Sometimes, the fire of creativity is struck not by lightning but by the slow, smoldering ache of dissatisfaction. And in today's soul-stirring conversation, we welcome Shawn Whitney, a filmmaker who found cinema not in the corridors of academia, but in the quiet rebellion of self-taught screenwriting and micro-budget filmmaking. Shawn Whitney is a screenwriter, director, and founder of Micro Budget Film Lab who empowers indie creators to tell powerful stories on shoestring budgets.
Our journey with Shawn begins not in childhood fantasies of movie stardom, but in the dense woods of Brechtian theater and the quiet study of old black-and-white films. His path wandered, as many worthwhile ones do, through rejection, basement solitude, and heartbreak—until something within him demanded not just expression but transmutation. Shawn didn’t study film in college. Instead, he emerged from the theater world and fell into filmmaking after a failed workshop production left him broke and dispirited. Yet that fall became his rise. As he said, “I just started writing screenplays and learning the craft in the quiet shadows.”There’s something beautiful in learning the art of story not from glamorous sets or high-priced workshops but from the bones of failed experiments and the echoes of dialogue bouncing around your own mind.
Shawn described his education not with fanfare but humility—referencing Sid Field, Blake Snyder, and the ever-controversial Save the Cat—tools that became his spiritual guides, not rigid masters. And with every script, he refined a method. Not the method, mind you. A method. “You just need a method. You can’t just be anarchy,” he mused.But perhaps what struck me most was Shawn’s philosophy that screenwriting is not just structure—it’s an argument about what makes life meaningful. Films, he insists, must be animated not by market trends, but by inner turmoil, by the strange flickering passions of the human heart. “It can’t just be about chopping up zombies. Your characters must go through an inner transformation.” That idea—that a film is a living question—sets Shawn apart in a world often obsessed with following the formula instead of feeling the pulse.Shawn’s micro-budget films—“A Brand New You” and “F*cking My Way Back Home”—aren’t just titles that stick. They are rebellious acts of filmmaking born from limited means and limitless creativity.
His stories unfold not in sprawling CGI landscapes, but in human longing, funny sadness, and philosophical absurdity. One film follows a man trying to clone his dead wife in the living room. Another explores redemption from the passenger seat of a towed Cutlass Supreme. With a budget of $7,000 and a borrowed tow truck, Shawn pulled off scenes that feel bigger than most tentpole blockbusters.But filmmaking, for Shawn, isn’t just about his own expression. Through Micro Budget Film Lab, he’s become a teacher, a mentor, and a kind of mad scientist in the alchemical lab of storytelling. His passion is not merely to direct, but to help others break free from the gatekeeping systems that keep fresh stories from being told. “We need a micro budget movement,” he declared, envisioning a cinematic rebellion where filmmakers use what they have to tell stories no one else dares to.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/bulletproof-screenwriting-podcast--2881148/support.
Our journey with Shawn begins not in childhood fantasies of movie stardom, but in the dense woods of Brechtian theater and the quiet study of old black-and-white films. His path wandered, as many worthwhile ones do, through rejection, basement solitude, and heartbreak—until something within him demanded not just expression but transmutation. Shawn didn’t study film in college. Instead, he emerged from the theater world and fell into filmmaking after a failed workshop production left him broke and dispirited. Yet that fall became his rise. As he said, “I just started writing screenplays and learning the craft in the quiet shadows.”There’s something beautiful in learning the art of story not from glamorous sets or high-priced workshops but from the bones of failed experiments and the echoes of dialogue bouncing around your own mind.
Shawn described his education not with fanfare but humility—referencing Sid Field, Blake Snyder, and the ever-controversial Save the Cat—tools that became his spiritual guides, not rigid masters. And with every script, he refined a method. Not the method, mind you. A method. “You just need a method. You can’t just be anarchy,” he mused.But perhaps what struck me most was Shawn’s philosophy that screenwriting is not just structure—it’s an argument about what makes life meaningful. Films, he insists, must be animated not by market trends, but by inner turmoil, by the strange flickering passions of the human heart. “It can’t just be about chopping up zombies. Your characters must go through an inner transformation.” That idea—that a film is a living question—sets Shawn apart in a world often obsessed with following the formula instead of feeling the pulse.Shawn’s micro-budget films—“A Brand New You” and “F*cking My Way Back Home”—aren’t just titles that stick. They are rebellious acts of filmmaking born from limited means and limitless creativity.
His stories unfold not in sprawling CGI landscapes, but in human longing, funny sadness, and philosophical absurdity. One film follows a man trying to clone his dead wife in the living room. Another explores redemption from the passenger seat of a towed Cutlass Supreme. With a budget of $7,000 and a borrowed tow truck, Shawn pulled off scenes that feel bigger than most tentpole blockbusters.But filmmaking, for Shawn, isn’t just about his own expression. Through Micro Budget Film Lab, he’s become a teacher, a mentor, and a kind of mad scientist in the alchemical lab of storytelling. His passion is not merely to direct, but to help others break free from the gatekeeping systems that keep fresh stories from being told. “We need a micro budget movement,” he declared, envisioning a cinematic rebellion where filmmakers use what they have to tell stories no one else dares to.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/bulletproof-screenwriting-podcast--2881148/support.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You are listening to the IFAH podcast Network. For more
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Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome to the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, episode number four twenty six.
Start writing no matter what. The water does not flow
until the faucet is turned on.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Louis Lemore broadcasting from a dark, windowless room in Hollywood
when we really should be working on that next draft.
It's the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing you the craft and
business of screenwriting while teaching you how to make your
screenplay bulletproof.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another
episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am your humble
host Alex Ferrari. Now. Today's show is sponsored by Bulletproof
Script Coverage. Now. Unlike other script coverage services, Bulletproof Script
Coverage actually focuses on the kind of project you are
(00:59):
in the goals of the project you are, so we
actually break it down by three categories micro budget, indie film, market,
and studio film. There's no reason to get coverage from
a reader that's used to reading temp pole movies when
your movie is gonna be done for one hundred thousand
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(01:20):
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to covermiscreenplay dot com. Enjoy today's episode with guest host
Dave Bullets.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
My guest this week runs micro Budget Film Lab. He
has directed two micro budget features and is in pre
production for a third with guest Sean Whitney. Hey, Sean,
thanks a lot for coming on the show.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Thanks, thanks very much for having me, Dave. I really
appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Oh, you know, my pleasure, Sean. You know, I've seen
everything he does, you've been doing with the micro Budget
Film Lab and all the great things that you're doing
over there. But before I even you know, we start
talking about all the things you do there, I wanted
to talk, you know, about your career and about you know,
getting started. So you know, we're growing up, Sean. Did
you always you know, have this you know, this hobby
of film or this love affair with film? And and
(02:18):
you know, did you make films growing up as a kid?
Speaker 4 (02:22):
No, no, short answer, no, No, I mean I always was.
I've thought of myself as a writer since I was
probably ten or nine years old. But you know, there
was no we didn't have any video cameras or anything
like that, like it just we just didn't have them.
So it wasn't really around. I watched a lot of
(02:44):
old movies, you know, it was back in the days
first before cable and then cable, and so you know,
we would get like Channel twenty nine from Buffalo and
we would watch you know, bad movies, or not bad movies,
but old movies from the fifties and sixties. But it
wasn't really until much later that I decided to pursue film.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Actually, so, did you end up going to college for film?
Speaker 4 (03:07):
No? No. So I went to university in Toronto at
the York University, and I did a liberal arts degree
in humanities kind of cultural studies, and then I did
a master's in interdisciplinary studies that was focused on writing
for the theater. And i'd started a small theater company
that was doing like Brecdian musical theater and we did
(03:29):
a bunch of really great productions, and you know, I
wrote stuff and I was doing that, and then but
then I went decided to make a turn towards film
really in about the year two thousand and three, I guess,
and at that point I just began writing, you know,
I'd done I tried to do actually a theater production.
(03:50):
I did, like a workshop production, and it went really
badly and I lost a lot of money, and I
was really depressed. So I kind of hit in my
basement for about three years and just started writing screenplays
and just sort of learning how to write screenplays on
my own. And then I guess three or four years
and then I ended up getting accepted into the Canadian
Film Center, which is kind of like the American Film
(04:11):
Institute Institute, and that was my kind of, you know,
my formal, the formal, official part of my education was
that residency there.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Now you mentioned, you know, writing your own screenplays and
sort of teaching yourself how to write screenplays. You know
that that's sort of something I did a few years ago,
you know, and I think that helps out a lot.
And what I want to ask is, you know, was
there any particular books or even scripts or even movies
that you sort of us to sort of pick apart,
you know, and how to sort of teaching yourself how
(04:42):
to write.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Yeah, there was a few books. I mean, sid Field
I think was maybe the first book screenplay that I
that I read, and that kind of opened my eyes
to you know, structure and all that kind of stuff.
And then I read another book by Epstein called Crafty Screenwriting,
which was really good. And then the most recently I
(05:05):
read a few years ago now, I read Save the
Cat by Blake Snyder, and that was I know, it gets,
it gets you know, a lot of bad people go
on about it now because it has become kind of
the dominant model in Hollywood in many ways, but it's
I still think that it's a really powerful machinery that
(05:25):
you can use. You can bend it to kind of
more unconventional structures. But it was really useful for me
in terms of creating a kind of method to approach
the screenwriting process.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yeah, I have noticed that Say the Cat has has
gotten a lot of flack. I mean, I think if
you're at the top of any field, and you know,
I think Save the Cat has sort of gotten to
the upper echelon now because I mean, well, Sidfield has passed,
and so has had the person made Save the Cat
has passed. But I mean, I still think that it's
(05:56):
been able. It's been it's been sort of passed on
through his through his pro And I think now when
when you're at the top field, when you're at the
top of any field, I think you're going to get
flack for a lot of things.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, and it's partly it's because
of the way that Hollywood approached the whole process of storytelling.
I mean, it really is the kind of formula that's
in Save the Cat is used constantly, Like you can
watch a movie and time it's kind of just the same,
the cat structure. And and I think people get because
(06:27):
of that, and because a lot of Hollywood movies are
pretty you know, they're pretty empty, sort of commercial properties
that are really, you know, not about they're not about art,
They're about They're a product, right, And I think people
confuse the power of the story structure with the vacancy
of the content. And I think that's where a lot
of that comes from. It's like, you know, Hollywood movies
are kind of empty, or not all of them, but
(06:49):
a lot of them are empty, and it's because they
all follow this model, and I think that's it's a
little bit of a misrepresentation.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yeah, and you know, I know you can't see this
because it's a but I have a huge screenwriting book
library right next to me to my left, and I
sort of did what you did, you know, I wanted
to figure out, you know, screenwriting the nuts and bolts
and getting down to the absolute you know, sort of
atoms of it and figure out, you know, what makes
a great screenwriter, what makes a great screenplay. And I
(07:17):
sort of just you know, would buy these books piece
by piece. Some of them you could buy I mean
for pennies on the dollar in Amazon. Others you know,
they just came out and they're still full price. But
you know, there's a lot there. There are some that
really speak to to me, and there's others that I
read and I'm just like, I don't know, maybe this
is lost because you know, I'm sure it happened to
you too, Sewan, where you have people recommend books to you,
(07:40):
like screenwriting books, for instance, and you read them and
you're just like, what was the big deal about this?
Speaker 4 (07:44):
You know, yeah, yeah, totally, And a lot of them
end up. I don't know, after a while, if you
read a few of them, it's like, okay, this is
I'm kind of reading the same thing again. And yeah,
at a certain point you need to just get a
method that you're going to use and then and then
learn from it and find it, find ways to advance
upon it. You know. I don't think there's any absolutely
(08:05):
perfect or the right method exactly, but you just need
a method. You can't just be it can't just be anarchy.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Yes, absolutely, I think a method is key. Finding your
routine also, which I guess is another way of saying method,
but you know, finding your routine and making sure you know, okay,
well eleven o'clock today or maybe a little earlier, or
maybe I'm gonna get up in too, you know, an
hour early today and I'm just gonna write, you know,
I'm just gonna write for you know, forty five minutes
to half an hour. And and you're absolutely right, you know,
(08:32):
finding that process is key because like you just said,
when I would read some of these books, I would
I felt like I was reading the same thing, the
same things over and over again, and I'm just like,
I didn't I just read this book like with a
different cover and by a different author. But I mean,
but that that's bound to happen. You know, once you start,
you know, getting to a certain point, you're gonna start
seeing all that same uh information just basically you know,
(08:54):
used again or maybe presented in a different way.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, there's only some many ways
in a sense to tell a story. And if you're
telling a three act story or a story that has
a beginning, middle, and end, anyway, there's only so many
ways to do it. And you know, the interesting thing
because I read a lot of scripts in my I
have a development job, and I read tons of scripts,
and what you see mostly is that is not I mean,
(09:19):
you do see scripts that come in that are kind
of you know, soulless machines, but mostly what you see
from screenwriters who aren't established is that they just don't
have the structure. They don't know how to tell a
story that keeps moving forward, and you really need that.
And so, to go back to what you're saying is
so it feels repetitive on the one hand, and it
is repetitive in a lot of ways, but it also
(09:42):
is like people need to learn this because otherwise you
can't tell a story.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
And you touched on something through Sean, you know, you said,
that's some of the scripts that come in are like
a soulless machine.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Will be right back after a word from our sponsor
and now to the show.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
You know, I know you can't go into specifics or
you know, anything like that, but is there anything any
sort of thing that that that writer might be doing wrong,
whether it be structure or is it because they don't
have a voice that makes it sort of like that
soulless machine.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
Well, what it is is that people write to the
market and because you know, people want to make a living,
and so they think, okay, well, you know, like for
a while, we were getting all these found footage scripts,
for instance, which you know, we're the Rage, and they
would come in and people would follow the beats, you know,
it would like X would happen on page twelve and
why would it happen on page twenty three or whatever.
(10:38):
But what was lacking in them was that they were
just you know, it's like it's like watching a plumber
fix your pipes. It's necessary work, you know, but it's
not interesting besides for you, because you know your toilet's overflowing.
But for most people it's not going to be that interesting.
And so what's I find lacking is that kind of
some kind of universal universality to it. So you need
(11:01):
to have, for instance, your characters it can't just be
about you know, chopping up zombies or aliens or whatever.
They have to be going through an inner turmoil, because
really what stories are about is there an argument, you know,
about what makes the good life. And you're making an argument.
And if you're not making an argument, and if it's
not being felt through your character, then it just feels
like watching a plumber fix a pipe or watching somebody
(11:21):
build a house. It's kind of interesting to see the
structure of it, but it's not emotionally moving.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
I just took a webinar. It was a free webinar
but by Doug Richardson, who did who wrote Diehard Too,
And he actually was saying, you know that whole thing
about an argument, and he is. His whole thing was, hey,
structure is an argument. You know, how you structure your
film should be an argument for your whole movie. And
you know that that actually really stuck with me, and
you know, just great that you hear. I'm just hearing you,
(11:49):
you know, say something similar about your characters. An argument
as well, which again is I agree with one hundred percent.
As something I've learned with screenwriting is that and that
you know, you we we sort of when we were
making characters. I think sometimes screenwriters have a tendency to
write themselves just like you said, you know, we put
ourselves as the main character, and I think that sort
(12:10):
of ends up hurting us because the main character ends
up becoming almost like a shell and everybody else is
sort of you know, having all the having sort of
you know, like the witty banter or maybe they're actually
the ones that are actually going through a transformation, and
the main character just sort of, you know, is just
sort of there going from you know, basically just going
through the motions.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
Yeah, yeah, totally. And I mean it can be you,
but it has to be you in a universal way.
It has to be universal you you know, like you
have to you know, there's things about your life. You know.
There was a film, a micro budget film that I
talk about a lot called Bellflower from a few years ago,
think twenty eleven, that was shot for like seventeen grand
and it did really well. I think it went to Sundance.
Actually it went to Sundance. I got distribution with a telescope.
(12:52):
It's a great movie and it's about his breakup, so
it's a very in some ways of personal film. But
he took his breakup and he turned it into a
kind of universal crazy story about young male rage and
representations of violence and stuff that's a lot of fun
to watch and has has universal value to it because
he what he does is all the parts, the soul
(13:15):
of it all fits together. So the characters are characters,
journey fits with the theme of the movie, and the
theme of the movie fits with the visual styling of
the movie and with the visual elements in the movie,
and that all fits with what's happening with the secondary
characters and so on. So it works together as a
as a machine with a machine in the good sense,
a machine in the sort of emotional emotional sense that
(13:37):
all the parts are firing and all the pistons are firing.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. It kind of
reminds me also of a sort of mad Max. You know,
main Max Furry wrote, I know what we're talking about now,
you know, because with the main character, but a Mad Max,
so he never really changes, you know. But that again
is the whole point of Mad Max is that he
Max is never actually the main character of any of
his movies. You know, he's just he's helping everybody else
(14:01):
out as they're going on their adventures. And I think
but going into those even well probably that may be
probably started the second one, but in Road Warrior, but
even even you know Road Warrior, then you have Beyond
thunder Dome and then you have the newest one, Fury Road.
You kind of see that formula work and it actually works,
like we were just saying, it actually works for that,
but anywhere else you'd kind of be like, well, what
the hell's going on here? You know, it's not complementing itself,
(14:23):
if you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that the model of the
Mad Max model is also the model for noir, you know,
like no our fiction and noir films is about this cynical,
scarred human in the world who is giving us an
entry into the world to see that the journey of
other people, and we become where they're sort of cynical,
where they're sort of bring brought in in the same
(14:46):
way in the same state as that person, and then
we're learning through that process the argument about that world
and what's valuable. You know.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point. Kind of reminds
me of Chinatown in a way. You know, Jack Nicholson, Uh,
you know, at the whole end, he was very very
sort of scarred and by the end, you know, I
don't know if he really changed, but but the whole
but the whole venture was absolutely amazing.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
No, absolutely, So, you know.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
As we talked more about, you know, your career, Sean,
you know you you obviously you know, you taught yourself
how to write screenplays, and you know, so where was
it where you actually started to sit down and actually
you you made your own film.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
So I had after I actually shortly before I went
to the film center, and then after I went to
the film center, I made a few shorts and kind
of you know, i'd read, I read a few things
about you know, how to shoot not cross the line,
you know, coverage that kind of thing, and then I
started I shot some some shorts that were you know,
from moderate to bad, and but it was really fun
(15:50):
and I and I loved it and I learned a
lot as both as a filmmaker and as a writer,
because I learned, Okay, well that doesn't work. You know,
that's you know, a block of dialogue that long isn't
going to work. Saying it this way doesn't work like
you just you see it being played out. And so
it's an extremely useful experience, even from the point of
view being a screenwriter. And then, you know, and then
(16:12):
when I came out of the film Center and well,
a bunch of stuff happened. I had a script options
with like an Oscar nominated producer, and it all looked,
you know, great, and you know, I was counting the
money and thinking my career was about to take off.
How did things go wrong? And that was two thousand
and eight, and then at the bottom fell out of
the financial market, and in subsequently all the money dried
(16:32):
up for indie films and Hollywood's reverted to just you know,
retreads and remakes and tent pole pictures. And so while
I got a job out of that in development that
I still have, my career as a filmmaker and as
a screenwriter kind of came to a halt. And so
after a number of years of having done that, I
(16:54):
just was like one day sitting in my office with
my wife, feeling frustrated because I was reading a script
that I that I thought was kind of bad, but
was you know, was financed because it had some a
list casts. And I turned to my wife and I'm like,
this is ridiculous, Like we're helping. You know, she's a
wedding photographer, so she helps people realize their dreams in
her way, and I was doing it with you know,
story editing, and I said, you know, why don't why
(17:16):
aren't we why are we just the bridesmaids? You know,
why don't we make our movie? And uh, and so
we decided at that point then we just started talking
about a story. And then it happened.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Yeah, the the bottom fell out in two thousand and eight. Uh,
for man, for so many people. I mean, I was
so tragic. And you know, I know other people as
well who've had who had things development and two thousand
and eight hit and my god, I mean, and here
we are in twenty sixteen and we're still recovering from
that here in America. But but yeah, you know, and
(17:50):
the and the shocks were sort of felt world wide.
But you know, so you were you know, you're able
to regain you know, your composure, you you know regain
you know your motivation and you know, So what was
what ended up? Did your first movie ended up being?
Speaker 4 (18:06):
It ended up being? I mean, it's it's like a
sci fi comedy called A Brand New You about a
widower who can't get over the death of his wife,
and so he moves into his house and after trying
to failing at committing suicide, he convinces his landlord and
his roommate to help him try to clone her in
the living room because his landlord it turns out as
(18:26):
this disgraced biochemist, and so it's about him trying to
kind of recreate this moment that is lost. But it's
a comedy. So it's funny but funny. Sad, I guess.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
So is that available to watch online with the view?
Do you or anything?
Speaker 4 (18:41):
No, we're we got a sales agent and we've been
going through the hell that is known as deliverables, and
we just sent off for the second time for you
have to get a you have to get a quality
control report before your film, like we've done all the
rest of the stuff, I think, I hope to God.
And then we needed to make this quality control report,
and so it goes, you know, you send it in.
(19:03):
It costs you like fifteen hundred bucks for you know,
four passes to cover your video and all your your
audio tracks, and they send you report and if there's
any problems in there, you know, and it could be
any kinds of thing, then it comes back to you
and then you have to fix those and then you
have to send it back. So we got that back
and send it to our audio editor and our editor
or picture editor, and and so we've we've just sent
(19:26):
it off for the second QC report and I'm hoping
that it's good enough.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Yeah, those deliverables sean the more, you know, I didn't
know too much about deliverables till a few years ago,
and then I found out all that is in that
is involved with deliverables. And even we're talking with you know,
my friend Jason Brubaker Distriver, you know, just getting involved
with those deliverable deliverables. You know, it's like a like
you said, it's like what did you call a living hell?
I think that's pretty accurate.
Speaker 4 (19:54):
But yeah, yeah, it's totally brutal.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
We'll be right back after a word from our spot
answer and now back to the show.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
So, you know, so if you finished your first movie,
and again you know, that was a micro budget film,
and you know, you made your second film, which, by
the way, I love the name of this of this film,
by the way, fucking my Way back Home. Yeah, that
that is a very a very good title, by the way.
And also it's very eye catching. So even if I
(20:28):
didn't know what it was, even if I didn't know
what it was about, I could just imagine what that
what that is about. But you know, so where was
the impetus to make your second film? I mean, did
you already have this script, you know, written while you
did your first one, or did you sort of just
you know, have a lot of motivation to sort of
make this script.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
No, we were, well, we we'd done the kind of
the festival thing with the first one and gone to
a few festivals and won some awards, and we were like,
what are we going to do next? And so we
you know, I had some other scripts that we wanted
to do, but they were bigger. They were like, you know,
at least one hundred thousand dollars kind of thing, and
we're just we're not in the position to make one
hundred thousand dollars movie unfortunately at the moment. And so
(21:09):
we you know, my production partners, there's four of us
in the company, and we said, well, you know, what
are we going to do next? And I had this
story that I developed with another writer years earlier, that
he and I were going to shoot together, a wonderful
writer named Ryes Cruthers, And but it just never happened.
We'd both kind of gotten busy with our own things,
and so I spoke to him and I said, hey, dude,
(21:30):
can I take our story and write it up as
a script so we can shoot it? And he was like, yeah, absolutely, absolutely,
So I then I wrote it up and we started editing,
you know, getting notes back and forth, and you know,
I don't know how many months later, eight months later,
maybe nine months later, then we shot the movie.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
So when you shot the movie, did you have a
slightly bigger budget than when you were when them with
your first movie? No.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
You know, the irony is we learned a lot from
the first movie. You know, we made mistakes that cost
us money, and we got better at improv improvising, and
so the first film cost us I think twenty two
thousand or something. And the second movie we shot for
seven thousand, but it's actually more complicated and there's more locations,
and we a lot of it takes place in a
(22:17):
car going around the city. So we had to tow
the car because our driver, like he plays the driver
in the film, is like maybe the worst driver on
the planet. So the idea of him acting while driving
this like nineteen seventy four cut the Supreme was was
a horrifying thought. So we had to like tow the
car around.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
So when you had to tow the car around, I
guess the biggest then, the biggest part of production budget
then was obviously a tow truck, a driver and then
a tow truck. You obviously had to get like some
kind of I guess you had a route that you
wanted to go. Again, I'm just I'm just thinking with
the producer's hat right now.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Sean was, yeah, yeah, no, you know we went. So
plan A was okay. So plan A was we thought,
you know, we had a connection with the post production
house and maybe he could get us a deal with
a you know, a rental house, Whites in Toronto, and
he contacted them for us, and they got back and
they were like, oh, yeah, you can get a you know,
(23:14):
you know, a toe vehicle, but it's like ten thousand
dollars a day. Plus you need to get cops, right,
you need to have off duty you know, paid paid
duty officers. And we're like, well, it's more than our budget.
So we tried U haul and we did attacks that.
We did a test shoot with a U Haul trailer
pulling it around and so on, and that seemed like
(23:35):
the way we were going to go, but that was
going to be I think about a thousand bucks with insurance,
and that still seemed high. So what we ended up
doing was a guy who owns a cafe around the
corner from my house had a tow truck. And while
he had a car, first of all, he had this
cutless Supreme and I was like, hey, man, can I
rent your car for the shoot? Your car is like
this big, ugly beast and it's a beautiful sky blue
(23:56):
color and I really want to use it because it
really looks good. And he was like, yeah, yeah, totally.
And we told him we were going to toe it
and he was like, oh, hey, do you want to
you want to rent my my my pickup truck a
little Toyota pickup truck, like, yeah, sure, So we rented
it off him for a few hundred dollars and then
we went on Craigslist and we found somebody who rented
like a car tow trailer and we rented it for
(24:19):
two weeks for I think three hundred dollars. So in total,
you know, car toe, vehicle and trailer was like eight
hundred bucks, seven hundred bucks.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Well that, you know, again, that's amazing how you know
just by by just sort of putting on your producer hat,
you can actually you know, get that down further and
further and further. And again I imagine also you're going
to have insurance because I could just imagine it towing
a car around. But so it was insurance included into
that eight hundred dollars cost.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
Yeah, we got we got production insurance and that was
more that was for the entire production, and I think
it was about nine hundred bucks maybe to cover the
whole thing. And it was a bit dodgy, Like we
told them, they were like, you know, we have this
car and we'll be towing it to locations and then
putting it off the trailer and shooting it in location
and so they you know, if they found out we
(25:11):
were shooting with people in the vehicle towing it around,
we probably wouldn't have been covered. So we would have
had to evacuate everybody from the car if we've gotten
a new accident. But luckily we didn't and there was
no there was no insurance claims were made.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Excellent. You know it's always going every whenever you never
have to make an insurance claim, right so you know,
so now showing with with with sort of finishing the film,
is it is it on VOD yet or are you
putting that together right now?
Speaker 4 (25:41):
Yeah, we just got picture locked like last week, and
so we've sent it off to the composer, we've sent
it off to the audio mixer to begin that process,
and we've sent it off to the colorist.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
So now now so so now that that pictures locked
now now again and I'm cheating because I have your
hoolay full of front of me, and I know you
made a third movie, so with a third movie that's
actually in development right now? Correct?
Speaker 4 (26:09):
Yes, yeah, yeah, there's a we have a we have
a script that's written that's I think a second draft
at this point that we're hoping to do a little
little higher budget if we can raise the cash or
I guess, you know, figure out the whatever the equivalent
is of, uh, you know, a tow trailer for for
our our spaceship, because it's all takes place inside of spaceship.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
And that's called the Century of Redemption.
Speaker 4 (26:32):
Right, Century of Redemption.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Yeah, yeah, So obviously you're going to shoot that next year,
and uh you know, again I wish you the best
with shooting that. And uh so what I wanted to
ask about was obviously your micro Budget Film Lab. You know,
you know you you sort of started this, and what
was sort of the impetus to actually start micro budget
Film Lab.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
Well, when we shot the first film, I mean, finding
information was it was really dispersed. You know, we could
find an article here, an article there, and get you know,
pull some tips here and there. But a lot of
it was really learning on the fly, which added added
stress to the whole process. So and you know, we
(27:15):
were borrowing money and you know, figuring out how to
finance it and all that stuff that we had to
kind of build the machine from scratch, as it were.
And so my thinking was that it would be great
because there are so many people out there who want
to make a micro budget or who want to make
a feature and are just waiting. They're doing like I did,
you know, they're waiting for years and you know, submitting
to contests and you know, spending hundreds and hundreds of
(27:37):
dollars on contests, and you know sometimes contests don't even
send you the results and never mind notes. And I
was like, you know, people need to have that resource,
and so I want to be that resource. And I
wanted it to be different than you know, No Film School,
which is a great site, but it is you know,
it has a lot of gear focus. And I'm you know,
because I'm my background coming in from the point of
(27:58):
view of story and from screenwriting, I was kind of
more rested in the aesthetics and the story construction side
and how to do things differently and how to create
a kind of shared aesthetic. Like I mean, I wrote
a post a little while ago called about, you know,
we need a micro budget movement, and I've been thinking
about that a lot, and the need to kind of
for us as micro budget filmmakers to move beyond simply
(28:21):
you know, atomized individuals all struggling to make our films
and I'm happy to help people out on that basis,
just like the technical side of how to make a movie.
But also, you know, where there have been successes in
the past with people outside of the system, they've generally
been coming from people who exist as a movement. You know,
you look at Dogma ninety five or Mumblecore, or the
Neo Realists or the French New Wave, and they part
(28:45):
of their marketing buzz and part of their power comes
from this esthetic challenge to the dominant storytelling models and
cinematic models. And so I wanted to kind of create
a space where that kind of could do uh gest
state And that's where that's kind of where the name
lab came from. It was like a laboratory for for
(29:07):
film movements.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
We can do a lot of like experimentation.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Right yeah, yeah, like.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Sort of mixing chemicals like a mad scientist.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
Yeah yeah, making drugs.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
But we know, I mean, but experimentation film. I think
that's what allows you know, with making micro budgets. And
you know, even even when I, you know, made my
own student film, it allowed for more experimentation because obviously,
number one, we had no clute to the hell we
were doing. And I'm I mean me personally, I had
no clude what I was doing when I was making
my student film. Two, the budget was like the change
(29:39):
you know people have in their pockets. And three I
had no yourd answer to so any any weird wacky
thing we did, you know, is it funny? Okay, let's
put it, let's put it in there.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
and now back to the show.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
But you know, with micro budgets, you know, you know
this is it's always you know, encouraged for experimentation because
I mean, you know, Sean, if you had a couple
million dollar budget and you had people who are reporting
to every day, you know, you try to do something
out of the norm, and they're going to say, well,
what the what the fuck are you doing?
Speaker 4 (30:17):
Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Yeah, there's a lot of pressure,
there's a lot of there's a lot of stake. When
you've got a million or ten million or one hundred
million dollars, you know, they want you to do what works,
and what works is what worked last year or the
year before, and so they just want to repeat the
same thing because it's a formula that makes money. But
that that formula that works for Hollywood for ten million
(30:38):
dollar movies or a hundred million dollar movies doesn't work
for micro budgets because they just look like cheap knockoffs, right, Yeah,
and they look like and they look like they look
like cheap knock offs. But more than that, they all
the flaws of Hollywood can be are kind of hidden
by the money that's poured into the great effects and
the great sound and the great light, and you know,
(31:00):
these awesome actors who are loved and so people forgive them,
you know, any errors or whatever. All that stuff allows
Hollywood to kind of smooth out the problems in their
in their in their storytelling and in you know, the
the conventionality of their their cinematics technique or whatever. You
don't have that in a micro budget, so you get
none of the good of Hollywood of all that that money,
(31:21):
and you get all of the bad when you're trying
to just replicate a Hollywood formula film on like you
know what they their budget for their coffee cups?
Speaker 3 (31:32):
So true, Sean, you know, and again yeah, you know
if you try to Yeah, you're right, if you try
to try to emulate that, you're just going to end up,
you know, shooting yourself in the face. And that's something
that I found as well. You know, I tried to
emulate different action movies, you know, with my second and
third student films, and I'm like, holy crap, I don't
have the time, the budget, the resources to do all
this stuff. So I can't make you know, a whole
(31:54):
scene about gunplay or uh, you know, I can't blow
up this whole building, even with you know, red giant effects,
you know, And it sort of reminds me. Also, there
was this panel of discussion was watching on TCM and
one of the guys who host TCM said he actually
loved the era of the fifties and sixties with movie
making because they didn't have a budget to blow up
(32:15):
buildings or anything, so they had to focus on this story.
And to me, that's where we are again. Is I
think a hallmark of a filmmaker nowadays is you have
to make a micro budget film set in one to
three locations, very minimal, and the story and the concept
have to be what is your main selling point of
this whole thing?
Speaker 4 (32:37):
Yeah, I mean I don't know about you know, there's
some Dogma films that I really love, like celebration I
really love. And you know, they had their Bow of
Chastity or whatever that was very very strict and most
of them ended up breaking it. And I don't know
about all of the rules in terms of restrictions about
what you can and can't do, because there's you know,
there's a film Monsters by Gareth Edwards who went on
to do Godzilla, and Godzilla apparently sucks. Never seen it,
(33:00):
but you know it's got bad reviews and so on,
and Monsters did really well. And Monsters did really well,
I think because kind of what you're saying about story,
because it was a it was a really fresh, you know,
it's a monster movie, but it's not about the monsters.
The monsters are just the backdrop to this road movie
and this relationship between these two people in a structure
that's not it's much more open and alive than really tight,
(33:25):
tightly bound Hollywood structures where you know, there's a monster
and they kill people one at a time in the
woods and so on. And it wasn't that, and so
he used you know, there's a lot of effects in that,
but he shot it for like fifteen thousand bucks and
then he just happens to be this you know, special
effects wizard who has worked for years for the BBC
doing you know, crazy compositing and all this incredible stuff.
(33:48):
So he had those he had that talent, and so
you know, kudos to him to bring that talent. But
then you know where he couldn't. He couldn't do the
kind of practical effects that you can do with Hollywood.
So his shooting was was this story, this really simple,
beautiful little story, but this relationship between these people, and
that's what gave the movie its power. The Monsters was
(34:10):
you know, sometimes kind of was neat or whatever, but
that's you know, when he got to Godzilla, then he
could Then he didn't have to think about stories so much,
and so he ended up with a much weaker picture
than Monsters, which was made for again like the coffee
cup budget for Godzilla. And you know, I don't know
what he's doing next, but that that point that you
make about the story being so important and breaking with
(34:31):
the conventions of what Hollywood does with stories and really
allowing yourself, you know, to take advantage of the freedom
that you have as a filmmaker because you don't have
one hundred million dollar weight hanging over your head that
you have to recoup.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Yeah, and it's I was also reading something about this
as well, where a lot of studios now are looking
at you know, the micro budget film, the micro budget
film world, the independent film world, and they're taking directors
who maybe made a movie for a million or less,
and all of a sudden they're making giving them all this,
you know, all this money to sort of make these
these franchises. For instance, Josh Trank with Fantastic Four. Prior
(35:08):
to that, he made Chronicle for I think what three
million dollars, And you know, I've seen stuff like that,
and I think also, I don't know how well that's
transferred over though. I think that I don't know if
if the studios are rushing because they're so desperate for
a hit to sort of prop up every of the
other properties, or if maybe you know, these these interependent
directors maybe aren't aren't there yet, if you know what
(35:30):
I mean.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
I think it's more I mean they're trying to. I
think there's two things. I think that often us as artists,
often we don't know what makes us special or you know,
our artists artistic production specially you know, we were not
super self critical all the time, and so we don't
know how to necessarily replicate it. And when we're put
in a new situation where suddenly you've got ten or
(35:53):
one hundred whatever million dollars, you're you're in a new situation,
and so you're not you have. You know, before there
was all of pressures on you that forced you to
be the kind of artists that you were, and now
there's different pressures on you that are changing you in
a different direction. So there's that, but there's also Hollywood
isn't interested in what is the magical about the really
(36:14):
small budget movies. What they're interested in is the buzz
and the cachet and the you know, the edginess of them.
But they those are just words for them, and they
don't really know how to capture it because again, they're
thinking about the one hundred million bucks that they just
invested and they need to recoup that, and so they
need to take all the edges off because you want
to appeal to you know, you know, It's like I
(36:36):
had a meeting with a sales agent on a completely
different project a while back, and the first question they
asked me about the project was who's your white male lead.
And it was sort of eye opening to me, you know.
And this guy was probably a nice guy whatever, you know,
probably not a racist, but he he is speaking about
how the market, the superstitions of the market conceived of
(36:57):
it because they're like, well, black guys and women and
you know, lesbian's engage don't sell in China or they
don't sell in Africa. So we need somebody who's like
the universal iconer avatar for money making, and that is
the white male dude between the ages of thirty five
and fifty. And so that's the kind of the way
(37:18):
that they think about it. And so even when you
get an edgy director up there, you know, like Garret
Edwards doing Godzilla, now, they're trying to fit it into
the money making mold that they know, and it has
to fit into that. And so even you know, you know,
you go into it's like the old joke, right, Oh,
I joined the government to change it from within, and
then instead of changing the system, the system changes you.
(37:40):
And I think that's what happens.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
Yeah, it's very true. And you know, you know, as
you're talking about you know, budgets, you know you have
currently you know, a micro budget you know, film Lab
Fun competition, which I think is amazing. So could you
go into a little detail about that.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
Yeah, you know, I was what I wanted to do
was to create a screenwriting coaching program because I think
often people who you know, because there is so much
emphasis on gear, because gear has become so cheap and
made it so possible to make micro budget films now,
whether it's camera gear or sound gear or whatever, and
people get so hung up on gear and they become gearheads,
(38:18):
and you know, people talking about the latest red camera
and black magic and you know, blah blah blah, and
they and the scripts I read are and you know,
I read about one hundred fifty scripts a year. Like
I've read well over a thousand scripts in the last
eight years, and I'm telling you most of them are
are very weak and not developed. And it's kind of
part of my argument to my community is you need
(38:41):
to develop your script. So I was like, how can
I motivate people to develop good, you know, edgy, fresh
scripts and get them to focus on that so that
they can make some great pictures and like really go
deep in terms of the stories that exist inside themselves.
So I thought well, I'm going to do a screenwriting thing,
but how can I get people interested? So I decided
(39:02):
to come up with this screenwriting coaching intensive that would
last over a period of three months, and I would
work with a you know, a relatively small group of
people to go through each stage of the screenwriting process,
from you know, how to come up with a story
for a microbudget, how to create a log line, how
to create a story structure, developing characters, theme, all that stuff,
right through to revising, how to revise your script with
(39:24):
a micro budget in mind, and then have this and
provide feedback the whole time, and then at the end
have this potential award so that you know, of the
first ten scripts that are submitted, at the end of
this process, I would give like a full story edit
of their scripts, which is what I do professionally, and
I would meet with them over Skype, and then the
(39:45):
best script of those ten, I would give them an
you know, I would invest twenty five hundred dollars into
making their movie.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 4 (40:03):
And so that's kind of how it was born.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
And I also like, you're doing the video question and
answer section, because I imagine as soon as you announced
the competition, this flurry of questions came in, and I'm sure,
and it's a great idea, by the way, that you're
doing it through video, because video is you know, it's
always obviously it's a great promotional tool. And I think
also a lot of times people more especially filmmakers, more
(40:29):
adapt to watching a video tutorial or explanation if you will,
then then just you know, reading sort of like a
blog post.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I try to mix it up
a little bit and do a bit of both. But yeah,
and it's kind of nice to do, you know, Like
with the FAQs that I've done, I can just you know,
I get I get tons of you know, questions, and
I went through them and found some of the most
common ones, and then I could just go up on
my roof. You know, there's a terrorists in our apartment.
So I went up on the terrorists and and just
(41:00):
just sat there with my coffee and you know, can
just talk into you know, my selfie stick that I
put an elastic band on to hold it to a chair,
and I could just talk to it and answer the
question like like we're sitting down having about coffee.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yeah, it did feel that way as well. And so obviously,
just to sort of answer a few of those questions,
I know you already answered them, but just for obviously
for the listeners, you know, Like I guess, the one
would be, you know, who actually owns the script at
the end of all.
Speaker 4 (41:27):
This, the writer such filmmaker owns the scripts. The only
deal is for the money. The only conditions I guess
is that it's an investment, so there'll be an investor's contract,
and if the film makes money, then you have to
pay back. You have to pay back the money, you know,
and which seems reasonable, and I want people to take
(41:50):
some responsibility for the process of you know, their their contributors,
to their to their film. And then that money, it
won't come back to me. I'll put it into another
fund so that I can grow a fund to ultimately supply,
you know, help other people in the same in the
same corner sort of way. And then the second thing
is that the money will be released on the first
day of principal photography, so you actually don't just write
(42:12):
a script and get the money. You actually have to
go into proper pre production and I'll work with people
through the pre production process to help them get the
show on the road, and on the first day of
principal photography, that cash will be released from them from escrow.
Speaker 3 (42:25):
And I think that's an amazing idea, Sean. And so
further so, for people listening who might be interested in
you work, where could they enter you know, this fun competition.
Speaker 4 (42:35):
Well it hasn't. The doors haven't opened yet. I've been
taking because I got tons of feedback from people and
but what they felt should be in the program and
so on, and so I'm going to open the doors
to that. And as I say, it's not you know,
it's not going to be to tons of people because
because I'm giving feedback, I can only deal with so
many people. Before I would, you know, have to start
(42:56):
taking amphetamines and stay up all night. So that'll happen
on not this coming Monday, but the following Tuesday, So
a week Tuesday, I'll open the doors on that.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
And is that for people just in Canada or people
in the US and UK enter.
Speaker 4 (43:16):
Yeah, it's people internationally, you know. One of the cool things.
You know, I've been promoting the Facebook page and the
website and so on through Facebook, which is you know,
in terms of you know, micro budget film marketing. Facebook
is actually has a really user friendly, very powerful interface.
But I've been I was marketing, and I was marketing
(43:36):
it primarily to the United States and Canada because that's,
you know, where I'm from, and by accident, I think
I selected worldwide and so it ended up promoting this
thing is one of the posts out internationally, and I
started getting I'm like, why am I getting all these
people with names like Indian names. It was like all
of a sudden, like literally like dozens of people contacting
(43:58):
me from India, And I realized that made this mistake,
and it was awesome because it's I'm meeting these filmmakers
from India. Like I just interviewed a filmmaker last week
who did a micro budget film called d Major, which
is a beautiful film and has gotten is getting it
looks like it's getting distribution on the India's version of Netflix,
and it's got him, you know, a producer is coming
on board for his next film anyway, And it was
(44:18):
a fascinating interview just to hear how in Kolkata he
made a movie for three thousand dollars and how they
did it and you know, they didn't have a slider,
so they put a camera on the sweater and they
pulled it across the table and this kind of stuff.
But anyway, that's a long detour to say that the
program is open internationally.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
The reason I ask is because, you know, obviously America
is my my you know, US is my biggest market,
followed by the UK, followed by China, then Australia, then Canada.
So I just wanted to just obviously just wanted to
make sure.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, the Chinese filmmakers are more than
welcome as well obviously as Americans and Brits.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Excellent. And I is shocked as everyone else when I
heard that China was my third biggest market. I looked
at my numbers and I'm like, wow, okay, but bigger,
bigger than yeah, seriously, who knew bigger than bigger than
the Australia and Canada. Wow? And you know, so Sean,
you know, I know we touched this briefly, but you know,
(45:18):
sort of you know, in closing, I wanted to ask,
you know, what, is there anything else that you're working
on that we should know about?
Speaker 4 (45:26):
Uh? Well, I mean in terms of my film, it's
it's the you know when you mentioned Century of Redemption,
which is a space kind of there's a sci fi
but all takes place in one location, though a fairly
elaborate location. And then I mean, I am I'm on
a I'm a senior programmer at the Victoria, Texas Indie
Film Festival, which is a wonderful film festival just outside
(45:47):
of Houston. And uh and I you know, I mean,
I'm working on stuff all the time with this company
I work for in Canada Media Biz, and I've been
with them as an executive story consultant for about eight
years and go story editing and also developing original content.
So I have I have some TV series that are
in development that I'm pretty stoked about and hoping something
(46:08):
happens with them. But you know, I'm at the point now.
You know, if you've been in the film industry anytime
at all, you know, you know, producers come to you
and they're like super excited about your project, and you
get all excited and it's gonna happen, and then and
then they don't happen, And so I'm I'm I still
retain a small glimmer of hope in my heart, but
part of me is always like, yeah, you know, I
can't get I can't get excited about maybe you know,
(46:30):
the mainstream stuff any longer because it's just so hard.
It's so hard to get stuff off the ground. Things
crash and burn all the time.
Speaker 3 (46:37):
Yes, I couldn't agree more, Sean. I I just was
having this conversation the other day. It is so hard
to get things without with you know, even a pretty
sizeable budget off the ground. You know, and people who
listen to this podcast on a frequent basis know that
I talk about that a lot. I talk about my
own projects and things that have just crashed and burned,
and things that never really got off, and things that
(46:58):
got off and still had a lot of problems on
take off. But so, you know, inclosing, Sean, is there
anything we didn't talk about that maybe you wanted to discuss,
or any sort of final thoughts to sort of put
a period at the end of this whole conversation.
Speaker 4 (47:11):
Well, I think the main thing and the main inspiration
from micro Bridget Film Lab is you know, following on
from what we were just saying about everything's crashing and burning,
and you know, I looked up. I was reading some
stuff on the speck of screenplay market recently, and something
like one hundred thousand scripts are registered every year with
the Writer's Guild of America, and this year less than
(47:31):
one hundred were purchased by the studios and the indie majors.
And it can look really depressing, and you can sit
around sending query letters forever, and it's just important that
people know that you don't have to do that, and
that there you can make a great movie, you know,
and there are some awesome movies people I think forget.
You know, the French new wave Breathless was a micro budget.
(47:53):
It was under a hundred thousand dollars, and you know,
some of these great movies for lovers only made by
the Polish Brothers was shot for like zero and made
five hundred thousand dollars. But more than that, it was,
you know, they made a really cool romantic movie. And
so you can make really good stuff for not a
lot of money, and so you shouldn't feel like you
have to wait around for some benevolent producer to sort
(48:14):
of land in your lap and do it for you,
or some dentist with you know, more money than he
knows what to do with to invest in your film,
you can you can do it with a relatively small
amount of money.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Yeah, you know that. That's something I've been talking to
Sean about, you know, in a lot of my intros
about talking about this whole you know, don't wait around,
you know, figure out what you have at your disposal
location wise. You know what I call the resource list,
you know, locations, actors and like sort of like props.
So if you can make those lists and you can
sort of brainstorm and sort of reverse engineer a script,
(48:47):
because that way you're not you know, if I know
my uncle owns an abandoned house somewhere, how could I
use that for a film? You know? Or even if
I use my own living room. I had a friend
of mine who shot a film of his in his
own living room and he later regretted it, but because
he wanted to do all this blood stuff, and he
did it all. But then he said, look, that smell
(49:08):
got in the house, and uh so if you got
so there's a tip. If you're gonna use blood a lot,
you know, a lot of blood, maybe not, don't do
that in your living room. But yeah, yeah, but yeah,
you know, and I think again, you know Jason Brewbreaker
calls the backyard Indie. I think again, this is going
to be the Hallmark Sean where you have to be
able to sort of make a film in a very
(49:29):
minimal location with with very minimal locations, actors, props, and
and be able to tell the best story you can.
And I think that's going to sort of be like
the Hallmark now with how you know you can sort
of you know, build your career from that.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
Yeah. No, I think that's totally true. And I think
that you know, make a list of your resources is
really important and extend that list not just to you know,
cool stuff that you have lying around and cool locations
that you have, but also to your skills and the
skills of people around. You know, if you're like Garrett Edwards.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
and now back to the show.
Speaker 4 (50:09):
And you can do great compositing and great you know visuals,
you know VFX on your computer. That's a resource also,
or if you can, you know, blackmail your brother in
law to do it for you, whatever happens to be,
that's that's a resource that you should. You should, you know,
you should make the movie that you can, not the
movie that you want, because it's you know, what you've
been told is the right kind of movie.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
Yeah, I definitely agree. Sohewan, where can people find you
out online?
Speaker 4 (50:34):
They can go to our Facebook page. They can just
I'm sure search on Facebook to micro Budget Film Lab
or our website is Microbudget Filmlab dot com and they
can find us there.
Speaker 3 (50:47):
Are you on Twitter or Facebook? Well, I'm sure you
already sid Facebook. So are you on Twitter? Anything else?
Speaker 4 (50:52):
I on Twitter a little bit. On Twitter, I've never
really gotten into we do. I do have a YouTube
channel that I'm slowly adding material to, but those the
primary locations at this point are our Facebook and the website.
Speaker 3 (51:08):
Sean, Sean Whitney, I want to say thank you very
much for coming on, sir.
Speaker 4 (51:12):
Thank you very much for having me. It's been great
talking to you.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
It's been great talking to you as well, and I
wish you the best of luck with everything.
Speaker 4 (51:18):
Thank you you too, Thank you very much. Luck in China.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
Thank you very much, Jean. I'll talk to you soon, buddy, Okay,
take care, goodbye.
Speaker 2 (51:28):
I want to thank Dave so much for doing such
a great job on this episode. If you want to
get links to anything we spoke about in this episode,
head over to the show notes at Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv.
Forward slash for twenty six. Thank you so much for
listening to guys. As always, keep on writing no matter what.
I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1 (51:44):
Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast at bulletproof
Screenwriting dot tv.
You are listening to the IFAH podcast Network. For more
amazing filmmaking and screenwriting podcasts, just go to ifagpodcastnetwork dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome to the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, episode number four twenty six.
Start writing no matter what. The water does not flow
until the faucet is turned on.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Louis Lemore broadcasting from a dark, windowless room in Hollywood
when we really should be working on that next draft.
It's the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing you the craft and
business of screenwriting while teaching you how to make your
screenplay bulletproof.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another
episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am your humble
host Alex Ferrari. Now. Today's show is sponsored by Bulletproof
Script Coverage. Now. Unlike other script coverage services, Bulletproof Script
Coverage actually focuses on the kind of project you are
(00:59):
in the goals of the project you are, so we
actually break it down by three categories micro budget, indie film, market,
and studio film. There's no reason to get coverage from
a reader that's used to reading temp pole movies when
your movie is gonna be done for one hundred thousand
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script Coverage, our readers have worked with Marvel Studios, CIA,
(01:20):
wm E, NBC, HBO, Disney, Scott Free, Warner Brothers, The Blacklist,
and many many more. So if you need your screenplay
or TV script covered by professional readers, head on over
to covermiscreenplay dot com. Enjoy today's episode with guest host
Dave Bullets.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
My guest this week runs micro Budget Film Lab. He
has directed two micro budget features and is in pre
production for a third with guest Sean Whitney. Hey, Sean,
thanks a lot for coming on the show.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Thanks, thanks very much for having me, Dave. I really
appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Oh, you know, my pleasure, Sean. You know, I've seen
everything he does, you've been doing with the micro Budget
Film Lab and all the great things that you're doing
over there. But before I even you know, we start
talking about all the things you do there, I wanted
to talk, you know, about your career and about you know,
getting started. So you know, we're growing up, Sean. Did
you always you know, have this you know, this hobby
of film or this love affair with film? And and
(02:18):
you know, did you make films growing up as a kid?
Speaker 4 (02:22):
No, no, short answer, no, No, I mean I always was.
I've thought of myself as a writer since I was
probably ten or nine years old. But you know, there
was no we didn't have any video cameras or anything
like that, like it just we just didn't have them.
So it wasn't really around. I watched a lot of
(02:44):
old movies, you know, it was back in the days
first before cable and then cable, and so you know,
we would get like Channel twenty nine from Buffalo and
we would watch you know, bad movies, or not bad movies,
but old movies from the fifties and sixties. But it
wasn't really until much later that I decided to pursue film.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Actually, so, did you end up going to college for film?
Speaker 4 (03:07):
No? No. So I went to university in Toronto at
the York University, and I did a liberal arts degree
in humanities kind of cultural studies, and then I did
a master's in interdisciplinary studies that was focused on writing
for the theater. And i'd started a small theater company
that was doing like Brecdian musical theater and we did
(03:29):
a bunch of really great productions, and you know, I
wrote stuff and I was doing that, and then but
then I went decided to make a turn towards film
really in about the year two thousand and three, I guess,
and at that point I just began writing, you know,
I'd done I tried to do actually a theater production.
(03:50):
I did, like a workshop production, and it went really
badly and I lost a lot of money, and I
was really depressed. So I kind of hit in my
basement for about three years and just started writing screenplays
and just sort of learning how to write screenplays on
my own. And then I guess three or four years
and then I ended up getting accepted into the Canadian
Film Center, which is kind of like the American Film
(04:11):
Institute Institute, and that was my kind of, you know,
my formal, the formal, official part of my education was
that residency there.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Now you mentioned, you know, writing your own screenplays and
sort of teaching yourself how to write screenplays. You know
that that's sort of something I did a few years ago,
you know, and I think that helps out a lot.
And what I want to ask is, you know, was
there any particular books or even scripts or even movies
that you sort of us to sort of pick apart,
you know, and how to sort of teaching yourself how
(04:42):
to write.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Yeah, there was a few books. I mean, sid Field
I think was maybe the first book screenplay that I
that I read, and that kind of opened my eyes
to you know, structure and all that kind of stuff.
And then I read another book by Epstein called Crafty Screenwriting,
which was really good. And then the most recently I
(05:05):
read a few years ago now, I read Save the
Cat by Blake Snyder, and that was I know, it gets,
it gets you know, a lot of bad people go
on about it now because it has become kind of
the dominant model in Hollywood in many ways, but it's
I still think that it's a really powerful machinery that
(05:25):
you can use. You can bend it to kind of
more unconventional structures. But it was really useful for me
in terms of creating a kind of method to approach
the screenwriting process.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yeah, I have noticed that Say the Cat has has
gotten a lot of flack. I mean, I think if
you're at the top of any field, and you know,
I think Save the Cat has sort of gotten to
the upper echelon now because I mean, well, Sidfield has passed,
and so has had the person made Save the Cat
has passed. But I mean, I still think that it's
(05:56):
been able. It's been it's been sort of passed on
through his through his pro And I think now when
when you're at the top field, when you're at the
top of any field, I think you're going to get
flack for a lot of things.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, and it's partly it's because
of the way that Hollywood approached the whole process of storytelling.
I mean, it really is the kind of formula that's
in Save the Cat is used constantly, Like you can
watch a movie and time it's kind of just the same,
the cat structure. And and I think people get because
(06:27):
of that, and because a lot of Hollywood movies are
pretty you know, they're pretty empty, sort of commercial properties
that are really, you know, not about they're not about art,
They're about They're a product, right, And I think people
confuse the power of the story structure with the vacancy
of the content. And I think that's where a lot
of that comes from. It's like, you know, Hollywood movies
are kind of empty, or not all of them, but
(06:49):
a lot of them are empty, and it's because they
all follow this model, and I think that's it's a
little bit of a misrepresentation.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yeah, and you know, I know you can't see this
because it's a but I have a huge screenwriting book
library right next to me to my left, and I
sort of did what you did, you know, I wanted
to figure out, you know, screenwriting the nuts and bolts
and getting down to the absolute you know, sort of
atoms of it and figure out, you know, what makes
a great screenwriter, what makes a great screenplay. And I
(07:17):
sort of just you know, would buy these books piece
by piece. Some of them you could buy I mean
for pennies on the dollar in Amazon. Others you know,
they just came out and they're still full price. But
you know, there's a lot there. There are some that
really speak to to me, and there's others that I
read and I'm just like, I don't know, maybe this
is lost because you know, I'm sure it happened to
you too, Sewan, where you have people recommend books to you,
(07:40):
like screenwriting books, for instance, and you read them and
you're just like, what was the big deal about this?
Speaker 4 (07:44):
You know, yeah, yeah, totally, And a lot of them
end up. I don't know, after a while, if you
read a few of them, it's like, okay, this is
I'm kind of reading the same thing again. And yeah,
at a certain point you need to just get a
method that you're going to use and then and then
learn from it and find it, find ways to advance
upon it. You know. I don't think there's any absolutely
(08:05):
perfect or the right method exactly, but you just need
a method. You can't just be it can't just be anarchy.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Yes, absolutely, I think a method is key. Finding your
routine also, which I guess is another way of saying method,
but you know, finding your routine and making sure you know, okay,
well eleven o'clock today or maybe a little earlier, or
maybe I'm gonna get up in too, you know, an
hour early today and I'm just gonna write, you know,
I'm just gonna write for you know, forty five minutes
to half an hour. And and you're absolutely right, you know,
(08:32):
finding that process is key because like you just said,
when I would read some of these books, I would
I felt like I was reading the same thing, the
same things over and over again, and I'm just like,
I didn't I just read this book like with a
different cover and by a different author. But I mean,
but that that's bound to happen. You know, once you start,
you know, getting to a certain point, you're gonna start
seeing all that same uh information just basically you know,
(08:54):
used again or maybe presented in a different way.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, there's only some many ways
in a sense to tell a story. And if you're
telling a three act story or a story that has
a beginning, middle, and end, anyway, there's only so many
ways to do it. And you know, the interesting thing
because I read a lot of scripts in my I
have a development job, and I read tons of scripts,
and what you see mostly is that is not I mean,
(09:19):
you do see scripts that come in that are kind
of you know, soulless machines, but mostly what you see
from screenwriters who aren't established is that they just don't
have the structure. They don't know how to tell a
story that keeps moving forward, and you really need that.
And so, to go back to what you're saying is
so it feels repetitive on the one hand, and it
is repetitive in a lot of ways, but it also
(09:42):
is like people need to learn this because otherwise you
can't tell a story.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
And you touched on something through Sean, you know, you said,
that's some of the scripts that come in are like
a soulless machine.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Will be right back after a word from our sponsor
and now to the show.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
You know, I know you can't go into specifics or
you know, anything like that, but is there anything any
sort of thing that that that writer might be doing wrong,
whether it be structure or is it because they don't
have a voice that makes it sort of like that
soulless machine.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
Well, what it is is that people write to the
market and because you know, people want to make a living,
and so they think, okay, well, you know, like for
a while, we were getting all these found footage scripts,
for instance, which you know, we're the Rage, and they
would come in and people would follow the beats, you know,
it would like X would happen on page twelve and
why would it happen on page twenty three or whatever.
(10:38):
But what was lacking in them was that they were
just you know, it's like it's like watching a plumber
fix your pipes. It's necessary work, you know, but it's
not interesting besides for you, because you know your toilet's overflowing.
But for most people it's not going to be that interesting.
And so what's I find lacking is that kind of
some kind of universal universality to it. So you need
(11:01):
to have, for instance, your characters it can't just be
about you know, chopping up zombies or aliens or whatever.
They have to be going through an inner turmoil, because
really what stories are about is there an argument, you know,
about what makes the good life. And you're making an argument.
And if you're not making an argument, and if it's
not being felt through your character, then it just feels
like watching a plumber fix a pipe or watching somebody
(11:21):
build a house. It's kind of interesting to see the
structure of it, but it's not emotionally moving.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
I just took a webinar. It was a free webinar
but by Doug Richardson, who did who wrote Diehard Too,
And he actually was saying, you know that whole thing
about an argument, and he is. His whole thing was, hey,
structure is an argument. You know, how you structure your
film should be an argument for your whole movie. And
you know that that actually really stuck with me, and
you know, just great that you hear. I'm just hearing you,
(11:49):
you know, say something similar about your characters. An argument
as well, which again is I agree with one hundred percent.
As something I've learned with screenwriting is that and that
you know, you we we sort of when we were
making characters. I think sometimes screenwriters have a tendency to
write themselves just like you said, you know, we put
ourselves as the main character, and I think that sort
(12:10):
of ends up hurting us because the main character ends
up becoming almost like a shell and everybody else is
sort of you know, having all the having sort of
you know, like the witty banter or maybe they're actually
the ones that are actually going through a transformation, and
the main character just sort of, you know, is just
sort of there going from you know, basically just going
through the motions.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
Yeah, yeah, totally. And I mean it can be you,
but it has to be you in a universal way.
It has to be universal you you know, like you
have to you know, there's things about your life. You know.
There was a film, a micro budget film that I
talk about a lot called Bellflower from a few years ago,
think twenty eleven, that was shot for like seventeen grand
and it did really well. I think it went to Sundance.
Actually it went to Sundance. I got distribution with a telescope.
(12:52):
It's a great movie and it's about his breakup, so
it's a very in some ways of personal film. But
he took his breakup and he turned it into a
kind of universal crazy story about young male rage and
representations of violence and stuff that's a lot of fun
to watch and has has universal value to it because
he what he does is all the parts, the soul
(13:15):
of it all fits together. So the characters are characters,
journey fits with the theme of the movie, and the
theme of the movie fits with the visual styling of
the movie and with the visual elements in the movie,
and that all fits with what's happening with the secondary
characters and so on. So it works together as a
as a machine with a machine in the good sense,
a machine in the sort of emotional emotional sense that
(13:37):
all the parts are firing and all the pistons are firing.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. It kind of
reminds me also of a sort of mad Max. You know,
main Max Furry wrote, I know what we're talking about now,
you know, because with the main character, but a Mad Max,
so he never really changes, you know. But that again
is the whole point of Mad Max is that he
Max is never actually the main character of any of
his movies. You know, he's just he's helping everybody else
(14:01):
out as they're going on their adventures. And I think
but going into those even well probably that may be
probably started the second one, but in Road Warrior, but
even even you know Road Warrior, then you have Beyond
thunder Dome and then you have the newest one, Fury Road.
You kind of see that formula work and it actually works,
like we were just saying, it actually works for that,
but anywhere else you'd kind of be like, well, what
the hell's going on here? You know, it's not complementing itself,
(14:23):
if you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that the model of the
Mad Max model is also the model for noir, you know,
like no our fiction and noir films is about this cynical,
scarred human in the world who is giving us an
entry into the world to see that the journey of
other people, and we become where they're sort of cynical,
where they're sort of bring brought in in the same
(14:46):
way in the same state as that person, and then
we're learning through that process the argument about that world
and what's valuable. You know.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point. Kind of reminds
me of Chinatown in a way. You know, Jack Nicholson, Uh,
you know, at the whole end, he was very very
sort of scarred and by the end, you know, I
don't know if he really changed, but but the whole
but the whole venture was absolutely amazing.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
No, absolutely, So, you know.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
As we talked more about, you know, your career, Sean,
you know you you obviously you know, you taught yourself
how to write screenplays, and you know, so where was
it where you actually started to sit down and actually
you you made your own film.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
So I had after I actually shortly before I went
to the film center, and then after I went to
the film center, I made a few shorts and kind
of you know, i'd read, I read a few things
about you know, how to shoot not cross the line,
you know, coverage that kind of thing, and then I
started I shot some some shorts that were you know,
from moderate to bad, and but it was really fun
(15:50):
and I and I loved it and I learned a
lot as both as a filmmaker and as a writer,
because I learned, Okay, well that doesn't work. You know,
that's you know, a block of dialogue that long isn't
going to work. Saying it this way doesn't work like
you just you see it being played out. And so
it's an extremely useful experience, even from the point of
view being a screenwriter. And then, you know, and then
(16:12):
when I came out of the film Center and well,
a bunch of stuff happened. I had a script options
with like an Oscar nominated producer, and it all looked,
you know, great, and you know, I was counting the
money and thinking my career was about to take off.
How did things go wrong? And that was two thousand
and eight, and then at the bottom fell out of
the financial market, and in subsequently all the money dried
(16:32):
up for indie films and Hollywood's reverted to just you know,
retreads and remakes and tent pole pictures. And so while
I got a job out of that in development that
I still have, my career as a filmmaker and as
a screenwriter kind of came to a halt. And so
after a number of years of having done that, I
(16:54):
just was like one day sitting in my office with
my wife, feeling frustrated because I was reading a script
that I that I thought was kind of bad, but
was you know, was financed because it had some a
list casts. And I turned to my wife and I'm like,
this is ridiculous, Like we're helping. You know, she's a
wedding photographer, so she helps people realize their dreams in
her way, and I was doing it with you know,
story editing, and I said, you know, why don't why
(17:16):
aren't we why are we just the bridesmaids? You know,
why don't we make our movie? And uh, and so
we decided at that point then we just started talking
about a story. And then it happened.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Yeah, the the bottom fell out in two thousand and eight. Uh,
for man, for so many people. I mean, I was
so tragic. And you know, I know other people as
well who've had who had things development and two thousand
and eight hit and my god, I mean, and here
we are in twenty sixteen and we're still recovering from
that here in America. But but yeah, you know, and
(17:50):
the and the shocks were sort of felt world wide.
But you know, so you were you know, you're able
to regain you know, your composure, you you know regain
you know your motivation and you know, So what was
what ended up? Did your first movie ended up being?
Speaker 4 (18:06):
It ended up being? I mean, it's it's like a
sci fi comedy called A Brand New You about a
widower who can't get over the death of his wife,
and so he moves into his house and after trying
to failing at committing suicide, he convinces his landlord and
his roommate to help him try to clone her in
the living room because his landlord it turns out as
(18:26):
this disgraced biochemist, and so it's about him trying to
kind of recreate this moment that is lost. But it's
a comedy. So it's funny but funny. Sad, I guess.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
So is that available to watch online with the view?
Do you or anything?
Speaker 4 (18:41):
No, we're we got a sales agent and we've been
going through the hell that is known as deliverables, and
we just sent off for the second time for you
have to get a you have to get a quality
control report before your film, like we've done all the
rest of the stuff, I think, I hope to God.
And then we needed to make this quality control report,
and so it goes, you know, you send it in.
(19:03):
It costs you like fifteen hundred bucks for you know,
four passes to cover your video and all your your
audio tracks, and they send you report and if there's
any problems in there, you know, and it could be
any kinds of thing, then it comes back to you
and then you have to fix those and then you
have to send it back. So we got that back
and send it to our audio editor and our editor
or picture editor, and and so we've we've just sent
(19:26):
it off for the second QC report and I'm hoping
that it's good enough.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Yeah, those deliverables sean the more, you know, I didn't
know too much about deliverables till a few years ago,
and then I found out all that is in that
is involved with deliverables. And even we're talking with you know,
my friend Jason Brubaker Distriver, you know, just getting involved
with those deliverable deliverables. You know, it's like a like
you said, it's like what did you call a living hell?
I think that's pretty accurate.
Speaker 4 (19:54):
But yeah, yeah, it's totally brutal.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
We'll be right back after a word from our spot
answer and now back to the show.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
So, you know, so if you finished your first movie,
and again you know, that was a micro budget film,
and you know, you made your second film, which, by
the way, I love the name of this of this film,
by the way, fucking my Way back Home. Yeah, that
that is a very a very good title, by the way.
And also it's very eye catching. So even if I
(20:28):
didn't know what it was, even if I didn't know
what it was about, I could just imagine what that
what that is about. But you know, so where was
the impetus to make your second film? I mean, did
you already have this script, you know, written while you
did your first one, or did you sort of just
you know, have a lot of motivation to sort of
make this script.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
No, we were, well, we we'd done the kind of
the festival thing with the first one and gone to
a few festivals and won some awards, and we were like,
what are we going to do next? And so we
you know, I had some other scripts that we wanted
to do, but they were bigger. They were like, you know,
at least one hundred thousand dollars kind of thing, and
we're just we're not in the position to make one
hundred thousand dollars movie unfortunately at the moment. And so
(21:09):
we you know, my production partners, there's four of us
in the company, and we said, well, you know, what
are we going to do next? And I had this
story that I developed with another writer years earlier, that
he and I were going to shoot together, a wonderful
writer named Ryes Cruthers, And but it just never happened.
We'd both kind of gotten busy with our own things,
and so I spoke to him and I said, hey, dude,
(21:30):
can I take our story and write it up as
a script so we can shoot it? And he was like, yeah, absolutely, absolutely,
So I then I wrote it up and we started editing,
you know, getting notes back and forth, and you know,
I don't know how many months later, eight months later,
maybe nine months later, then we shot the movie.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
So when you shot the movie, did you have a
slightly bigger budget than when you were when them with
your first movie? No.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
You know, the irony is we learned a lot from
the first movie. You know, we made mistakes that cost
us money, and we got better at improv improvising, and
so the first film cost us I think twenty two
thousand or something. And the second movie we shot for
seven thousand, but it's actually more complicated and there's more locations,
and we a lot of it takes place in a
(22:17):
car going around the city. So we had to tow
the car because our driver, like he plays the driver
in the film, is like maybe the worst driver on
the planet. So the idea of him acting while driving
this like nineteen seventy four cut the Supreme was was
a horrifying thought. So we had to like tow the
car around.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
So when you had to tow the car around, I
guess the biggest then, the biggest part of production budget
then was obviously a tow truck, a driver and then
a tow truck. You obviously had to get like some
kind of I guess you had a route that you
wanted to go. Again, I'm just I'm just thinking with
the producer's hat right now.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Sean was, yeah, yeah, no, you know we went. So
plan A was okay. So plan A was we thought,
you know, we had a connection with the post production
house and maybe he could get us a deal with
a you know, a rental house, Whites in Toronto, and
he contacted them for us, and they got back and
they were like, oh, yeah, you can get a you know,
(23:14):
you know, a toe vehicle, but it's like ten thousand
dollars a day. Plus you need to get cops, right,
you need to have off duty you know, paid paid
duty officers. And we're like, well, it's more than our budget.
So we tried U haul and we did attacks that.
We did a test shoot with a U Haul trailer
pulling it around and so on, and that seemed like
(23:35):
the way we were going to go, but that was
going to be I think about a thousand bucks with insurance,
and that still seemed high. So what we ended up
doing was a guy who owns a cafe around the
corner from my house had a tow truck. And while
he had a car, first of all, he had this
cutless Supreme and I was like, hey, man, can I
rent your car for the shoot? Your car is like
this big, ugly beast and it's a beautiful sky blue
(23:56):
color and I really want to use it because it
really looks good. And he was like, yeah, yeah, totally.
And we told him we were going to toe it
and he was like, oh, hey, do you want to
you want to rent my my my pickup truck a
little Toyota pickup truck, like, yeah, sure, So we rented
it off him for a few hundred dollars and then
we went on Craigslist and we found somebody who rented
like a car tow trailer and we rented it for
(24:19):
two weeks for I think three hundred dollars. So in total,
you know, car toe, vehicle and trailer was like eight
hundred bucks, seven hundred bucks.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Well that, you know, again, that's amazing how you know
just by by just sort of putting on your producer hat,
you can actually you know, get that down further and
further and further. And again I imagine also you're going
to have insurance because I could just imagine it towing
a car around. But so it was insurance included into
that eight hundred dollars cost.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
Yeah, we got we got production insurance and that was
more that was for the entire production, and I think
it was about nine hundred bucks maybe to cover the
whole thing. And it was a bit dodgy, Like we
told them, they were like, you know, we have this
car and we'll be towing it to locations and then
putting it off the trailer and shooting it in location
and so they you know, if they found out we
(25:11):
were shooting with people in the vehicle towing it around,
we probably wouldn't have been covered. So we would have
had to evacuate everybody from the car if we've gotten
a new accident. But luckily we didn't and there was
no there was no insurance claims were made.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Excellent. You know it's always going every whenever you never
have to make an insurance claim, right so you know,
so now showing with with with sort of finishing the film,
is it is it on VOD yet or are you
putting that together right now?
Speaker 4 (25:41):
Yeah, we just got picture locked like last week, and
so we've sent it off to the composer, we've sent
it off to the audio mixer to begin that process,
and we've sent it off to the colorist.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
So now now so so now that that pictures locked
now now again and I'm cheating because I have your
hoolay full of front of me, and I know you
made a third movie, so with a third movie that's
actually in development right now? Correct?
Speaker 4 (26:09):
Yes, yeah, yeah, there's a we have a we have
a script that's written that's I think a second draft
at this point that we're hoping to do a little
little higher budget if we can raise the cash or
I guess, you know, figure out the whatever the equivalent
is of, uh, you know, a tow trailer for for
our our spaceship, because it's all takes place inside of spaceship.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
And that's called the Century of Redemption.
Speaker 4 (26:32):
Right, Century of Redemption.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Yeah, yeah, So obviously you're going to shoot that next year,
and uh you know, again I wish you the best
with shooting that. And uh so what I wanted to
ask about was obviously your micro Budget Film Lab. You know,
you know you you sort of started this, and what
was sort of the impetus to actually start micro budget
Film Lab.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
Well, when we shot the first film, I mean, finding
information was it was really dispersed. You know, we could
find an article here, an article there, and get you know,
pull some tips here and there. But a lot of
it was really learning on the fly, which added added
stress to the whole process. So and you know, we
(27:15):
were borrowing money and you know, figuring out how to
finance it and all that stuff that we had to
kind of build the machine from scratch, as it were.
And so my thinking was that it would be great
because there are so many people out there who want
to make a micro budget or who want to make
a feature and are just waiting. They're doing like I did,
you know, they're waiting for years and you know, submitting
to contests and you know, spending hundreds and hundreds of
(27:37):
dollars on contests, and you know sometimes contests don't even
send you the results and never mind notes. And I
was like, you know, people need to have that resource,
and so I want to be that resource. And I
wanted it to be different than you know, No Film School,
which is a great site, but it is you know,
it has a lot of gear focus. And I'm you know,
because I'm my background coming in from the point of
(27:58):
view of story and from screenwriting, I was kind of
more rested in the aesthetics and the story construction side
and how to do things differently and how to create
a kind of shared aesthetic. Like I mean, I wrote
a post a little while ago called about, you know,
we need a micro budget movement, and I've been thinking
about that a lot, and the need to kind of
for us as micro budget filmmakers to move beyond simply
(28:21):
you know, atomized individuals all struggling to make our films
and I'm happy to help people out on that basis,
just like the technical side of how to make a movie.
But also, you know, where there have been successes in
the past with people outside of the system, they've generally
been coming from people who exist as a movement. You know,
you look at Dogma ninety five or Mumblecore, or the
Neo Realists or the French New Wave, and they part
(28:45):
of their marketing buzz and part of their power comes
from this esthetic challenge to the dominant storytelling models and
cinematic models. And so I wanted to kind of create
a space where that kind of could do uh gest
state And that's where that's kind of where the name
lab came from. It was like a laboratory for for
(29:07):
film movements.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
We can do a lot of like experimentation.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Right yeah, yeah, like.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Sort of mixing chemicals like a mad scientist.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
Yeah yeah, making drugs.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
But we know, I mean, but experimentation film. I think
that's what allows you know, with making micro budgets. And
you know, even even when I, you know, made my
own student film, it allowed for more experimentation because obviously,
number one, we had no clute to the hell we
were doing. And I'm I mean me personally, I had
no clude what I was doing when I was making
my student film. Two, the budget was like the change
(29:39):
you know people have in their pockets. And three I
had no yourd answer to so any any weird wacky
thing we did, you know, is it funny? Okay, let's
put it, let's put it in there.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
and now back to the show.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
But you know, with micro budgets, you know, you know
this is it's always you know, encouraged for experimentation because
I mean, you know, Sean, if you had a couple
million dollar budget and you had people who are reporting
to every day, you know, you try to do something
out of the norm, and they're going to say, well,
what the what the fuck are you doing?
Speaker 4 (30:17):
Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Yeah, there's a lot of pressure,
there's a lot of there's a lot of stake. When
you've got a million or ten million or one hundred
million dollars, you know, they want you to do what works,
and what works is what worked last year or the
year before, and so they just want to repeat the
same thing because it's a formula that makes money. But
that that formula that works for Hollywood for ten million
(30:38):
dollar movies or a hundred million dollar movies doesn't work
for micro budgets because they just look like cheap knockoffs, right, Yeah,
and they look like and they look like they look
like cheap knock offs. But more than that, they all
the flaws of Hollywood can be are kind of hidden
by the money that's poured into the great effects and
the great sound and the great light, and you know,
(31:00):
these awesome actors who are loved and so people forgive them,
you know, any errors or whatever. All that stuff allows
Hollywood to kind of smooth out the problems in their
in their in their storytelling and in you know, the
the conventionality of their their cinematics technique or whatever. You
don't have that in a micro budget, so you get
none of the good of Hollywood of all that that money,
(31:21):
and you get all of the bad when you're trying
to just replicate a Hollywood formula film on like you
know what they their budget for their coffee cups?
Speaker 3 (31:32):
So true, Sean, you know, and again yeah, you know
if you try to Yeah, you're right, if you try
to try to emulate that, you're just going to end up,
you know, shooting yourself in the face. And that's something
that I found as well. You know, I tried to
emulate different action movies, you know, with my second and
third student films, and I'm like, holy crap, I don't
have the time, the budget, the resources to do all
this stuff. So I can't make you know, a whole
(31:54):
scene about gunplay or uh, you know, I can't blow
up this whole building, even with you know, red giant effects,
you know, And it sort of reminds me. Also, there
was this panel of discussion was watching on TCM and
one of the guys who host TCM said he actually
loved the era of the fifties and sixties with movie
making because they didn't have a budget to blow up
(32:15):
buildings or anything, so they had to focus on this story.
And to me, that's where we are again. Is I
think a hallmark of a filmmaker nowadays is you have
to make a micro budget film set in one to
three locations, very minimal, and the story and the concept
have to be what is your main selling point of
this whole thing?
Speaker 4 (32:37):
Yeah, I mean I don't know about you know, there's
some Dogma films that I really love, like celebration I
really love. And you know, they had their Bow of
Chastity or whatever that was very very strict and most
of them ended up breaking it. And I don't know
about all of the rules in terms of restrictions about
what you can and can't do, because there's you know,
there's a film Monsters by Gareth Edwards who went on
to do Godzilla, and Godzilla apparently sucks. Never seen it,
(33:00):
but you know it's got bad reviews and so on,
and Monsters did really well. And Monsters did really well,
I think because kind of what you're saying about story,
because it was a it was a really fresh, you know,
it's a monster movie, but it's not about the monsters.
The monsters are just the backdrop to this road movie
and this relationship between these two people in a structure
that's not it's much more open and alive than really tight,
(33:25):
tightly bound Hollywood structures where you know, there's a monster
and they kill people one at a time in the
woods and so on. And it wasn't that, and so
he used you know, there's a lot of effects in that,
but he shot it for like fifteen thousand bucks and
then he just happens to be this you know, special
effects wizard who has worked for years for the BBC
doing you know, crazy compositing and all this incredible stuff.
(33:48):
So he had those he had that talent, and so
you know, kudos to him to bring that talent. But
then you know where he couldn't. He couldn't do the
kind of practical effects that you can do with Hollywood.
So his shooting was was this story, this really simple,
beautiful little story, but this relationship between these people, and
that's what gave the movie its power. The Monsters was
(34:10):
you know, sometimes kind of was neat or whatever, but
that's you know, when he got to Godzilla, then he
could Then he didn't have to think about stories so much,
and so he ended up with a much weaker picture
than Monsters, which was made for again like the coffee
cup budget for Godzilla. And you know, I don't know
what he's doing next, but that that point that you
make about the story being so important and breaking with
(34:31):
the conventions of what Hollywood does with stories and really
allowing yourself, you know, to take advantage of the freedom
that you have as a filmmaker because you don't have
one hundred million dollar weight hanging over your head that
you have to recoup.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Yeah, and it's I was also reading something about this
as well, where a lot of studios now are looking
at you know, the micro budget film, the micro budget
film world, the independent film world, and they're taking directors
who maybe made a movie for a million or less,
and all of a sudden they're making giving them all this,
you know, all this money to sort of make these
these franchises. For instance, Josh Trank with Fantastic Four. Prior
(35:08):
to that, he made Chronicle for I think what three
million dollars, And you know, I've seen stuff like that,
and I think also, I don't know how well that's
transferred over though. I think that I don't know if
if the studios are rushing because they're so desperate for
a hit to sort of prop up every of the
other properties, or if maybe you know, these these interependent
directors maybe aren't aren't there yet, if you know what
(35:30):
I mean.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
I think it's more I mean they're trying to. I
think there's two things. I think that often us as artists,
often we don't know what makes us special or you know,
our artists artistic production specially you know, we were not
super self critical all the time, and so we don't
know how to necessarily replicate it. And when we're put
in a new situation where suddenly you've got ten or
(35:53):
one hundred whatever million dollars, you're you're in a new situation,
and so you're not you have. You know, before there
was all of pressures on you that forced you to
be the kind of artists that you were, and now
there's different pressures on you that are changing you in
a different direction. So there's that, but there's also Hollywood
isn't interested in what is the magical about the really
(36:14):
small budget movies. What they're interested in is the buzz
and the cachet and the you know, the edginess of them.
But they those are just words for them, and they
don't really know how to capture it because again, they're
thinking about the one hundred million bucks that they just
invested and they need to recoup that, and so they
need to take all the edges off because you want
to appeal to you know, you know, It's like I
(36:36):
had a meeting with a sales agent on a completely
different project a while back, and the first question they
asked me about the project was who's your white male lead.
And it was sort of eye opening to me, you know.
And this guy was probably a nice guy whatever, you know,
probably not a racist, but he he is speaking about
how the market, the superstitions of the market conceived of
(36:57):
it because they're like, well, black guys and women and
you know, lesbian's engage don't sell in China or they
don't sell in Africa. So we need somebody who's like
the universal iconer avatar for money making, and that is
the white male dude between the ages of thirty five
and fifty. And so that's the kind of the way
(37:18):
that they think about it. And so even when you
get an edgy director up there, you know, like Garret
Edwards doing Godzilla, now, they're trying to fit it into
the money making mold that they know, and it has
to fit into that. And so even you know, you know,
you go into it's like the old joke, right, Oh,
I joined the government to change it from within, and
then instead of changing the system, the system changes you.
(37:40):
And I think that's what happens.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
Yeah, it's very true. And you know, you know, as
you're talking about you know, budgets, you know you have
currently you know, a micro budget you know, film Lab
Fun competition, which I think is amazing. So could you
go into a little detail about that.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
Yeah, you know, I was what I wanted to do
was to create a screenwriting coaching program because I think
often people who you know, because there is so much
emphasis on gear, because gear has become so cheap and
made it so possible to make micro budget films now,
whether it's camera gear or sound gear or whatever, and
people get so hung up on gear and they become gearheads,
(38:18):
and you know, people talking about the latest red camera
and black magic and you know, blah blah blah, and
they and the scripts I read are and you know,
I read about one hundred fifty scripts a year. Like
I've read well over a thousand scripts in the last
eight years, and I'm telling you most of them are
are very weak and not developed. And it's kind of
part of my argument to my community is you need
(38:41):
to develop your script. So I was like, how can
I motivate people to develop good, you know, edgy, fresh
scripts and get them to focus on that so that
they can make some great pictures and like really go
deep in terms of the stories that exist inside themselves.
So I thought well, I'm going to do a screenwriting thing,
but how can I get people interested? So I decided
(39:02):
to come up with this screenwriting coaching intensive that would
last over a period of three months, and I would
work with a you know, a relatively small group of
people to go through each stage of the screenwriting process,
from you know, how to come up with a story
for a microbudget, how to create a log line, how
to create a story structure, developing characters, theme, all that stuff,
right through to revising, how to revise your script with
(39:24):
a micro budget in mind, and then have this and
provide feedback the whole time, and then at the end
have this potential award so that you know, of the
first ten scripts that are submitted, at the end of
this process, I would give like a full story edit
of their scripts, which is what I do professionally, and
I would meet with them over Skype, and then the
(39:45):
best script of those ten, I would give them an
you know, I would invest twenty five hundred dollars into
making their movie.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 4 (40:03):
And so that's kind of how it was born.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
And I also like, you're doing the video question and
answer section, because I imagine as soon as you announced
the competition, this flurry of questions came in, and I'm sure,
and it's a great idea, by the way, that you're
doing it through video, because video is you know, it's
always obviously it's a great promotional tool. And I think
also a lot of times people more especially filmmakers, more
(40:29):
adapt to watching a video tutorial or explanation if you will,
then then just you know, reading sort of like a
blog post.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I try to mix it up
a little bit and do a bit of both. But yeah,
and it's kind of nice to do, you know, Like
with the FAQs that I've done, I can just you know,
I get I get tons of you know, questions, and
I went through them and found some of the most
common ones, and then I could just go up on
my roof. You know, there's a terrorists in our apartment.
So I went up on the terrorists and and just
(41:00):
just sat there with my coffee and you know, can
just talk into you know, my selfie stick that I
put an elastic band on to hold it to a chair,
and I could just talk to it and answer the
question like like we're sitting down having about coffee.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yeah, it did feel that way as well. And so obviously,
just to sort of answer a few of those questions,
I know you already answered them, but just for obviously
for the listeners, you know, Like I guess, the one
would be, you know, who actually owns the script at
the end of all.
Speaker 4 (41:27):
This, the writer such filmmaker owns the scripts. The only
deal is for the money. The only conditions I guess
is that it's an investment, so there'll be an investor's contract,
and if the film makes money, then you have to
pay back. You have to pay back the money, you know,
and which seems reasonable, and I want people to take
(41:50):
some responsibility for the process of you know, their their contributors,
to their to their film. And then that money, it
won't come back to me. I'll put it into another
fund so that I can grow a fund to ultimately supply,
you know, help other people in the same in the
same corner sort of way. And then the second thing
is that the money will be released on the first
day of principal photography, so you actually don't just write
(42:12):
a script and get the money. You actually have to
go into proper pre production and I'll work with people
through the pre production process to help them get the
show on the road, and on the first day of
principal photography, that cash will be released from them from escrow.
Speaker 3 (42:25):
And I think that's an amazing idea, Sean. And so
further so, for people listening who might be interested in
you work, where could they enter you know, this fun competition.
Speaker 4 (42:35):
Well it hasn't. The doors haven't opened yet. I've been
taking because I got tons of feedback from people and
but what they felt should be in the program and
so on, and so I'm going to open the doors
to that. And as I say, it's not you know,
it's not going to be to tons of people because
because I'm giving feedback, I can only deal with so
many people. Before I would, you know, have to start
(42:56):
taking amphetamines and stay up all night. So that'll happen
on not this coming Monday, but the following Tuesday, So
a week Tuesday, I'll open the doors on that.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
And is that for people just in Canada or people
in the US and UK enter.
Speaker 4 (43:16):
Yeah, it's people internationally, you know. One of the cool things.
You know, I've been promoting the Facebook page and the
website and so on through Facebook, which is you know,
in terms of you know, micro budget film marketing. Facebook
is actually has a really user friendly, very powerful interface.
But I've been I was marketing, and I was marketing
(43:36):
it primarily to the United States and Canada because that's,
you know, where I'm from, and by accident, I think
I selected worldwide and so it ended up promoting this
thing is one of the posts out internationally, and I
started getting I'm like, why am I getting all these
people with names like Indian names. It was like all
of a sudden, like literally like dozens of people contacting
(43:58):
me from India, And I realized that made this mistake,
and it was awesome because it's I'm meeting these filmmakers
from India. Like I just interviewed a filmmaker last week
who did a micro budget film called d Major, which
is a beautiful film and has gotten is getting it
looks like it's getting distribution on the India's version of Netflix,
and it's got him, you know, a producer is coming
on board for his next film anyway, And it was
(44:18):
a fascinating interview just to hear how in Kolkata he
made a movie for three thousand dollars and how they
did it and you know, they didn't have a slider,
so they put a camera on the sweater and they
pulled it across the table and this kind of stuff.
But anyway, that's a long detour to say that the
program is open internationally.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
The reason I ask is because, you know, obviously America
is my my you know, US is my biggest market,
followed by the UK, followed by China, then Australia, then Canada.
So I just wanted to just obviously just wanted to
make sure.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, the Chinese filmmakers are more than
welcome as well obviously as Americans and Brits.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Excellent. And I is shocked as everyone else when I
heard that China was my third biggest market. I looked
at my numbers and I'm like, wow, okay, but bigger,
bigger than yeah, seriously, who knew bigger than bigger than
the Australia and Canada. Wow? And you know, so Sean,
you know, I know we touched this briefly, but you know,
(45:18):
sort of you know, in closing, I wanted to ask,
you know, what, is there anything else that you're working
on that we should know about?
Speaker 4 (45:26):
Uh? Well, I mean in terms of my film, it's
it's the you know when you mentioned Century of Redemption,
which is a space kind of there's a sci fi
but all takes place in one location, though a fairly
elaborate location. And then I mean, I am I'm on
a I'm a senior programmer at the Victoria, Texas Indie
Film Festival, which is a wonderful film festival just outside
(45:47):
of Houston. And uh and I you know, I mean,
I'm working on stuff all the time with this company
I work for in Canada Media Biz, and I've been
with them as an executive story consultant for about eight
years and go story editing and also developing original content.
So I have I have some TV series that are
in development that I'm pretty stoked about and hoping something
(46:08):
happens with them. But you know, I'm at the point now.
You know, if you've been in the film industry anytime
at all, you know, you know, producers come to you
and they're like super excited about your project, and you
get all excited and it's gonna happen, and then and
then they don't happen, And so I'm I'm I still
retain a small glimmer of hope in my heart, but
part of me is always like, yeah, you know, I
can't get I can't get excited about maybe you know,
(46:30):
the mainstream stuff any longer because it's just so hard.
It's so hard to get stuff off the ground. Things
crash and burn all the time.
Speaker 3 (46:37):
Yes, I couldn't agree more, Sean. I I just was
having this conversation the other day. It is so hard
to get things without with you know, even a pretty
sizeable budget off the ground. You know, and people who
listen to this podcast on a frequent basis know that
I talk about that a lot. I talk about my
own projects and things that have just crashed and burned,
and things that never really got off, and things that
(46:58):
got off and still had a lot of problems on
take off. But so, you know, inclosing, Sean, is there
anything we didn't talk about that maybe you wanted to discuss,
or any sort of final thoughts to sort of put
a period at the end of this whole conversation.
Speaker 4 (47:11):
Well, I think the main thing and the main inspiration
from micro Bridget Film Lab is you know, following on
from what we were just saying about everything's crashing and burning,
and you know, I looked up. I was reading some
stuff on the speck of screenplay market recently, and something
like one hundred thousand scripts are registered every year with
the Writer's Guild of America, and this year less than
(47:31):
one hundred were purchased by the studios and the indie majors.
And it can look really depressing, and you can sit
around sending query letters forever, and it's just important that
people know that you don't have to do that, and
that there you can make a great movie, you know,
and there are some awesome movies people I think forget.
You know, the French new wave Breathless was a micro budget.
(47:53):
It was under a hundred thousand dollars, and you know,
some of these great movies for lovers only made by
the Polish Brothers was shot for like zero and made
five hundred thousand dollars. But more than that, it was,
you know, they made a really cool romantic movie. And
so you can make really good stuff for not a
lot of money, and so you shouldn't feel like you
have to wait around for some benevolent producer to sort
(48:14):
of land in your lap and do it for you,
or some dentist with you know, more money than he
knows what to do with to invest in your film,
you can you can do it with a relatively small
amount of money.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Yeah, you know that. That's something I've been talking to
Sean about, you know, in a lot of my intros
about talking about this whole you know, don't wait around,
you know, figure out what you have at your disposal
location wise. You know what I call the resource list,
you know, locations, actors and like sort of like props.
So if you can make those lists and you can
sort of brainstorm and sort of reverse engineer a script,
(48:47):
because that way you're not you know, if I know
my uncle owns an abandoned house somewhere, how could I
use that for a film? You know? Or even if
I use my own living room. I had a friend
of mine who shot a film of his in his
own living room and he later regretted it, but because
he wanted to do all this blood stuff, and he
did it all. But then he said, look, that smell
(49:08):
got in the house, and uh so if you got
so there's a tip. If you're gonna use blood a lot,
you know, a lot of blood, maybe not, don't do
that in your living room. But yeah, yeah, but yeah,
you know, and I think again, you know Jason Brewbreaker
calls the backyard Indie. I think again, this is going
to be the Hallmark Sean where you have to be
able to sort of make a film in a very
(49:29):
minimal location with with very minimal locations, actors, props, and
and be able to tell the best story you can.
And I think that's going to sort of be like
the Hallmark now with how you know you can sort
of you know, build your career from that.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
Yeah. No, I think that's totally true. And I think
that you know, make a list of your resources is
really important and extend that list not just to you know,
cool stuff that you have lying around and cool locations
that you have, but also to your skills and the
skills of people around. You know, if you're like Garrett Edwards.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
and now back to the show.
Speaker 4 (50:09):
And you can do great compositing and great you know visuals,
you know VFX on your computer. That's a resource also,
or if you can, you know, blackmail your brother in
law to do it for you, whatever happens to be,
that's that's a resource that you should. You should, you know,
you should make the movie that you can, not the
movie that you want, because it's you know, what you've
been told is the right kind of movie.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
Yeah, I definitely agree. Sohewan, where can people find you
out online?
Speaker 4 (50:34):
They can go to our Facebook page. They can just
I'm sure search on Facebook to micro Budget Film Lab
or our website is Microbudget Filmlab dot com and they
can find us there.
Speaker 3 (50:47):
Are you on Twitter or Facebook? Well, I'm sure you
already sid Facebook. So are you on Twitter? Anything else?
Speaker 4 (50:52):
I on Twitter a little bit. On Twitter, I've never
really gotten into we do. I do have a YouTube
channel that I'm slowly adding material to, but those the
primary locations at this point are our Facebook and the website.
Speaker 3 (51:08):
Sean, Sean Whitney, I want to say thank you very
much for coming on, sir.
Speaker 4 (51:12):
Thank you very much for having me. It's been great
talking to you.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
It's been great talking to you as well, and I
wish you the best of luck with everything.
Speaker 4 (51:18):
Thank you you too, Thank you very much. Luck in China.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
Thank you very much, Jean. I'll talk to you soon, buddy, Okay,
take care, goodbye.
Speaker 2 (51:28):
I want to thank Dave so much for doing such
a great job on this episode. If you want to
get links to anything we spoke about in this episode,
head over to the show notes at Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv.
Forward slash for twenty six. Thank you so much for
listening to guys. As always, keep on writing no matter what.
I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1 (51:44):
Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast at bulletproof
Screenwriting dot tv.
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