Found another good film related blog. Skidgel is a blog by a Macromedia engineer who does film stuff on the side and writes books on the subject. He has a number of videos on the site that really enjoyed watching.
I just finished one by a guy who works for Apple and does short film production on the side. He made an interesting comment that he wants to be a filmmaker. He doesn’t want to shoot documentaries for PBS, he doesn’t want to go into TV, he wants to shoot film shorts and ultimately feature films.
This made me think. I’m getting a little info overload on what it takes to be a filmmaker. Right now I have an idea that my path to fame, fortune and freedom is shooting my own movies – shorts and features – submitting them to film festivals or doing direct DVD distribution.
I think this comes from “Rebel Without a Crew.
But is that the way I really want to go? Do I want to make feature films? Some of the visual stories I love the most are Joss Whedon’s Buffyverse and Babylon 5. When I think of a 2 hour feature, I think the story is too short. Serenity left me wanting more. Seven years of Buffy left me satisfied. I think this reflects my writers side, because TV is a writers medium. On a TV series the Executive Producer, aka the show runner, is the top dog and comes up from the ranks of writers. In features, the top dog is the director and his vision is an interpretation of a screenplay.
I don’t primarily want to be a writer. The idea of cranking out scripts sounds boring, and I’ve found doing that a struggle. I don’t like to write scripts for the sake of writing them. But when I decided I was going to make my first short, I wrote the script in a day. The story just came quickly, but it was in the framework of creating the whole picture.
So is there a path to being a show runner that doesn’t involve being a writer first? Not that I know of. Though in the near future video podcasting might become something like that. If the money was there, and the final place wasn’t a tiny video iPod, but a TV screen. And it might be possible to do a direct to DVD TV series. The world of media is changing fast and there will be chances for new things to happen.
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