How To Make A Movie - And ....how not to make a movie

The action never stops.. and the story never starts...

Our friend and neighbor upstairs is the NY City Film Commissioner.  She gets invited to everything, and last week she was kind enough to bring us along to the NY premier of Pirates of the Caribbean 4, starring Penelope Cruz and Johnny Depp.   

It is a movie based on an amusement park ride and it fill its purpose.  Like a good amusement park ride, the action never stopped.  And like every other amusement park ride, it had no plot and no coherent story line.  I mean when was the last time you got off a roller coaster and said, 'great ride, but what exactly was the plot?'

You get what you pay for, and in this case, thanks to Ms. Oliver, we didn't pay anything, but some studio forked out, by some estimates, $310 million to make the movie.

$310 million! You would think for that much money they would at least hire a writer.

The arrival of Screenworld, (iPads, iPhones, tablets, video online, Netflix movies on demand and so on) has also given rise to

1.  An insatiable and unlimited demand for endless amounts of always changing content.

2.  A search for ways to cut the budgets.  (Unless everyone wants to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 4 all the time on all platforms).

This gives us, needless to say, an opening.

Is it possible to produce compelling movies with our little cameras and FCP laptops?

The answer here is, of course, a resounding yes.

The key to great movies (as opposed to great amusement park rides) is in the storytelling. Something notoriously lacking from POTC4.

Now, here's a guy who made a killer feature film for $7,000 with his home video camera

This is El Mariachi, by Roberto Rodriguez, who we talked about yesterday.

His first feature, El Mariachi, was so good that he got picked up by Columbia Pictures and now makes movies with budgets in the hundreds of millions.

Like JK Rowling writing Harry Potter, all you need is a pencil, a piece of paper and a good idea.

Well, to make a movie, you also need a camera and a Final Cut Pro editing system.

You also need to learn to shoot and learn to edit, but that's why you're here.

And learn to tell a good story...

Something that apparently $310 million can't buy you.

But $9.95 a month (not to plug my own product TOO much)... will.

So get out your cameras, get out your scripts, get hold of a few friends who always wanted to be actors - or just wander down to the local university - they got millions of them there... (wanna be actors that is), and start making your movie.