The last of the Soul Searcher anniversary featurettes is a completely frank and open breakdown of the budget.
Find out how I raised the money, what I offered my investors, what distribution deals were put on the table, how much the film made worldwide and how much of that money came back to me (you may be shocked). Most importantly, discover exactly what was spent on each element of the budget, from travel and catering to make-up and lighting.
There are many ways to shoot a chase scene, but not all of them will give a sense of speed. Today I’m going to look at the chases in a couple of my old films and see what we can learn from them about enhancing the impression of speed.
First of all, here is the car chase from my silly 2002 action movie, The Beacon. (You may notice I’ve tried to increase the sense of speed through extremely fast editing, with only limited success.)
Michael Curtis had been a successful and award-winning post production editor before launching into full film productions for a broad range of clients through his company EditLab. Several years ago he formed a film collaborative, Filmstigator, to draw together fellow creatives and produce independent films.
“After years of working as a television editor and producer,” Curtis explains, “I yearned to branch out and start creating the kinds of personal films I’d never had a chance to make before—the kinds of films that had originally drawn me to the industry. I wondered if there were others out there like me, and I began actively looking for them.”
While attending the Orlando Film Festival in October of last year, I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Michael Curtis. He was there for the showing of his first film short, "Gift." Like many independent filmmakers, he has spent many years doing commercial film projects for clients but finally wanted to create something entirely his own. In this article I will cover Curtis’ entry into the commercial film production world and some of the projects he has worked on. In a second article, I will discuss how Curtis brought all that experience to his first independent film project and the creative process to make "Gift" a reality.
Due to the power of these sort of “meta-concepts,” the draw of incredible, tense movies like The Game, Inside Man, and Ocean's Eleven, and the popularity of things like LARPing, some companies, like Lexington, Kentucky’s The Breakout Games, have decided to see about bringing the metagames found in complex board games and video games and the scenarios reserved to for edge of your seat thriller...
When video games grew popular, it was assumed that people would play these animated games when they were children (when children already play a lot of games) and then grow out of them. But we began to learn that people didn’t grow out of them, but instead craved more complex mysteries and stories as they aged. This led to pivotal games like Myst and Rivven, which started the modern video game...