Guerrilla Filmmaking

INVENTING THE MOVIES a must read! (PART II)

CHAPTER 10. COMING TO TERMS WITH THE NET.

"In a suburb south of Los Angeles, it looked as though a band of cell-phone-obsessed nomads had set up camp in the parking lot surrounding an office complex: a small village of tents had sprung up overnight, and white trailers were parked in neat rows.

A yellow AMC Gremlin was being towed slowly around the neighborhood by a truck; inside the car were the actors Morgan Freeman and Paz Vega, and a movie camera was mounted on the bed of the truck to capture their conversation.

The movie they were making, 10 Items or Less, tells the story of a famous actor (Freeman) who enters and then alters the life of a convenience store cashier (Vega). It was fairly typical for a low-budget movie made without studio support: costs were being kept under $10 million, the shoot would be completed in just fifteen days, and the script didn’t call for any flashy visual effects or elaborate sets. (In 2006, when 10 Items was made, the average cost of producing a studio movie was $65 million.) It was also being shot on 35-millimeter film, like most movies of its vintage."

INVENTING THE MOVIES a must read!

Scott Kirsner is a journalist who writes about innovation, with a special focus on the ways that new technologies are changing the entertainment industry.

He writes regularly for Variety and The Boston Globe, and has been a contributing writer for Fast Company, BusinessWeek, and Wired. He edits the blog CinemaTech (est. 2005), and is the author of The Future of Web Video, one of the first books about the business and creative possibilities of online video, originally published in November 2006 and updated in March 2007. Scott’s writing has also appeared in the New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Salon, the San Jose Mercury News, and Newsweek, among other publications.

This is so far, the book of the year for me! Scott makes you understand the future of filmmaking, a lot of the stuff that's in the book is not new, but the way he analyzes the different phases of cinema starting from 1894 untill tomorrow it's simply fascinating.

He's been generous enough to share the introduction of his book with everybody, but also he's sharing one of the best chapters, the number 10th: Coming to Terms with the net.

Today I'll be sharing the introduction of his book that you could find in the next page. Tomorrow the amazing chapter 10th, so stay tuned.

When The Dark Knight is reaching $ 500 Millions, we remember Following

Less than 10 years ago Following's budget was equivalent at the amount of money that the entire production of The Dark Knight spent in napkins ($ 7,000) that's 0,003 % of the new Batman entire budget of $ 185 millions.

Guerrilla filmmakers, there's hope! You just have to do something similar to Following, a Guerrilla Masterpiece.

The Film was written and planned to be as inexpensive to produce as possible, but Nolan has described the production of Following as "extreme", even for a no-budget shoot. With no money, limited equipment, and a cast and crew who were all in full-time employment on weekdays, the shoot took a full year to complete. The production was so small that on many of the shoots, the cast, crew and their equipment could travel to their locations in a single London taxi. 

To conserve expensive film stock, every scene in the film was rehearsed extensively to ensure that the first or second take could be used in the final edit.   For the most part, Nolan filmed using non professional lighting equipment, employing only available light. He also used the homes and apartments of his friends and family as locations.

Synopsis
A struggling young writer takes to following strangers around the streets of London ostensibly to find inspiration for his new novel. Initially, he sets strict rules for himself regarding whom he should follow and for how long, but quickly discards them as he becomes addicted.

Dogme 95 and the Vow of Chastity

Dogme 95 used to be an avant-garde filmmaking movement. Started in 1995 by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg with the signing of the Dogme 95 Manifesto and the Vow of Chastity. They were later joined by fellow Danish directors Kristian Levring and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, to form a group sometimes known as the Dogme 95 Collective or the Dogme Brethren. This movement was officially dissolve in 2005, although different filmmakers from all over the world keep using the vow of chastity as a principle, and keep submitting films to the website of the movement, Wes Anderon's Rushmore is Dogme Film # 180. So far there are 276 officially recognize Dogme Films.

The beginning: The French New Wave Movement

In January of 1954 François Truffaut publishes his essay "Une Certaine Tendance of Cinema Francaise" in Cahiers du Cinema in which he stated that the director was the "author" of his work; that great directors such as Renoir, or Hitchcock, have distinct styles and themes that permeate all of their films.This article originate the French New Wave Movement

Here you have the film techniques of this movement, the foundations of what we know today as Guerrilla Filmmaking.