Shooters,

Excuse the cross-posting with the Festivals blog, but we didn’t wany any of you to miss out on this -

Mullighan recently presented a panel at the London Short Film Festival, entitled ‘Luck = Preparedness + Opportunity’. With him were the delightful filmmakers (and Shooters), Ben Slotover and Eva Weber.

If you weren’t lucky enough to make it down to the Curzon for the event, no fear! Ben has kindly made his notes from the panel available to you all here.

Ben, as it turns out, has actually made short instructional videos, very good tools for the newer indie filmmaker. You can watch his Zero Budget Filmmaking Compilation below, but he has uploaded more videos to his profile on Shooters which I thoroughly recommend you watch.

Ted Hope Art House Convergence Closing Remarks from joe zina on Vimeo.

You can also read the full text of Hope’s keynote address, delivered at the Arthouse Convergence in Salt Lake City just before Sundance, on indieWIRE.

The incredibly useful Workbook Project recently added another weapon to its creative arsenal. NEW BREED consists of first person accounts of the filmmaking process – you can read through all the posts or go straight to the filmmakers or projects that you’re particularly interested in. The site outlines some NEW BREED goals for 2009:

With the dawn of 2009 comes some new additions to the site. NEW BREED: CRITICAL FOCUS will introduce a new series of interviews, special topics addressed by site regulars and more articles from guest contributers. Look for upcoming conversations with filmmakers Hunter Weeks, Ondi Timoner, Barry Jenkins, Lynn Shelton and Joe Swanberg, as well as a new series of articles by site regulars sharing insight into lessons learned… the hard way. And in a few days we will introduce a prolific filmmaker of short films, Jack Daniel Stanley, who takes his southern gothic horror film, A Little Mouth To Feed, to Slamdance 09 and offers insight into his preparations, planning and experience at the festival.

If you’d prefer not to learn ALL your lessons the hard way, read NEW BREED and hear from filmmakers who learned them for you!

Sundance is going to be interesting this year. With the economy in the dumps there is almost certainly not going to be the usual sales activity, and hopefully filmmakers will be going there with expectations firmly in check. This could actually be a good thing for Sundance. As Steven Zeitchik writes in the Hollywood Reporter:

But what these breakouts show is that the fest’s main value might now lie in the classic indie model, in which little money is spent and little is earned. The payoff comes in the form of critical cachet and awards, not in a “Little Miss Sunshine”-style plug-and-play blockbuster. It’s a switch that takes the fest back to its emergence two decades ago, when movies like “sex, lies & videotape” were championed not as possible crossover hits but as giving rise to directorial talent and even a new style of filmmaking.

Such a shift would dovetail, in a sense, with the festival’s own ambitions. While organizers haven’t voiced outright opposition to the sales market as they have with swag and ambush marketing, they have had an ambivalent relationship with it: Organizers like the heat and industry attendance it brings but privately worry that it puts the emphasis on the big sale instead of the great film.

So, like the Scouts, be prepared and be ready with a strategy that does not stand or fall on a sale.  Filmmakers looking for festival strategy tips may already be aware of Chris Gore’s Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide. I haven’t read them but you might also want to look at Christopher Holland’s Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers and Heidi Van Lier’s The Indie Film Rule Book. You can read more from Heidi on the Film Independent website here and here. Bomb It director Jon Reiss also has some good advice on his blog, including info about printing postcards and posters.

Shooting People will be reporting from Park City over on our Festival Focus blog so stay tuned!

Gosh, what a long time it has been since I last posted on here. Sorry for the extra-long silence over the holidays. Anyway I am back and, like many others, I have been thinking a great deal about the challenges facing independent filmmaking in 2009.

I mentioned on my Shooting From The Hip blog that independent filmmakers are well trained in dealing with financial uncertainty and I hope that we can continue to work together to forge a creative path in 2009. Make sure that you add Shooters you have worked with to your profile on shootingpeople.org – this will make it much easier for you to find cast and crew for your films who have worked with people you already know and trust.

And here’s a new blog to add to your list if you want some solid information on how films actually get made. All About Indie Filmmaking is written by Jane Kosek, an indie film producer in LA, and is full of useful tips to help you find your feet in the industry.

Happy New Year!