Biggest Filmmaking Lessons I Learned From Making ‘TINY: A Story About Living Small’

FilmCourage.com
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read
Watch the video interview on Youtube here

Biggest Filmmaking Lessons I Learned From Making‘TINY: A Story About Living Small’

Film Courage: Christopher, what about making the documentary film TINY helped you become a better filmmaker? What did you learn about that experience?

Christopher Smith: Wow! So much. TINY for me was definitely a boot camp, in filmmaking particularly, but also in documentaries. From everything to the process to shooting, editing, doing sound and those things, but also from the business side of things, raising money, distribution, the film festival circuit, learning about festival strategy, all the way through running your own business. I learned so many things…[laughs] we don’t have enough time to go over it really.

Watch the 2012 video interview about the documentary TINY on Youtube here

Film Courage: Well you said earlier that the design community is quite enthusiastic and it’s a very large community. Did you think that they [the community] would take to the film as they did? [When in 2012 we interviewed you and Merete Mueller about the documentary TINY]. It’s one of our most watched videos from when we interviewed you. So did you think that they would be so taken with [the film]?

Christopher Smith: When we first set out to do TINY, Merete and I, we didn’t really know what to expect and it certainly exceeded any expectation that we had for crowdfunding initially. But along the way we were seeing how people were reacting to it. So the first time it kind of went public as a project, as when we did Kickstarter and seeing when that took off and before we even finished the movie, we had 700 or 800 Facebook followers for it. We could tell that there was something there and the interest in the media all along and just the way that things would be shared or go viral. It got to the point where we would talk to a new reporter or whoever and say “Just so you know, you are going to get a lot of people who are going to read your article or whatever.” And they’d say “Okay.” Of course everyone always says that and then we’d get an email like a week to the day later saying “This was the most read article that we’ve had!” And I’m like “Told you…” I’d like to pretend that because Merete and I were very charming and they really cared about our story. But in reality I think we really timed it well and that the Tiny House phenomenon…(Watch the video here on Youtube).

Check out Christopher and Stephanie’s successfully funded Kickstarter campaignfor CURRENT SEA!

CONNECT WITH CHRISTOPHER SMITH
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CONNECT WITH STEPHANIE LINCOLN
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Watch the video interview on Youtube here

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