DIY Filmmaking Sucks

Indiewood is dying too.

Just to continue the drumbeat of bad news, traditional independent distributors and financiers are dropping like flies.

For us DIY filmmakers, this means that we're competing more and more for our audience (and for dwindling art house screens) with larger films. It also means that our "golden ticket" mentality is even more nuts -- you know, where we dream about the big sale of our film to a distributor for millions of dollars.

And since this is a trickle-down thing: it also means fewer investors willing to step up.

In any case, read this interview with Mark Gill of The Film Department, for a very succinct look at the toxic indie film economy.

Where are the opportunities in this situation?

Think outside the multiplex and beyond the DVD.

In other words, the industry should not be part of your "A" plan. In some ways, this is the way it has been for DIY filmmakers, but these days the industry doesn't have much to offer us at all -- not even a pipe dream.

Now go out there and make your movie. And don't quit your day job.

DIY filmmaking is dead. Thank you pirates!

You think downloading pirated movies for free is fine? Well I hope you don't plan to make any money making movies.

We're way under water on Quality of Life still. It's a huge money losing effort sadly.

And it looks like torrents have killed our international chances as well.

Just today, we got this note from a prospective wholesaler in one of the biggest countries in Europe:

Well regarding dvd sales, I must say that the graff dvd market has gone totally down the last months, it has become impossible to sell more than 50-100 copies of a dvd, this is due to massive bootlegging. Everybody downloads from the net. There's even a website with all the brand new graffiti videos, there are even books & mags...
That's the sad truth, it will kill creativity.
That's why most people here have already seen or downloaded Quality of Life. For these reasons I'm not really interested in distributing dvd's anymore. I'm sure you understand since you must probably face the same problem everywhere worldwide.

What's that you hear?

The sound of DIY filmmaking croaking.

Unlike music creators, we make our (meager) money from sales of recordings, not live performances. Once the market for recordings (DVDs) dries up, we can't pay back investors. If we can't pay back investors, we cannot make movies with better production values and we cannot afford to even make them in the first place. That means: YouTube is the new indie filmmaking and true quality feature films from DIY voices will start to dry up.

So can one of the virulently pro-pirating advocates please tell me how pirates help indie filmmakers?

And if you support DIY filmmakers, you should be buying or renting your DVDs, not pirating.