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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

My new profession

Yousuf Abbasi said:
Is this story scary because it, in a way, undermines years of training, experience, and [financial] investment by industry professionals? Perhaps. But what I also think is that this type of "ridiculous" behavior is perceived as a threat to some, who have spent most of their life acquiring knowledge in their professed field, and now comes along a newbie that wants to figure it all out and be a "pro" in a few weeks.

Whether you want to admit it or not, every professional probably has a subconscious (or conscious) need to make his job seem more complex, involved, and difficult than it really may be, so that he is still "valued" in his trade. But, to be sure, in this age of widely-accessible information and lower-barriers to entry (in many markets, including cinema), some newbies will certainly achieve faster what took their predecessors decades (even if they seem overly ambitious, and perhaps ridiculous).

I agree, that no matter what market we're in, sometimes quality results mean paying up. I'll be the first person to tell someone that they simply cannot have a new Ferrari for the price of a Ford. But don't be surprised if you find people doing for $100 what took the "old pros" $10,000 to do.

Anyone that has the ambition, smarts, and insanity to be a pro in _________ (fill in the blank), I say go for it, no matter how silly you look in front of others.

:-)
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No matter how you look at it experience takes time... equipment takes money. Usually the amateur is missing both. Also I've come to believe that many are deluding themselves.... you can't find the proper path if you are living in an illusion of being all of these... writer, director, producer, editor, director of photography and production company (with absolutely no income). A large part of the low budget indie scene is pure fantasy.
 
Andrae Palmer said:
No matter how you look at it experience takes time... equipment takes money. Usually the amateur is missing both. Also I've come to believe that many are deluding themselves.... you can't find the proper path if you are living in an illusion of being all of these... writer, director, producer, editor, director of photography and production company (with absolutely no income). A large part of the low budget indie scene is pure fantasy.
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It seems that the problem is more people being unrealistic or they just don't want to do the work of learning a craft. Sometimes when you start out in the entertainment industry you do have to work for free and if you do a good job people notice.

But to say that you can't be a writer, director, producer, editor, DP and production company and not make any money at it is wrong. I just have me in my production company and on a couple music videos I have filled all those slots...and yes I did make money. Maybe not as much as I should have on some of them but others I made enough to pay for my time and equipment. Then the other thing you can wear all these hats on is doing stock footage and making little videos out of them to sell them better and have people pass them around. In a sense doing your marketing for you for free. All of the stock footage I sell doesn't come from sales by the stock footage houses that rep my footage but by people seeing the videos I've done.

All I'm trying to say is that if you want to wear all these hats you can but it is a lot of hard work.
 
Andrae Palmer said:
No matter how you look at it experience takes time... equipment takes money. Usually the amateur is missing both. Also I've come to believe that many are deluding themselves.... you can't find the proper path if you are living in an illusion of being all of these... writer, director, producer, editor, director of photography and production company (with absolutely no income). A large part of the low budget indie scene is pure fantasy.
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"Experience takes time": While nothing can substitute for years of hands-on experience, I believe that diligence and ambition to learn & succeed can get you pretty close.

"Equipment takes money": Yes, but that is where resourcefulness comes into the picture. The possibilities of what $1,000 can buy can differ greatly from one person to another. It's all about being creative with the money you DO have.

"One being a Writer, director, producer, editor, and DP is an illusion": Is it? I don't think so. I think it would take a LOT of work, drive, ambition, and smarts -- but an illusion it is not.

"The low budget indie scene is fantasy": I agree, in large part it is, but that's because I believe most of this world is made up of Type-B personalities that don't GO GET WHAT THEY WANT, or aren't really "Film savvy." They sit back and hope it all falls in their laps. But I assure you, this is not true of the entire low budget scene -- as there are many that have ambitious, creative, resourceful, intelligent, and out-of-the-box minds.

I think the experienced pro's do a good job of filtering the go-getters from the delusional ones, so that way atleast valuable knowledge is passed on to the right people. However, I can certainly see why the delusional ones create a bad rep for the entire low budget scene.
 
Its pretty hard to be resourceful when one wants to be everything... writer, director, producer, DP, editor, production company and this person has no finances/skills to support any of that. It would be a lot savvier to find a good producer, editor, a good DP and get a production company to help with equipment (many companies will do so for free). I see it all as an identity crisis and absolutely nothing to do with the artistry of film making. How can anyone really help an inexperienced jack of all trades that wants to do everything by themselves? I've seen this problem with many low budget directors... I even tried to find a job that no one was interested in and guess what... even when I did that... they wanted to do that job too... lol. Heck I've seen people call themselves DPs and don't know the significance of F-Stops.

Yousuf Abbasi said:
I think the experienced pro's do a good job of filtering the go-getters from the delusional ones, so that way atleast valuable knowledge is passed on to the right people. However, I can certainly see why the delusional ones create a bad rep for the entire low budget scene.
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You are right... filtration is a vital skill in this industry.
 
Pretty spot on. There is no shame in being new to something, but this industry like no other seems to breed the ground floor "expert", and it's too often 10% talent and 90% image. I've been in this business for over 20 years, since I was 14 years old and I run into this all the time. I worked my way up from a gofer (go-for an apple box...) to a grip, to an A.C. then at the ripe old age of 17 I got my hands on an Avid 230 system and taught myself how to use it. With in a few years I was cutting spots and learning AfterEffects. I have seen tremendous change in this industry, both positive and negative, but I have never adopted the attitude that there is something I was an "expert" at because there is always room to learn from an experience. Anyone who self-describes themselves as an "elitist" I have no patience for.

I can't count on all my fingers and toes the number of times I have met someone in this business who has talked their way into it, and just because they say that are, *poof*, suddenly they are a director, a DP, an editor, etc... I can usually spot this from a mile away, the sad thing is their clients usually can't, until it ends badly. In the metaphor here, that would be a car crash, right? Funny, because I have often used those words "car crash" to describe a production in melt-down mode, usually the result of the same type of newbie "race car driver" at the wheel. I tend to see this more in production than I do in post, but that seems to be a migrating trend as now a days everyone is an editor.

It's not all this way of course, there are lots of 'newbies' that know their place and are hard workers and pay their dues and never stop learning and never act like they are the experts. I don't mind enthusiasm, but the attitude and the "image is everything" way of walking into this business is a problem. Thanks for making me laugh with this race car driver analogy. Now Im going back to work, to learn some more.

-bk
 
Andrae, you get those kinds of people in EVERY field. It's just the nature of human beings to want to bite off more than they can chew. They see the "sexiness" in all these different roles and want to be all of them. I totally agree with you, a person has to have a REALISTIC outlook and a THOUGHT-OUT game plan, anything less is being wreckless and delusional. Such a realistic plan also usually involves being responsible and SAVING UP money for necessary equipment! But, if your REALISTIC plan is in fact to be all of those things (writer, directer, producer, etc), and you are taking the steps to learn and get ahead, then more power to you.

A "DP" that doesn't know the significance of F-Stops is not a DP. He can call himself whatever he wants to, though!
 
I have never met anybody who's said they want to be a director/producer/editor and DP etc. Usually it's someone who doesn't have the money or friends to fill those roles who ends up taking them on. Most low budget directors I know fall into a producer's role very reluctantly - they want to be purely "artists" but often they have to deal with the money because it's their own!

It's also only natural that people want to diversify their skills and experience. Actors often want to direct, directors often produce projects, and even David Mullen here has expressed that he wishes to direct something one day. Nothing wrong with that, we're all human and growing and these days most of us live a very long time.

It's good advice however, not to EXPRESS that you want to do several crafts so that it becomes confusing for others. You meet a LOT of people in this business, and you collect a lot of cards. It's best to state clearly that you do ONE thing - and that skill should be the one you are most accomplished at, or the one you wish to be paid for. Because that's how you will be pegged. The same way actors are pegged into some roles. Otherwise people think you're very amateurish if you rattle off that you can take on a lot of roles, or worse they won't remember what you do!
 
I chalk all this up to the world getting smaller and smaller with the expanse of the internet. There's so much information out there and it's easy to find, if you have some patience, humility and passion. It's great for the people who know how to use it, and it's painful for those who must wade through the garbage. That garbage is inevitable.

It's amazing how the creative zeitgeist has exploded in many different fields because of the internet. There is a serious pools of talented people all over the world that are finding their way and becoming quite accomplished as they share ideas and techniques online.

Yousuf - I think the spirit of the post was that this is a person that was barking up the wrong tree, and would obviously get nowhere with that type of post and mentality.

All this is to say that the inexperienced newbs with talent will find others who are talented and will flourish. Birds of a feather. I often work for inexperienced people but I do so when I see they have potential. I would hope that the same goes for more experienced people who might hire me.

Talent finds a way, and I believe many people here understand that.
 
Four things that I know:

1. Experience does take time, that it does.

2. Your never too experienced to learn.

3. Your never in a high enough position that would exclude you from learning.

4. When you think you know it all you cease to be creative.
 
Justin Chin said:
IThere's so much information out there and it's easy to find, if you have some patience, humility and passion.
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And therein lies part of the problem. Knowledge and experience are not the same thing. You can gain knowledge from many sources. Experience can be had only by living and doing. In other words, it takes time, by definition. Unfortunately, one only undertands the value of experience once they have it, not before. And the ability to have proper judgment really requires both.

The passing off of book (or Internet) learned knowledge as experience is what is dangerous, albeit very prevalent these days.
 
M Most said:
And therein lies part of the problem. Knowledge and experience are not the same thing. You can gain knowledge from many sources. Experience can be had only by living and doing. In other words, it takes time, by definition. Unfortunately, one only undertands the value of experience once they have it, not before. And the ability to have proper judgment really requires both.

The passing off of book (or Internet) learned knowledge as experience is what is dangerous, albeit very prevalent these days.
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Yes. Sorry, I should have been more clear. I wasn't trying to say knowledge is more important than experience. Experience is the important and necessary element in any art or craft.

And I agree 100% with Shawn P as well.
 
Of course every couple of years somebody comes out of nowhere to win a film festival with a no budget movie and get a career. That never happens in the racing world.

Overall I love the analogy though. I'm not sure why every up and coming film student still thinks they are the next Tarantino or whatever. And is there a pill to cure that? OTOH, if everyone didn't think that would anyone ever make it?
 
As someone with the benefit of time allowing experience and knowledge, I do feel it is important to rediscover now & then your roots and why you went into this business in the first place, to try and think like a wide-eyed innocent amateur (now & then). Partly to avoid cynicism, but also to reinvigorate oneself by tapping in on the youthful hope, ambition, and energy that gets dulled over time, as well as open oneself to re-evaluation. This is important in order to grow, just like it's important to prune a rose bush to get it to grow better.

My only concern when I see a young person full of passion and ambition is when I see their ego getting in the way of their learning, because that will ultimately be a limitation.

Truffaut once wrote about a director's early movies as having the strengths and weaknesses of youth, but he felt that these youthful drives -- the need to impress others, the need for recognition of one's talent, the desire to show-off -- were not negative qualities if it lead to interesting work. They often express a certain joyfulness that can be missing in one's later work.

What I see as a danger among some people is to think that the process of growing up and becoming an adult is to come up with fixed opinions on everything as soon as possible -- because that's how adults act, like they know everything. This sucks, this is cool, that blows, etc. It becomes rather limiting, this way of thinking, though it does have its practical uses, developing a critical faculty. But one often can't distinguish between personal taste, opinion, and fact because you've set up a list of arbitrary rules by which to judge everything.

In filmmaking, for example, it may be this notion that "grain is bad" and thus any movie with a grainy texture has "bad" cinematography. But the basis for this judgement is arbitrary and fails to take things into context, plus is as limiting and meaningless as saying "blue is bad".

But I have no problem with youthful ambition, passion, and ego as long as it doesn't get in the way of clear thinking and the ability to see things the way they really are.
 
Citizen Kane, maybe considered the greatest film ever made--technically and artistically, was directed by the know-it-all boy-wonder at the ripe old age of twenty five.

When he was young, he often went to theater companies and pretended to know everything and lied about everything to get in the door.

George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985), best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, writer, actor and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television, and radio.

Isn't it ironic the greatest film ever made was made by a neophyte? The film industry thrives on these stories and myths.
 
I very much like David's usual quiet wisdom that is so fitting with Truffaut's -- to roughly paraphrase Mark Twain: I never let higher education stand in the way of my learning... I think this could be applicable with "professionalism" standing in for higher education. The best filmmaking (and art) always as a sense of discovery, I think.

There are many ways up the mountain. Some artists are comets, some are glorious one-trick ponys, others are slow gatherers and learners who acquire more and more depth. The ego can be a driving force, but if it serves the person rather than the work itself, it rarely amounts to much that is lasting.

In the case of Welles, his legendary ego, appears to have ultimately been in service primarily of work itself. And rarely has a film artist sacrificed more. Of course artist & film are always a tough marriage. Rare on a level that Welles achieved. We should not overlook that he was not a precocious one-trick pony by any means. The Magnificent Ambersons, while less flamboyant (and flawed in part by studio machinations) is pretty magnificent as well. And even the "fun" of Touch of Evil is still stunning.
 
I think it's important to note that for every one who tricks and lies his way onto a film studio or into a crew there are a 1,000 who get found out and get a bad reputation.

That was something I hated in film school. They would tell you how you're supposed to twist the truth in order to get what you wanted to get your film made. I just don't have the stomach for such blatant dishonesty even if it costs me opportunities. And I think in the long run trying to game and trick people burns bridges more often than creates opportunity. Call me naive but I think you can make it without being a weasel.
 
A person has to start somewhere. I think a young person's passion can seem naive but also powerful and intoxicating. And that's the way it should be. They create the new visions because their perspectives are in sync with the times. Often times they plow through the technical because of their lack of patience but how could it be otherwise? Let's not forget from these bursts of creativity the untalented will often quickly fall to the wayside but many also blaze the path to the future.
 
Experience is the important and necessary element in any art or craft.
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Does Talent get a spot anywhere here? The fact is, in just about ANY art form, some people just seem to naturally have a talent for it.

The problem with filmmaking is that it is simultaneously an ART and a BUSINESS. A business can only be learned, but an art can only be taught to the extent of knowing how to recreate previous work through previous conventions. Originality can NOT be taught, nor can innovation, or vision.

The business side of it: You need knowledge AND experience. You need to pay your dues and climb up the ladder. You are NOT special, just like the rest of us. I've seen a thousand kids like you, kid. All you want to do is be the next big thing in the indie world with your neo-noir-spaghetti-western-experimental-zombie-psychological-thriller-teen comedy, you got a LOT to learn.

The art side of it: Knowledge and Experience are valuable, but neither even approach Talent and Passion in importance. Of COURSE you think I need to pay dues. Because you've been doing it all this time and still aren't Tarantino. THAT means I can't be either, right? And i should NEVER use movies like Primer, Paranormal, El Mariachi, Clerks, Swingers, Reservoir Dogs, The Blair With Project, Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead etc. etc. etc. etc. because they were ONCE in a MILLION, right? Thats a whole lot of "once in a millions." F*ck that. I can't wait to be the next one to prove you wrong.


One side sounds overly Jaded, the other, a little naive.

AND BOTH ARE CONSTANTLY PROVEN RIGHT.

Though i DO have formal training, I won't lie; I'm more the latter. I'm a wide-eyed kid who's saving up all his coins to buy a camera and make a movie with my film school buddies.

Until I've failed several times, nobody will convince me that i can.

That said, I am TEMPERED and KEPT ON EARTH by the former. I have a great deal of respect for those who are more experienced than I. They are a-plenty on this forum, which is why I come here and avoid several other filmmaking sites. This place is special, and i can learn a LOT from people here.
 
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