Copy Your Own Damn Footage
You’re not Michael Bay. Stop pretending you need a full crew.
On the day I directed my first short film way back in 1994, my teacher came into the school’s studio looking for me. I had a crew of eight or nine people, but the mood wasn’t right, so I had headed behind the set to make some adjustments to a light shining through a window. The teacher saw that I wasn’t sitting beside the camera operator, and yelled that filmmaking is about collaboration, not “creative masturbation”. Paul, if you’re reading this, it’s great to have an orgy to get the job done, but sometimes you’ve just got to take care of things yourself.
Earlier this year, I got a message from an old friend asking me to come out and help on his film. I thought long and hard about it, excited about the idea of being on set. And then I didn’t reply. It was kind of a jerk move on my part, but he was asking me to be a DMT on his no-budget film. A Digital Media Technician’s (sometimes known as a DIT or a DUT) primary responsibility is copying the data off of the camera and making duplicates for safety. Today again I saw a no-budget, non-paying webseries by a friend of a friend, looking for a DMT amongst a half dozen other crew positions.
If you’re shooting a small production and the camera operator or camera assistant can’t take a few minutes to dump the cards to a hard drive before the lunch break, none of you should be making a film. Put the camera down, walk away, and rethink your life. SD cards are cheap and big. File sizes are pretty small. USB 3 transfers pretty damn fast. On a single camera shoot, copying the cards is not a full day’s job.
Since director Robert Rodriguez’s career has slowed down, many indie filmmakers seem to have forgotten the incredibly powerful lesson of his book Rebel Without A Crew. One man with a couple of friends made a movie that launched a career that most of us are envious of. He used the tools he had available and the people around him to make a film that cost very little to make and propelled him to stardom. He’s worked with the very best actors in the business and now has his own TV channel. It’s a rare achievement to be sure, but it started when he set out to do what was thought to be an impossible task for one man.
When you’re working on a passion project with very little money, you absolutely cannot think like a “real” film production. You don’t have their resources. More crew means more time spent organizing people, more money spent on food, more space in cars to transport people to set. Every person you add costs more and wastes more time. The bare minimum isn’t always the best way to do things, but a few dedicated people can accomplish far more than a lot of bored ones.
On my feature film, Separation Anxiety, we never had more than three crew members, including myself. Most days, I was directing and doing sound alongside a camera man. There were a few days when I was the entire crew, either by design (trying to keep a low profile while shooting on city streets with no permits) or because the camera operator forgot he had to shoot a wedding (Matt, I hold no grudge because the scene I shot that night came out great).
I’ve also directed a crew of twenty on a commercial for a large company. It was amazing to only have to worry about telling the director of photography what shot I wanted and directing the actors. If every shoot I was on had $20,000 a day to spend like that one did, I’d be in heaven. But a crew that size moves far slower than a small team. Not only does a small crew keep things moving fast, it also gives you an appreciation for jobs that you can overlook on a bigger set. You’ll realize how important set decoration is when you’re scotch-taping 343 newspaper clippings to a hotel room wall, knowing your lead actor has to leave in two hours.
I’m in pre-production now on a feature film with a $50,000 budget. We’ll have a crew of four or five. A DMT won’t be one of them. Not because a DMT isn’t an important position, but because it’s not an essential position. The leaner your crew, the faster you’ll move. Someone needs to point the camera, someone needs to be in front of the camera, and someone needs to record what they say.
Everyone else is gravy.
