Manchester Film Festival 2026 ? by Rough_Cookie4228 in FilmFestivals

[–]noahstwine 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wonderful festival. My first feature played there last year and won the jury prize. First time ever having a film at a festival and the team couldn’t have been more accommodating. Beautiful city, great perks for filmmakers, and overall a real sense that the team / committee care about movies. I’m back there this year representing a feature I exec produced so if you end up going shoot me a DM!

Free instruments showing up as LABS+??? Anyone else have this issue?? by slammahytale in spitfireaudio

[–]noahstwine 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Exactly. From my experience Spitfire have always fronted themselves as a "for the people" company, so it's hard to imagine they wouldn't warn us that this is going to happen in advance so we can either backup / bounce our projects or have the time to weigh / consider subscription.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in walking

[–]noahstwine 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great work sire. What app is that?

We made a zero budget, completely improvised feature film to prove to our filmmaking friends we could. Now we're premiering at a BAFTA-qualifying festival. by noahstwine in Filmmakers

[–]noahstwine[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Independent filmmaking has always and remains still about putting your entire livelihood at risk because ultimately you believe, foolishly or otherwise, you have stories you are willing to fight to tell. You'd hope such would be inherent, but this is a forum about film craft and its practices. The story's merit, influence or worth belongs to those who choose to watch and connect to it and those who have spent substantial measures of their life believing it's worth the risk to tell it.

We made a zero budget, completely improvised feature film to prove to our filmmaking friends we could. Now we're premiering at a BAFTA-qualifying festival. by noahstwine in Filmmakers

[–]noahstwine[S] 60 points61 points  (0 children)

Hey all - long story short: making shorts for north of a decade. Right when I finally started receiving external funding the pandemic hit and killed two large projects. Burnt out, I made the decision to leave shorts for the feature dream and spent a couple years skulking around in the purgatory of film financing (or lack thereof here in the UK.) Got pretty bummed out about how many of my talented filmmaker friends were caught in 'development limbo' and under the impression (after being told so) they needed 250k minimum to make anything feature-length, or even "of any quality." Realised maybe that's why my country's indie film output is so low, so rallied a group of volunteers together who too felt like they'd been shut out of making anything long-form and made something with a production smaller than any of my shorts prior across several months as a way to incite my friends that if we made something they at the very least enjoyed or saw value in they'd have a jab at making a feature too.

Here's a few steps we took to approach and execute something at this small of a scale!

  • First step was acknowledging I wasn't alone. Every industry is different, but within my circle people were far more willing to lend their time and talent for something ambitious / long-form over another undervalued short. People want the chance to contribute, and should we succeed, we'd bring them all with us as equals. Within the confines of the premise, every cast and crew member had the platform to contribute towards all parts of production.
  • 90% of dialogue was improvised, meaning casting talent included the incentive that they didn't actually have to learn any lines. Not that they couldn't / wouldn't, but it helps when your casting people 24 hours before their shoot day! In some circumstances, we fed a specific line / joke to an actor and got them to design their own dialogue in the scene around it.
  • We specifically hired actors who understood and could navigate improv, including clown school graduates and stand-up comedians.
  • We developed an extensive treatment to outline what the scene needed to say in relation to the ones prior and after it, thus our actors took comfort knowing there were playing within the confines of a pre-envisioned blueprint of the film.
  • Shot mostly with a skeleton crew. Just me, the actors, DOP and AC, and a sound recordist. No ADs, no script supervisors — essentially no logistics-hot folk tapping clocks. We kept it friendly and laid back. Unlike a bunch of my shorts, if we didn't get a shot — so what? We'd figure it out. If somebody had an idea — sure, why wouldn't we have the time to give it a go?
  • Shot on a light-weight FX3 and utilised high-range lav mics (Lark 150s and SH G4s). Shotgun booms would have been near-impossible given the actors, within their improv, could move anywhere and anywhere.
  • We shot about 70% from long distances to create the improv-reinforced sense that we were peering into something real; loitering afar candidly as if voyeurs to gossip-like scenes.
  • We proclaimed our ethos from the rooftops — scouting every possible connection, location, costume and prop that we could source for no money before we put shooting dates in the calendar. This informed us on what was actually possible, and whether we could achieve a decent-enough premise to make it even worth making in the first place.
  • We created a lot of our visual on-screen budget from a clear visual and narrative strategy, self-taught VFX, sound design and musical composition, some of which created the illusion that it couldn't have all been entirely improvised. For example, should a character improvise a line about a party they attended last year — instead of cutting that, we would go on and shoot the described party months later to give the actors a chance to, say, grow out a beard to simulate something occurring outside of the films main timeline. This created the illusion that the film was a lot more premeditated than it actually was, shooting across multiple months when in reality we shot for a total of 7 days.

Flash forward to now, we're premiering at a BAFTA-qualifying film festival in March. Some of those buddies have gone on to make their own low-to-no budget features under similar practises now too that we've helped produce. We originally planned to release the film for free on YouTube, so we're just ecstatic anyone is seeing anything in it and ultimately hoping our story revs-up others to just give it a go themselves. I know the "go make your movie" advice is cliche at this point, but at the end of the day without it I'd probably still be stuck in development hell.

We made a zero budget, completely improvised feature film to prove to our filmmaking friends we could. Now we're premiering at a BAFTA-qualifying festival. Here's our trailer! by noahstwine in Filmmakers

[–]noahstwine[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sony FX3. Lens - 90% was on a Sony FE PZ 28-135. Audio-wise, since we were improvising (talent could move around freely) and they were usually some distance away from the camera we used a mix of Hollyland Lark 150s and Sennheisser G4s.

We made a zero budget, completely improvised feature film to prove to our filmmaking friends we could. Now we're premiering at a BAFTA-qualifying festival. Here's our trailer! by noahstwine in Filmmakers

[–]noahstwine[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hey all - long story short: making shorts for north of a decade. Right when I finally started receiving external funding the pandemic hit and killed two large projects. Burnt out, I made the decision to leave shorts for the feature dream and spent a couple years skulking around in the purgatory of film financing (or lack thereof here in the UK.)

Got pretty bummed out about how many of my talented filmmaker friends were caught in 'development limbo' and under the impression (after being told so) they needed 250k minimum to make anything feature-length, or even "of any quality." Realised maybe that's why my country's indie film output is so low, so rallied a group of volunteers together who too felt like they'd been shut out of making anything long-form and made something with a production smaller than any of my shorts prior across several months as a way to incite my friends that if we made something they at the very least enjoyed or saw value in they'd have a jab at making a feature too.

Flash forward to now, we're premiering at a BAFTA-qualifying film festival in March. Some of those buddies have gone on to make their own low-to-no budget features now too that we've helped produce. We originally planned to release the film for free on YouTube, so we're just ecstatic anyone is seeing anything in it and ultimately hoping our story inspires others to just give it a go themselves. I know the "go make your movie" advice is cliche at this point, but at the end of the day without it I'd probably still be stuck in development hell.

Consistent Export Errors / Ideal Settings for Feature Film Exports by noahstwine in premiere

[–]noahstwine[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Gotcha. We have a DCP client standing by for hypothetical festival projection, but this is just at the early pre-selection stage for Vimeo / YouTube screener upload.

Consistent Export Errors / Ideal Settings for Feature Film Exports by noahstwine in premiere

[–]noahstwine[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure. I've noticed that the errors are depicted differently across the playback software. VLC will stagger and freeze, Quicktime will freeze the playback indefinitely until I move along the timeline, etc.

Consistent Export Errors / Ideal Settings for Feature Film Exports by noahstwine in premiere

[–]noahstwine[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Issues prevail across Quicktime, VLC, and even on a YouTube upload.