5 Things: 5) Completion Is An Accomplishment

 5 Things I Learned Making a $4,500 Movie

 

5) Seeing project from concept to distribution is it own accomplishment

Features, from concept to distribution, are beasts constructed from hundreds of moving parts that are controlled by thousands of decisions made from an infinitude of possible choices.  The project will wear you down with debt and/or time waiting.  Completion timelines are guides, at best.

I spent almost five years on Holiday.  At this point, I can’t afford to spend any more time on it.  And that is because of a truth only Director/Producers know: no one, not the people you live with, not the people you worked on the project with, not your friends and family, none of them will ever have any idea how much time you spent getting you project to distribution.  Only you know all the dotted “i”s and crossed “t”s that had to be done by a particular time, at a certain cost, with no errors.  This last stipulation means checking and re-checking everything all the way to the release.  No one will know all the tedious hours you spent filling out this, filing that, waiting on replies in order to move to the next step.

So if you make it all the way to distribution with your project, you have accomplished something even if you never make a dime.  The great thing is, in today’s digital delivery world, there is an audience for almost everything and they have access to your product in a way never possible before for independent filmmakers.