, that was a pretty attractive idea. Producers and other would-be creators found me as a resource to help bring their projects to life. Much of my current team’s work flows from the opportunities created by my film.
OK then, where do short films fit into the mix?
I would argue in the modern film economy, format is irrelevant. You could make something 5 minutes or 5 hours. Commercial viability is derived from marketing and packaging.
Of course the work matters most of all. But that’s the freeing part. You can look at the decline of traditional distribution and studios as an opportunity lost, or you could use it to empower a level of creative potential that just wasn’t possible before.
That’s the part of budget conversations that gets left out. People talk about what a project costs and what it earns. They don’t talk about what a project does for your identity, for your process, and how you learn to put work out into the world.
I wouldn’t recommend spending tens of thousands on a first project today. After 15 years and a dozen plus short films, my last one cost $6,000 and the one before that cost $5,000.
The full breakdown of how I think about budget tiers is in today’s video. But the takeaway from the feature still holds. The film you make is always going to be a thousand times more valuable than the amazing project that someone has developed but never had the gumption to go after and make. I’m still making my own films and stringing it together myself because I guess I won’t take no for an answer.
Watch the full breakdown on YouTube
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