I wrote the first draft quickly – in three weeks.  I had a general idea of what would happen.  I used Dante’s Inferno for inspiration, so I read Dante and asked myself “what is the midwestern auto insurance equivalent of this situation?”

Indievest, the finance company, is also a distributor.  That’s their business model.  So we were confident the film would get as aggressive a release as was possible.

I think the key to social media is understanding why people use it.  People blog, Twitter, or post, to communicate with their peers.  It’s not that people are interested in my film.  It’s that my film serves as fuel for their discussion.  Understood that way, social media can be extremely effective in getting the word out.  But it’s not effective if the promotional efforts try to get people to stop having their own conversations, and pay attention to marketing.

Steve is a prince.  You’ve never met anyone more gracious, professional, and approachable.  We had a great, sincere discussion about the film, and that set the tone for the whole production.  Casting Steve was one of the luckiest breaks I’ve had, in my career.

Take the limitations and incorporate them into the film’s design. If you don’t have time to do tripod shots, create a visual style that exploits hand-held.  In our case we didn’t have the resources to do a lot of set building, so we came up with a design scheme that was portable – simple colors, red, blue, yellow, black and white.  So we were able to impose a level of production design that was stronger than what you’d expect, for our budget. We also stuck to a shooting style (square to the frame, clean singles) that let us avoid shooting master shots, in some scenes.  So we saved an hour here, an hour there. Time is the killer.  If you are shooting days, night will come.  And if you are shooting nights, you are racing the sunrise.  Your day will end, with or without the shots you need.  So make sure you set yourself up for success.

If someone else directed it, film would travel through the camera, actors would act, sound would be recorded, and an editor would edit.  So it would be a film.  I can’t say what “good” is so I can’t say if it would be good.  But there is no way it would resemble what we came up with.  And I love what we came up with.

My world perspective will come through in what I write, and what I direct.  Just like the camera operator’s world view comes through in the frame choice.  I love all kinds of movies.  The question is, how appropriate is my perspective, for different genres?  We’ll have to see.