Thursday, October 15, 2009

Learning and enjoying Guerilla Filmmaking

A lot of people though not so familiar about how exactly movies are made gradually developed an interest to create one. It’s not easy to create a movie but one thing is for sure, you’ll have one hell of a blissful experience as it’s extremely fun, thrilling, exhausting and fulfilling at the same time especially if you do it in a guerilla way.

Guerilla filmmaking is done in a low budget, lesser crew, limited equipment and friendly talents that don’t asked sky rocketing talent fees. Commercial film is quite the opposite. My first film was produced and formed independently. It was so fulfilling and fun despite many difficulties.

Let’s talk about the stages of film production and how movies are formed. We call the first stage as Pre-production. In this stage, patience and hard work is needed. This stage is crucial because it is in this phase that you choose and hire your talents, select locations, build sets and prepare all the necessary materials needed for the shoot like the screenplay, shooting schedules/time frame, cast and crew, production vehicle, costumes etc.

Production is the second phase of the entire process. Apparently, this is the stage where the Director and his/her crew convert the screenplay to real videos. The Director should make sure that all the necessary shots and scenes are taken in preparation for the next stage in which all the recorded videos has to be in exact series according to the screenplay and should be all set for editing.

Once all the needed videos are recorded, the third stage of film production takes place. We call it Post-production. In this stage, the Director together with the editor joined forces in selecting good shots, put it in series, and add the intended sound effects/music to complete the film. This stage is also crucial because it is in this stage the film is being polished to its maximum quality both technical and contents.

After all the preparation and execution, your film deserves to be exhibited in big screen. We call this stage as Sales and Distribution phase. This simply means that the film you made reaches the distributor as well as its audience.

It might have appeared simple based on how I presented it. It is not. Like everything that we do, we can never feel sense of fulfillment if we do not undergo complexity and trouble since you will work under limited budget, equipment and crew. If you are an independent filmmaker you will surely experience difficulties twice as the one working in a huge budget.

However, if you got talent and heart for this craft you will not take these challenges as burden but instead find these things the spice of your main dish – Your Big Film.

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