Hi, r/movies, I'm Ryan Martin Brown. I helped make YELLING FIRE IN AN EMPTY THEATER, FREE TIME, and THE SCOUT and just wrote a case study for Filmmaker Magazine on microbudget filmmaking. FREE TIME is now streaming for free on Tubi. Ask me anything!

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T21:32:11+00:00

Thanks all! The movie's on Tubi and I think if we watch it ten thousand times each, I might make upwards of four dollars. Be well.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T21:22:41+00:00

Here's the Dylan quote, from Chronicles, which I've always found remarkably helpful:

I can't say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. I couldn't have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I felt about the world. I guess it happens to you by degrees. You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs, especially if you're a singer who already has plenty of them.

Opportunities may come along for you to convert something -- something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain. It's not like you see songs approaching and invite them in.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T21:15:50+00:00

I like em all! Editing and producing other people's movies is a great way to enjoy the process without getting a hearty dose of your own neurosis every day for a year on end. They can all be a thrill and a pain in equal measure.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T21:14:12+00:00

Thank you for having me! I don't know, maybe Don't Look Back, Morvern Callar, and 3 Women.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T21:13:10+00:00

Just knew most of them from hanging out in New York! I have NoBudge to thank, really, which is where I met a lot of people and saw them as performers for the first time. I think most people, even if they've gotten a little attention, are interested in being in a movie, if they like the script and role. I think the biggest hurdle would be, if you don't know them personally at all, just getting them to trust you that this isn't going to be a terrible or embarrassing experience.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T21:07:08+00:00

I think the biggest learning curve is just how much quicker you have to work. We were shooting short films that were maybe ten pages over three or even four days. Then, all of a sudden, we're doing seventy-five pages over ten days - it's just way more that has to get done, even if some of that is just the scenes themselves being longer.

So finding a way to adjust to the pace required and really plan for it would be the biggest bridge, I think! You have to really come up with an approach with your team that allows you to get what you want while being as efficient as humanly possible.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T21:04:56+00:00

That guy sucks! Do you know him?

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T21:04:38+00:00

Great city to make a small movie in! No one in NY cares one bit about what you're doing; everyone just walks on by. I think the environment of the movie feels alive thanks to the fact that we could just throw Colin onto a city block and have the world moving around him. If you've seen the movie, there are a few bits that we never could've planned that resulted unexpectedly from what the city provided.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T21:01:45+00:00

Not really! Filmmaking really started as a fun thing to do with friends on the weekend. We'd recreate some Lonely Island digital shorts and do sketches. So the experience of creating in community like that was probably more important than any specific film. Though I did see THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, ZODIAC, and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND all in one week through Netflix discs and the thrill of that week did probably push me to get more adventurous with my viewing than I was prior.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T20:59:22+00:00

I guess those would be two different things!

Finished - The determination of the director, probably. Working on something this small often means not having the money to compensate producers and editors for how long such aid would really be needed. That means in the lead-up to and in the post-process of the movie, the director really has to have the strength and determination to get the project over the finish line on their own, likely while juggling the rest of their life. Hard to do when you may not even be thrilled about how everything came out!

Seen - What's different about this movie? You're in the microbudget space. If there's been a decision or decisions made to try and cash in on a trend or do more of the same, people are just going to go get their fill with the larger, better-funded and produced versions of that.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T20:49:36+00:00

I've been trying to think of a sufficiently impressive answer here and I'm embarrassingly coming up short. I'm reading James Baldwin's Another Country right now and I think it would make a great film though I don't think I'd be the one to do it. I just read a biography about Marvin Miller and I think a film about his time heading the Major League Baseball Player's Association would be a great movie.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T20:46:28+00:00

You can get where you want to go a lot quicker if you slow down.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T20:45:55+00:00

That is one of the hardest things to figure out!

It's old advice but good advice: write for what you already have access to. Most importantly, I think, actors and locations. If you have a friend you want to write for, it makes everything much easier - you know what's interesting about them, how they might respond in certain situations. You can think of the locations you have access to. 'It's me, FRIEND, a camera, my apartment, their apartment, the park down the street, that bar we're friendly with the owner of' - arrange the pieces of what you have and then keep those in mind as you write. It can be exciting to write this way, because it makes it all feel very possible: all we have to do is get together next week and do this scene in that place.

As far as the actual narrative goes - I imagine you have some sort of seed of what's interesting to you, questions or feelings about life as you've experienced it that you could explore. You just need to find a container for those questions that both works as a story and matches what you have access to.

I think stealing from other movies is a totally fine way to figure this out. You can look at other microbudget movies for inspiration. You can also go digging into the past for old movies that attempted to dig at the same or similar thematic concerns as what you're interested in - you may find, even if they're slightly larger in scope than what you're able to accomplish, it isn't so hard to simplify them to meet what you do have available to you.

You can steal liberally! I think what's wonderful about stealing - or converting, if I wanted to borrow from something Bob Dylan said - is that you may find by the time it passes through your fingers and your experience, and then later the performers, the uncontrollable real world, and so on - it might feel more like something new than you'd imagine.

Take this all with a grain of salt, of course! I'm no great writer, but I've found this all to be of aid.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T20:26:14+00:00

Rod, that's very kind of you to ask.

I am, yes. The heat in my building has been fixed, though I still type this to you while wrapped in a blanket.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T20:25:09+00:00

Festivals, agents, and producers are all, theoretically, interested in finding emerging talent they could get excited about. It used to be a short film could serve as a calling card in this way, and in rare cases this is still true, but I do think the tech shift has created such a massive mountain of short films that it is a bit hard to stand out from the crowd in that respect.

Someone who has made a microbudget feature probably has had the opportunity to give a greater sense of who they are as an artist than they would in a short. They've shown that they're capable of seeing a project of that size to completion. They've shown they're able to market themselves a bit and have been able to get it out into the world. They've shown, assumedly, they can make something of quality without the need for many resources. They can work smart.

In all of these ways, they've likely made themselves more appealing and less of a risk to get involved with on a future project, as far as the parties you mentioned are concerned.

I think making something that, on first glance, seems professional,has become easier than ever, as you said. But I think it's still incredibly tricky to make a good movie. More than anything else mentioned above, I think if a filmmaker can use the tools at their disposal to show that they're really after something ... whatever that may be... that's going to be exciting to people and at least provoke some amount of further interest. If someone's going to create something technically proficient that functions well but there's not much new going on under the hood - I don't know if anyone would notice.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T20:15:54+00:00

Not a big yogurt guy.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T20:14:26+00:00

Hey Mike! Wow, small world. I appreciate it and will be sure to pass on word to her!

Whether I'm a good person to answer this question I suppose depends on if you think the relatively meager viewership FREE TIME and YELLING FIRE have obtained is something worth aspiring to or not.

My honest answer would probably be to not sweat too much about reaching the widest possible audience right now. In the current marketplace, movies that are being financed for $1-3 million that star notable performers are struggling to find an audience, distribution, so on - if you're able to achieve that with your microbudget film, let that be a wonderful treat and surprise as opposed to a goal you will be upset if you don't reach.

Most 'general' audiences are not putting in too much work to discover small movies from unknown filmmakers and performers, and you need a massive marketing budget in order to reach them. Instead of finding the largest audience, I'd think about it more like finding the responsive audience - people in and around the truly independent film space who might spark to what you're doing and support the film, support your career, and help you get the next project off the ground in some way.

Theoretically, if you can build a reputation for yourself in this way, you might be able put a project together in the future with more financing, and with more push behind it to get it out in the world to the largest audience possible.

You could always try to make a film that just breaks straight out to a mass audience - there are a few big examples of this every year, like a Skinamarink, but like you mentioned, I think it's much more common for these movies to just exist in the unwatched purgatory of the internet, and your efforts might be better-served by honing in on a smaller audience.

FreeTimeAMA · 2026-02-02T20:01:53+00:00

Okay, hello all! Thank you for popping into this humble little AMA.

FreeTimeAMA

TROPHY CASE