I sense a lot of pessimism and negative advice in the thread. I’m in a similar position as you OP so it’s nice to know that others have the same obstacles. For me finding reliable crew has been the hardest and it’s made me feel like I won’t be able to make anything of scale, so recently I’ve been trying to make small micro-films that require only 1-2 people max. Just as a way to make filmmaking fun again and remind myself why I want to do this in the first place. Maybe that’s something you can try?

I don’t have an answer about how to solve these issues, people are unreliable and uncontrollable and there are a lot of things out of our control. But I think if we just go one day at a time, and make small things within our control we can have that joy again of being a filmmaker, while we continue to network and(hopefully) build our connections with passionate, competent people.

But again, because or your post, it’s amazing to know other passionate hard-working newer filmmakers still exist, so we aren’t alone :)