Inspiration.

Last night I finished the Robert Rodriguez book "Rebel Without A Crew: or How A 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became A Hollywood Player".

It came in the mail from Amazon on Saturday, but I couldn't dig into it until I got back from snowboarding on Sunday evening.

It's basically a diary that tells the story of the making of his breakout film "El Mariachi" and how he did it on an ultra low ($7,000) budget and hit it big. My friend James Tauber told me that there was a more recent example of a high tech guy who shot a film for 7k and won the grand jury prize at Sundance, but I can never remember the name of it. I'll have to ask him (again).

I could not put the book down. To say that I was inspired by it is an understatement. He shot "El Mariachi" hoping to sell it on the Latino direct to video market, but on his way to doing that, he managed to get connected with an agent at ICM who within a matter of weeks had the entire town buzzing about this kid and his $7,000 movie. Then a bidding war basically broke out over Robert and his movie.

I suppose that you could say that he got the deal of the century, and that what happened to him is rare, but he produced a great film with a cool story. It struck me that these big agents can create a buzz about anyone and have it consume Hollywood overnight, but after watching "El Mariachi" I can see why they were so excited. The kid had talent. The chances are pretty low that what happened to him would happen to me, but they're even lower if I don't produce a feature at all, right?

Robert Rodriguez accomplished this amazing feat back in 1991/92. The technology and some of the techniques that he used in producing "El Mariachi" were the functional equivalent of stone knives when compared to today's technology.. But that didn't stop him which was what was so cool about it.

Still, a lot of things that he did and the advice that he had that are relevant to indie filmmaking regardless of the technology involved. Much of it really came down to planning. Knowing what he wanted ahead of time so he'd know where to put the camera when he shot, and also making editing decisions on the fly while he was shooting.

I was astounded by how he shot the film silent, then used a radio shack microphone and a cheapy Merantz cassette tape recorder to record the sound (dialog and effects) to the scene which he would later sync up in post. The fact that the audio went out of sync in several places was solved by simply cutting away before the actors lips went out of sync with the audio.

This was also done in the days before low cost computer based editing, so all 2000 cuts in the movie were done by hand on video tape (not the actual 16 mm film that was used).

While I won't have the technological limitations that he had, I'll have similar budget constraints, so the challenges will be rather significant. But he pointed out in his book, problems and challenges test creativity, the more creative you are, the easier it is to find solutions to your problems... We'll see..

I've ordered another book, "Killer Camera Rigs That You Can Build: How to Build Your Own Camera Cranes, Car Mounts, Stabilizers, Dollies, and More". The thought is that if I'm going to cram a ton of production value into this thing, I'll need to build some of my own rigs to keep the costs down. That will be fun, so I'm looking forward to it.

I've got a half finished script called "Heist" that I'll be going over for the next few days to see what can be done to complete it. I sort of have the story arc of the main characters completed in my head, but I think that I'll need at least one more minor subplot to fill it out. More to come... Stay tuned.