Barry_Green
Moderator
Depends on who the "you" is though.
A producer is an artist of "the deal", packaging together a director, a cast, a script, and financiers, in order to create a perfect storm where everyone gets what they want, and (ideally) the audience gets a great experience -- although that is not necessarily the producer's prime goal.
A director (IMO) should be a visual storyteller, whose focus should be on making the very best film possible given the circumstances that they're handed (which may involve limited budget, or casting as required by the producer, etc). The director is the one who should (IMO) be most concerned with the audience's experience.
The cinematographer is an artist and a technician and an engineer. Someone who specifically uses tools to create art. And isn't necessarily concerned with the overall story being told, but is more concerned with making each frame tell the story of that particular scene.
The writer is purely a storyteller, and need not have any interest in the crafting, technicals, or engineering of a motion picture.
Which brings us to -- the "filmmaker". Don't even really know what that person is, in the traditional sense, but in today's world that term probably applies to the do-it-all-yourselfer who seems to be the majority of DVXUsers here. This is a person who isn't specifically a writer, or a cinematographer, or a director, but is someone who finances, writes, shoots, directs, and edits their own material. And that's a whole different breed. There aren't many (if any) of those folks anymore in "hollywood", this is primarily (IMO) the domain of today's DSLR/prosumer equipment user, who does much of the work themselves or with the borrowed assistance of friends, or has a micro budget and spends what they can on who they can. And it is this person who we are probably all talking about or around, who may or may not be that concerned with an audience's reaction, who may or may not even have had their script read by anyone else, who may or may not care whether the finished product is sellable or of appeal to anyone other than themselves. They don't (necessarily) have bosses they answer to, they frequently don't know (or care) how the system "works" or even to be a part of the system. They want to "make films", period. Not necessarily for an audience, or for wide distribution, or for financial gain, although they may certainly desire all of those. To me, this is a mindset and mentality very different from, say, the cinematographer who eats, breathes, and sleeps American Cinematographer and watching the works of Kovacs or Hall, who actively hires himself out on other people's jobs for a good living, who makes it his job to know the equipment and the lights and the framing and staging and movement and dynamics of a scene etc. To me, the "filmmaker" is more likely to be a beginner, a hobbyist, or a dilettante. Most established folks that I know of, who make a living in the industry or who intend to, focus on one of the professions and call themselves that -- "producer", "director", "cinematographer", "writer". But sometimes you get somebody like George Lucas, who has the wherewithal and the experience, who has the money and the connections, who can do absolutely everything his own way, and who doesn't necessarily even care what the audience thinks of what they've done, and someone like that would certainly be entitled to choose the title "filmmaker" if they so chose.
So before we all go telling each other that "you're thinking the wrong way", it would be nice to recognize that not everyone shares the same goals.
