Why do filmmakers insist on claiming no budget?

Uhh

Uhh

I appreciate Barry that you think you're always right about all matters, but it's just not the case.

What you said is really telling "If you want to preserve it WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT IT," which is not what I said. You SHOULD be thinking about it! Hard drives may have changed but hard drives are hard drives, I could still pull up an old hard drive provided it works and put it into a PC no problem.

You should be paying people to archive film products, if they're worth keeping, and it's not a huge deal honestly. Digital is a far better method to preserve something perfectly with zero quality loss, and it's not true at all that film prints last 100 years no problem. SOME film prints can last quite a while, and stored at optimal temperatures in the perfect situations, yes of course, they should last 40-50 years without it being TOO bad, but even the film prints you get at theaters that are 2 weeks old look like crap already. There are cigarette burns all over them (not literally, but you know what I mean), scratches on the print, etc. They just look bad. Digital has NO quality loss whatsoever, from time 1 to time 1 million.

There sure are some people who make it out to be hard to do something that's very easy. I know people are idiots, but jesus, this is testing the limits of stupidity here. If you want to backup footage it's not hard, I don't even put the kind of effort into it that you could but I keep important stuff on the RAID and on another external in a different physical location, then I check that stuff periodically to make sure files work and whatnot. If the hard drives are operable, there should be no problems with any digital files anyway. You can go way more advanced than that and make sure that you have a checksum to verify the file lengths and you have numerous copies of the files on a RAID let's say. Have you ever actually have a file on your hard drive that just goes totally bad? I haven't seen that happen before. I have pictures that are 15 years old and have went through 8-10 hard drives now, no problems, ever. I don't know what you're afraid of, but obviously you must not know what you're doing with a computer whatsoever.

If you want to backup a feature film, a huge investment, yes it should have its own dedicated RAID unit and somewhere else entirely, a different location, it should have another RAID to be very safe, or another few external hard drives stocked full of the footage for backup. Hard drives don't fail just sitting there usually either, you do realize that right? Hard drive overuse has been proven to shorten the length of the drives, but I have a WD from 10 years ago that works just fine. I don't use it anymore but I plugged it in the other day and was surprised it still chugged along. If you don't want to have ANYONE to check on the data, ever, well yeah great you might have problems. But if you had one dedicated staff member just doing this archiving, it would still be plenty for a ridiculous film library. He could probably perform 10-20 system checks (films) per day, every day he's working, and that would support a massive library of titles.

For me, just managing my data, if I had a film print I wouldn't have a good cool place to store it, it would be in my storage unit which isn't temperature controlled, and it would eventually degrade, it's physical too so it's easy for physical damage to result, which isn't the case with data. Only the hard drive is physical, and since you should easily have it on multiple drives that's no issue.

I can't believe you can sit over there and act like *I'M* the one who is being unreasonable, when you are the one who is spouting just totally nonsense crap that makes no sense whatsoever from ANY reasonable perspective. You just are glued to this idea that somehow digital is very dangerous because oh my god every once in a while a hard drive fails, when that pretty much has nothing to do with data integrity if you have a good system of checks and balances protecting your files. It just makes no sense, it's laughable to me. If that's what you want to believe, go ahead, but I'll stick to what works and what makes sure that my work exists many decades into the future!
 
Jonathan:
"35mm is an absolutely terrible -- the worst -- way to preserve a film for generations to come."

and

"This is 2009, I really thought we'd be over the film purists and their looney bin mentalities, but I guess not."

If you want to throw stones, perhaps you should not live in a glass house?
 
LOL! in 50 years there will be no computer that has the connections, plugs, cables, drivers, drives, cards, or OS that will read the file system of your "vintage" media (if there is any files left at all).

Just try to connect a (SCSI) Syquest drive to a modern computer and read Quark Express 1.2 files.

History teaches a lesson here. If you want to preserve information for a looooong time,

1. carve it in stone
2. clay tablets
3. parchment

everything else fails in under 500 years. Period.

We have to face it. There is only one way to preserve our material in the moment.
Copy it every few years to the next state of the art medium.
Even thou there will be lot´s of problems left like file format.

Frank
 
Why do filmmakers insist on claiming no budget? Because if you're making an indie movie (non-union), and you're using friends as your talent, and you own digital camera (or your friend's camera), you can literally make a feature length drama without major special effects and rented locations for literally nothing.

Of course, like everybody you need to have food, shelter, transportation, etc.; but you will have those expenses regardless of whether or not you're making a movie and, therefore, you don't need to factor them into the budget. So essentially you're making a no budget movie.

And when you're 25 and want to get your feet wet making a feature length movie and you want some recognition as a filmmaker, you will probably think along the lines of Jonathan.

You shoot the movie with the latest digital cameras, you hire a crew that knows how to use the equipment, you hire SAG actors and sign the Ultra Low Budget agreement. If the movie costs $200,000 that's ok; you have a good chance of finding an agent or even distributor who will take the movie out into the market for you. You can do the festivals and if you have made an entertaining movie, you will be able to get some money back and perhaps you will even be able to make a lot of money or succeed beyond your wildest dreams. There are a few examples of people having done it. And if you lose some money, say $100,000, well, it may be all worth it if you get some recognition.

Of course, there is no reason why you shouldn't archive this movie by making copies every few years. Since Jonathan mentioned a hard drive that's still good after ten years, perhaps you can back up your movie every ten years, and after you get to your sixties, you can ask your children and grandchildren to continue backing up all your movies and then after several generations, your film will have been preserved for posterity.

But if you're not concerned about preserving your movie for 100 years, you don't have to bother. I mean, how many movies are masterpieces and need to be preserved? So it's a moot question. There is no need for 35mm archiving.

But for me this was a valuable thread because I know that there are people in the industry who still value 35mm film as a medium for archiving at least. As a filmmaker it means I will have access to 35mm film a while longer.

Digital distribution is so cost effective that it's possible for a filmmaker to distribute a movie without having to make interpositives, internegatives and release prints. And if a movie (as in over 80% of indie movies) does not require a theatrical release, there is no need to even think of archiving such a movie; a hard drive is sufficient to save the movie for at least ten years, and maybe another ten years on another hard drive.

I prefer to hold on to my 35mm films though, especially the ones that may have name actors in them. I have some great screenplays in development. I hope to make them in 35mm. Of course, everybody knows 35mm cannot be made as no-budget movies. The film stock itself would cost thousands of dollars.
 
One of the first professionals who helped me out on my first short (a small year ago) was one of the two only legally permitted props/weapons/firearms rentals in the Netherlands. I wrote him an email explaining my being new to filmmaking and some synopsis of the film itself. He called me after a week or so, telling me he could not help me because I was neither filmschool nor professional/commercial. But he was glad to help me think about the other ways to achieve my goal, without breaking the law (as I went to his business for not wanting to break any laws). Talking about it he came to the conclusion that there was no way I could portrait an assasin easily without the aspired gun and silencer I had in mind. So he rented me the stuff anayway. (With maximum discount, but that was months and much contact later.)

In my email I wrote him I was working on a no/low-budget short film.

Later, when I returned the two(!) guns and the silencer we had a nice talk about my plans and ambitions. He said to me: don't ever say you're doing a no-budget film when asking someone for help. It implies that you are not willing to spend any money on it, while in fact you are (every dime you can spare goes into it). Saying 'low-budget' tells people that money is an issue and that you are paying it all or most of it from your own pocket. Because that kind of dedication and passion gets rewarded. Not the kind that seems to say 'I want this for free'.

I know I'm in a different catagory here. But I thougth I should mention it as there are probably quite a lot of ambitious and serious noobs like me reading these posts.

I would not use the word low-budget to rid myself of critisism. I think. (Or should I :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)?)

Jasper
 
Anomie said:
He said to me: don't ever say you're doing a no-budget film when asking someone for help. It implies that you are not willing to spend any money on it, while in fact you are (every dime you can spare goes into it). Saying 'low-budget' tells people that money is an issue and that you are paying it all or most of it from your own pocket. Because that kind of dedication and passion gets rewarded. Not the kind that seems to say 'I want this for free'.
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Saying you have no money will mean (to anybody) that you are either not serious about what you're doing, or it will mean (to them) that you are very much a noob. I hate asking for people to work for free or give me stuff for free and I think offering to pay instead of crying "no budget" means you respect the person you're approaching and it means you respect the craft of filmmaking rather than just hoping you'll get lucky and all the pieces will fall into place.

Why should someone do YOU a favor? It's not their dream after all (making your film). Why should they contribute to your learning experience?

If you're young and just starting out, that's a different story so by all means beg, borrow, and... borrow some more.

.
 
Hahaha. Yeah I've told people I've shot a zero budget film before. In actuality it cost around $500 straight out of my pocket and probably much more in equipment usage and hours spent editing. BUT I was extremely proud of the film and to say we did it for zero budget seemed more impressive. I felt silly putting the $500 budget on imdb. :)
 
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