I was talking to someone the other day; it was actually the day after my blackberry decided to stop ticking. As I explained my absolute need for remote access to email he looked at me puzzled. "Well, what is it that you do with the documentary," he oddly asked.  It occurred to me that he had never been around a film set, post house, or any one who worked in film thus had no way to quantify how films are put together. Sometimes I get the feeling, this feeling has been re-inforced many, many times, that people think you hold a camera, point, push a button and then voila a movie appears. I can't judge people for thinking that way, they've never been involved with a film project and after-all, it only took an hour and a half of their time to see it.

So, in the spirit of openness and need to vent I would like to explain some of the things a producer/director of a low budget documentary does everyday and what it takes to finish a film such as "Troubled Waters."  Let me preface this tale by saying this is my experience so, as in all generalizations it doesn't apply to every single film making experience but needless to say, all films even bad one's take a lot, I mean, a ton, of work and "chutzpah."

Let's start with what is called "pre-production." As you can imagine before you start any project there is a lot of preparatory work to do in order to assure completion. You don't build a house without getting a blue print, buying land, getting permits, finding a contractor, who then assembles a crew, buys the material, and finally builds the home he was hired to build. Well, film is the same way. When you have an idea you have flesh out that idea and do a lot of research and prep work. For Troubled Waters, I was sitting in a class watching a documentary about Peru and thought, wow, I know someone that is getting ready to help this small town in Argentina, I think we could do a better documentary than this one and this one played on BBC. So, after that I spent weeks, doing research, figuring out what camera I would take, how I would pay for my plane ticket, how to get credit for it while in school, and getting permission to film it. Many emails, worries, and weeks later, I went on my first trip to document the events taking place. Now, on funded project there might be a small crew of 2-3 people doing all this prep work on a low/no budget film such as "Troubled Waters," there was one,  well, I did have a little help from two interns for three months for about 3 hours a week. It was kind of nerve racking.

Now, production, this is the fun part. It involves arranging travel to wherever you might be filming, gathering a crew, and going and shooting, taking notes, going over the footage you shoot and shoot some more. An example of a typical production day, such as my recent trip to Atlanta, involved making a small budget for  the trip, trying to get a boom operator (the guy that holds the mike), arranging the dates with the parties involved (via phone and email), getting permission to film, labeling all the tapes, packing the equipment, checking off my dummy list, and finally leaving to film. The day of filming I wake up and immediately start getting the camera together, mike hooked up and begin filming while the subjects are finishing their coffee and bagels. I don't stop filming until 10-12 hours later or more. Constantly filming shots, looking for master's to use later, being on guard for important conversations, all the while holding a 3.7 pound camera, which after a couple of hours feels more like 30 pounds. I sweat, my back hurts, I grunt, take camera notes, and finally the day ends. I am exhausted but another satisfying scene has been captured. When I am overseas I go over the footage of that day, take notes about what I might need to capture the next day, and begin logging footage. Fiction films are a whole other deal. I won't get into it for fear of creating a textbook out of my blog post.

Needless to say for a documentary such as "Troubled Waters" the director often simultaneously wears the "producer" hat. Thus in between and during production he or she is trying to arrange crew, promote the film, raise money, and well, produce the darn film. So, in between shoot dates I am constantly trying to raise money for production and post costs. I am also trying to keep our thus far volunteer crew of seven updated and  on the same page in order to make sure this thing gets finished. This includes lots of emails and phone conversations, even flying to NYC to meet with the lead editor, going over the script, and simply trying to hold it all together.

The final (kind of final) stage is post-production.  This is where the film is really made. In my opinion a good editor is probably almost the most important piece of a film. Post is when you edit the film. Up till now, it's like we've been gathering a lot of short stories, random sentences, and commas; now we have to cut, paste, move, and make it a coherent, compelling novel. All with the goal of "eliciting emotion." (Ode to Terry Linehan, my screenwriting professor for burning that phrase into my feeble student mind). With "Troubled Waters" we will probably have about 150 hours of raw footage. We have to whittle it down to 1.5 hours. That is a lot of whittling. A typical edit day, is maybe working on a two minute scene. If you have already picked out the hours of raw footage you will create your scene with you will then begin to pick out increments of the footage and put them on a "timeline," basically a digital canvas for film, creating a "rough cut" of the scene. You repeatedly play it back, making sure it all works together, discuss it, edit it down and add shot's over the footage. Let's say Jim is talking about a water test in Argentina, he's on a bus, well, instead of a shot of him just talking about the water test you put in some footage of an actual water test, some kids, the sun-setting, and finally cut back to Jim on the bus. It is tedious and a lot of work. It takes artistic skill as well a tech skills. Some documentaries take  six months to a year to finish in editing. We hope we can do ours in 10 weeks. I think we can but it will take a lot of prep work. I won't even get into some of the post's, post work such as expensive color correction, subtitling, sound mixing, recording the sound track and graphics. Needless to say, it is a lot of work and takes special equipment, time and skilled people.

Now, once the film is finally finished. If you are an independent film such as ours you begin to promote your film. The first traditional way to do this is by submitting it to film festivals around the world. This involves sending a copy to each festival along with an application and application fee which is usually around $50. You might submit the film to 100 festivals, if you are lucky you get in to about 10% of the festivals unless you hit the jackpot and get into "Sundance." Usually once a film gets into Sundance other smaller festivals clamor for the film. Sundance is expecting over 10,000 submissions for 2011 out of that they will only choose a total of about 200 short, narrative films, or documentaries combined. So as you can see it's almost like winning the lottery. If you don't find a willing distributor to help you get your film's into theaters, on DVD and television, the film maker has to try and find a way to get his or her film seen. Lately many have been booking there own screenings, selling DVD's at the shows, online, and trying to get deals for television.

As you can see the film you watch as an afterthought or on a whim has a long hard road to get to your television screen. For "Troubled Waters" we have made some progress but we still much of that long hard road to travel. Please consider helping us at indiegogo.com. For the sake of openness I will paste our current production budget for Argentina so that you might see some of the behind the scenes costs involved with making a micro budget film. This is the amount we are trying to raise through indiegogo, please check it out below. It is really a bare bones budget designed to cover minimal travel and production costs. Thanks for reading, till next time.

Troubled Waters Mini Production Budget 2010