How to self-finance making a fiction series. The story by a math school teacher.
Getting there
John worked as a primary school teacher, but he always wanted to become a filmmaker. After getting a few roles in big productions, he decided to use the money he earned as a teacher to self-finance a motion picture.
This is a story about perseverance and struggle in the modern world. Fight City, a dark place run by mobs, attracts a young man from Ohio, where he gets lost in the act of violence, money chasing, and simply surviving.
John Lee, a teacher, and an actor became the director and writer of Fight City. How does one make such a transition on their own, without any outside financial help? Where does one start? Here we discover the journey that lasted for seven years.
John was involved in such projects as Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Lionsgate’s Draft Day. This experience opened John’s eyes to the film production business insights and opportunities.
In addition, John produced the music video “Who Gone Be” to support the series and he is working on a comic book in the theme of Fight City. The music video and the comic strip create a whole new universe of Fight City, expanding on the themes of struggle, perseverance, and getting it done no matter what.
Self-financing
This episode is fully funded in paychecks from John’s work and income tax checks. In order to produce such a picture, John invested over a hundred thousand dollars from his own pocket over the last several years, since one would need the equipment that allows cinematic image, like the Alexa camera, sound, and much more.
“I financed this one hundred percent myself. I took a few donations, but ninety-nine percent was my own funding. After I paid my bills, every paycheck I received as a teacher every two weeks, eighty percent of my paycheck would go to financing this series.”
“Financing the crew is over eighty percent. A lot of the crew took payments in instalments, some took delayed payments, and I am forever indebted to these people.”
“If you have a limited budget and you are a filmmaker, my suggestion to you is to find someone with an iPhone, find somebody with another iPhone to record sound with, get some really good lighting which can be just some bulbs from the store and point them. Just use your friends, and then research. Go on Youtube and search how to make a good film, how to make a film with no budget. There are a lot of resources out there for your disposal if you take the initiative to go and find that information.”
Getting to find such talents as Dewey Bozella who plays Reggie in the series, helped the production — Dewey’s real-life story has been well-known around the United States for several decades. He has been wrongfully convicted of murder way back in 1983 and spent more than 26 years in Sing Sing prison until proven innocent and released in 2009. According to Dewey, boxing and the dream of boxing an opponent on a professional level is what kept him sane throughout all this time. You may read more about Dewey’s real story here.
In production
The most challenging part of the production process is believing. When one doesn’t have a budget and produces a series or a film alone, one must make certain sacrifices in terms of work and family.
John Lee: “My mom has taught me perseverance and this is what got me through”.
The production process started in 2017. Up to 50 crew members worked on the project. Casting was pretty straightforward due to the constraints in the budget; any actor that pretty much showed interest in the project took part. This meant that John had to make sure that actors knew what they were supposed to do, what the technical team had to do at any given scene, and how the whole financing situation was going to be resolved.
When choosing an actor during the casting process, John says that “A lot of times, an actor’s lack of experience is less of an issue than an actor’s attitude and inability to work with people and in a team”.
John adds: “Luckily, I am in New York City, and most people want to act. So I was able to at least get through to many people. I ended up having over a hundred cast members in Fight City. It was ridiculous if you think about it. It’s just a blessing.
Use your family and friends as actors. Many of them look like everyday people, and acting is everyday people doing everyday things. You have actors all around you. You just need to inspire and motivate them to want to do it.”
“My creative process is pretty sequential, from brainstorming to aggregating best topics, to outlining, then to rough draft, then skimming away the fat and keeping what you like. And that process can be applied to creating characters all the way to creating scenes and episodes within a season. It helps me because I have ADHD”.
Juggling between work, family, and the movie
“That’s a huge commitment. It puts strains on your relationships, it impedes your finances, and if you don’t feel convinced, it can cause you to quit.
“Most of the shooting had to happen during summer breaks, or my winter or spring breaks because you can call off only so much before a job wants to fire you. Most of the locations I shot at were my friends’ houses. We shot guerilla-style without a permit, and we just made sets work.”
“I was finishing my masters when I was doing Fight City. I got my masters, I had my first son, I had my first daughter. I went through so many ups and downs of life over the seven years as one could imagine. I started Fight City in 2014 and we just wrapped shooting this year. I am a math teacher. That’s seven years.”
John adds more about the commitment he had to make: “Because I wanted it to look the best of the best, I had to have the best of the best camera, I needed the best of the best team, and I needed the best of the best package. It costs money. If you don’t have a lot of money, you will find yourself having to sacrifice in certain areas, and I didn’t want to sacrifice the picture or the sound. If I wanted to sacrifice anywhere, it was going to be in my own pockets. It was going to be my own personal life. And that was the commitment I made.”
Post-production
Once most of the filming was completed in 2021, an Estonian production company Vita Pictura took over the post-production of the pilot episode.
John was brave to trust the company and the team located on another continent with the series post-production. An independent US creative meets another creative company on the other side of the world, and they decide to keep going forward together, since what unites them is their love for creative process.
John met Georgius and Vita Pictura team while filming a music video for “The Vamps” in Italy. Before that, they had mutual acquaintances in the US and met thanks to them.
One of the key people for Vita Pictura in the US has been a filmmaker and producer Alex G. Ghassan, who unfortunately passed away several years earlier — he was essential for Vita Pictura’s team to reach out to creative contacts in the US and he was the tying knot between the creatives in Estonia and in the USA.
John showed some clips to Georgius in Italy and intrigued him, so John promised to involve him and the team. Two years later, he was sending Georgius footage, and his Vita Pictura team was chopping it up and preparing it for the editing.
“Georgius and his team at Vita Pictura have proved that the Fight City will be treated as expected for a full series.”
After giving it a lot of thought, John and Georgius agreed that the feature film could actually be a series, so they decided to produce the pilot episode to attract some attention to the project.
Apart from offering expertise in post-production, Vita Pictura set up and shot the last scene of the series in Tallinn, Estonia. Vita Pictura members of the team Lev, Nikita, Anastasia, and Roman work on different fronts; each deals with the social media content, soundtrack, posters, production notes, and everything else that a work like this needs to have.
The Outcome
John’s influences while creating “Fight City” have been “Fight Club” and “Thor: Ragnarok”. John wants to tell stories from his perspective, and not by other people. “Fight City” is essentially a fiction series originated in and told by the Black community in the USA.
“Throughout it all, there was this consistent dread of I have to finish this, I have to finish what I started. I have to complete this because I had a vision of having a body of work and presenting it to the right person, and that right person presenting it to the next, and collaborating and coming together to make a huge film”. I had to complete my part in order for the vision to come to fruition.”
Films’ story reflects John’s own journey towards creating a whole movie by himself through the struggles he went through in order to finance this work and make it all happen. The story raises the theme of perseverance in the hostile world, a question of how far one is willing to go to achieve one’s goals, and people coming together to make this world a better place.
Visit the website of the movie and follow Fight City on IMDB.
