A Word of Advice on Filmmaking

This is a philosophy that will help you in any creative endeavor, not just filmmaking. The idea is simple. Stop whining. Essentially it's the idea that in order to get good at filmmaking you have to go out and practice.

Especially in the filmmaking art form, where the movies we all see at theatres cost an average of eighty-eight million dollars, it's easy to say you can't make a movie because you don't have money. It's true that you can't make a Hollywood style movie without an insane amount of money. However, there's nothing stopping you from making a movie. In this age of consumer cameras you can get a small camera for as little as eighty bucks. It won't be a very good camera and the movies you will make with it will probably suck. However, you have to make horrible movies and learn from them before you can ever hope to make good movies.

Art is not learned in a classroom and it isn't learned from books. Books and the classroom can field you ideas and tips but unless you go out there and actually figure out how to do these things yourself, it won't make you any better. Filmmaking is most defiantly a hands-on craft. I recently read "Rebel without a Cause" by Robert Rodriguez. Now if you something about this guy, you know that he was able, in college, to make a short film that won several film festivals. He also made "El Mariachi" without having finished college. However, college had nothing to these feats. In the book he details the fact that what taught him most was that he borrowed a camera from his father and from the age of thirteen to the age of twenty-three had made over thirty narrative shorts with his friends and siblings. They were small home movies and many of them very poorly done but it was from these movies that he learned how to edit, how to cut scenes together, how to film and frame shots. All this was learned from doing.

Now you might say, well he's different from the average Joe. However, if it took him thirty tries playing with a video camera, and he seems to have a real knack for putting visuals together, well then it should take the average Joe at least the same. Meaning if you want to make a good movie then practice for ten years and make about thirty short movies with a cheap camera to get the craft down pat. After doing this, you should have all the experience you need to go out and make something that's pretty damn good.

Thus stop whining about what you don't have. Focus on what you do have at this moment and go from there, solving the problems you face as you learn the best you can. Get involved with whatever community film you can find where you live. Most importantly, practice until your brain burns, and then practice some more.