producing Army of One

Nate North

Nate North

I've had this conversation a lot of times with a lot of people, but never in a focused way on the forum. Every time I see an indie film project come anywhere close to a win, it's from a team of people, usually dozens working together towards a common goal.

Simultaneously, almost every single person I've talked to for years is adamant about producing a feature film completely alone. What is driving this logic in a situation where metrics would indicate dramatically higher chances of success for teams?

Pushback on even 2 people working together is basically 100%, and yet I almost never see a film make it to broadcast with just one person on board. I understand the drawbacks and tradeoffs of creative collaboration, and yet you never see a single person playing hockey or baseball alone vs teams of 30. Is there something I'm missing? How much sense does it make to have a film with 1 actor, or for the editor to be the marketing person, etc. Why take a 10k hour job and turn a 3 month thing with a few dozen people into a multi year survivalist challenge?
 
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I see 2 dominant reasons (but certainly not the only ones):

1. Working with a crew - even a small one - requires a LOT of organization. This is an essential but rather boring skill, and one that many filmmakers lack.

2. The need for control. Many filmmakers want to have everything done exactly their way, and that just doesn't happen with a team.
 
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mlesemann said:
I see 2 dominant reasons (but certainly not the only ones):

1. Working with a crew - even a small one - requires a LOT of organization. This is an essential but rather boring skill, and one that many filmmakers lack.

2. The need for control. Many filmmakers want to have everything done exactly their way, and that just doesn't happen with a team.
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I think those are good and legitimate answers.

I don't think it validates the idea of solo feature filmmaking though.

I can make a project solo, and finish it, but it won't be anywhere near the quality of a solid collaboration with multiple talented people. We all want complete creative control, but it feels like the price for that is an inability to bring a functional product to market. People usually solve this with mercenaries, but even then outcomes are inferior to what happens when people are actually excited about pursuing a shared goal.

So If I had this binary choice between having everything my way, and actually succeeding, the options would be to quit, or sacrifice some of my control for the greater good of the project.

I recently worked with another filmmaker who isn't on this forum. He had written a lengthy script, and had a vision for his project. I began training him to use the animation system, and immediately there were problems. I want a custom military truck that looks EXACTLY this way. And I explained to him about diminishing returns and budgeting in film. Hannibal was a sequel to Silence of the Lambs, and Riddley Scott wanted Jodie Foster back to reprise the famed main character. Jodie Foster didn't come back though, so they had to change the Character of Starling to Julianne Moore. My point is that compromise in film is constant, even up to the 100 million dollar level. Even for the greatest directors of all time. I find it odd that people who are trying to make their first film demand more creative control than Riddley Scott of Stanley Kubrick.

Faced with the prospect of having one truck in one scene that didn't look EXACTLY like he wanted, or a character that was only a 80% match for what he imagined, he just cancelled the entire film and quit learning. I feel like anyone approaching the chaos of film as it exists in the real world without some degree of flexibility is doomed to failure.
 
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sfoster said:
IDK what the hold up is, everyone should just acknoweldge I'm a genius and devote their lives to providing me with free labor.
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I understand your meaning, but by that logic there shouldn't be any film teams out there. But there are.

Here's how I see the indie film problem.

There's a crowd of 10,000 of us, watching a man on a stage.

That man says, "I'm making a movie, and I'm getting paid 10 grand an hour for talking, and I get to live my dream and make a living"

Someone from the crowd shouts "how come you get to be rich, and I do the same work and don't get paid"

The man says "because I have 100 thousand dollars"

Each person in the crowd checks their pockets, and they only have 1000 dollars each.

One person in the crowd says, "Hey everyone, we have 10 million dollars collectively, we are actually way stronger than the guy on stage"

Another yells back "but we have to split the profits, so it doesn't work out."

The first man yells a question at the guy on stage. "How much does the guy who fetches your sprite on set take home annually"

The man on stage yells back "more than the director of an entire film who did every job would make, and that's after I take half of the net"

So the man in the crowd yells to the others "if any 100 of us worked together, we could equal what he's done, and every one of us could be successful"

For a brief moment, there is silence, and then the guy next to him says, "Well, ok, I'm the main actor, so I should be boss"

The woman next to him says "Hold on, I'm the cinematographer, without me, you're just looking at a blank screen, so I should be project lead"

The first guy says, "look, this isn't even about any of our skills, this is about brute force, and people like the guy on stage that have it just win big all the time whether they do a good job or not."

Another crowd member says "I'll work with you, just give me your 1000 dollars"

The first guy says, "to beat the guy on stage we need to pool our force, we can't gain traction against this guy by dividing and reducing our funds until we are powerless, that was the problem in the first place, that's what kept us too poor to earn money. This guy on stage barely has to work for a day to make what we make in a year, but together, we could change that."

Others in the crowd ponder this for a moment, and say "well, I'm not succeeding until someone pays me to succeed"

At the end of the story, the man on stage still controls everyone, is still able to make 3 movies a year, and the crowd, that has at least hundreds of times the collected resources, goes back to working at the DMV, and the guy on stage keeps taking home 30 thousand dollar checks for delivering a few sentences.

Was that a win? Was that the best way things could have possibly worked out? Did we prioritize our ego above our goals? Did our goals become so fractured as to become a tower of Babel situation? Why did the people with millions of dollars become subservient to the man with 100 grand? Are we poor because it had to be that way, or did we maybe have a choice in this, and chose poorly?
 
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mlesemann said:
What you just described, @Nate North , is a specific example of my point 2: the need for control.

Many filmmakers will walk away from a project rather than not be able to do things their way.
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There are times when that's the right move, but I think as a segment (indie filmmakers worldwide) that justification is DRASTICALLY overused. If I had to take a shot in the dark, I'd say I hear that 1000 times as often as actually makes sense.

Sometimes I show my friends in my local town this demo or that, and they say, well, it's really good, but I saw this one moment where the leaf on the tree didn't sway right, so I think no one will pay you for this.

I used to listen to them, everything must be exactly right all the time or just quit. I'm out buying jars of penut butter for dinner.

I watch an episode of Dragonball Z. The show is god awful. Half the run time is reapeated video loops like the hallways in scooby doo. Art is terrible, writing is terrible, sound is terrible. Sometimes they save animation money by just showing one frame for 20 seconds and playing a sound effect. Super lazy, super low grade.

I do a web search, company value, company headquarters, staff count, average salary. A team of 30 people making complete garbage, and every single person on that team makes over 5x my income.

What I'm looking at is what happens when you have 10% of my skill level, and you add cooperation and infrastructure.

Here is a sample of published film work from teams. In each case, a single picture, with a few animation loops playing in front. Everyone involved got paid, has a legit IMDB credit, and has work out on national broadcast channels.

 
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mlesemann said:
Someday I'm going to get a shirt that says:

"Be Reasonable - Do It My Way"

That would make everything SO much easier.
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First off, I'd like to note that this conversation is not directed at just Sean and Mara. These are general thoughts applicable to everyone, and while I've had discussions with both of you that seem relevant to this discussion, I'm not targeting either of you in any way. Honestly, the two of you have probably been the most helpful out of everyone. If this hits a bit close to home, that's unavoidable, but this is not a response to any interactions we've had. I'm saying the same thing I said before I knew anyone here. Indietalk has become kind of a small room, and the dynamic has suffered because of that. I've done what I could to help keep the forum alive, filling in long dead spaces with no posts, answering questions for everyone, cheering on anyone who made half an effort. I wish I could look back and say I'd made a difference in my time here. I looked today at the lounge category. Indietalk had pinned my post about helping Alcove at the top, which was cool. And as I looked at it, I got really depressed. Not because of that post, but because it was the only one. The only post in 2 years where anyone reached out and tried to help another person with no ulterior motives. I didn't feel proud, or special, or better than anyone, I just felt sad to live in a world there weren't 100 such posts, by all different people. My post shouldn't be the only one pinned there at the top of that list.

It's not that I don't understand this perspective. It's just that there is an error in your logic. It's not a dumb error. Your statement makes complete sense, but there is an error of omission here.

What if people tried working together, collaboratively, rather than it being everyone doing one person's idea. These statements both include the assumption that whoever was in charge has the same kind of dysfunctional ego that ruins everything else. Not every single person is like that, though my experiences over the last few years seem determined to prove me wrong about that.

For years corporations had a theory they operated on. We have to charge everyone for everything always, or else where does the money come from. Sounds pretty sensible right?

So in example, and there are many other examples, Epic Megagames would charge a 1 million dollar up front fee to begin working with Unreal Engine (not made up, that was the actual number). Up until 2015, that's how much it cost. It was easy to justify that price, it made sense, and some people paid it. However, they were only selling a few dozen licenses per year.

So one day a person like me is at a meeting at Epic, and they say something crazy. "what if we just give it away for free?" I'm certain many of the other executives at the table scoffed, jabbing each other with their elbows, laughing a bit. "sure, we'll just give away all our work for free, great job Einstein, any other ideas?" Another pipes up, "should I just give you a million dollars right now, like you're suggesting we do" Another snickers.

But Tim Sweeny, who is famously smarter than anyone on this forum, or any other forum for that matter, and has singlehandedly changed the face of global entertainment, was listening. He paused for a moment, staring out the window of the board room, and deep in thought said "If you love something, set it free"

It's now 7 years later. Epic's revenues have gone from about 500 million a year to about 6 billion per year over that time. This decision, to move forward without their hand out, without refusing to work with anyone who wouldn't pay them up front, resulted in a 1200 percent increase in income.

It's now the most widely used engine in the world today, with thousands of developers working on projects that pay royalties into their system. They are drastically more famous than they were, and they owe it all to the moment when they figured out that they were making less money by stopping everyone without a million dollars from making games. People can't pay you if everyone gets stopped from earning money BEFORE they have a chance to make any. Where does the money come from? You can't fund a movie with proceeds from a job at Target.

Here is the ad Tim made in 2015, announcing that they had dropped the 1 million dollar price tag, and welcomed anyone to come and work with them, because making great products with creative people was more important to the company's financial future than up front fees were.


He's now one of the top 10 entertainment producers in the world today. He got there by being open and optimistic, and trying things a new way that others said would fail.

Companies that became immensely successful without asking for money up front for their main product.

Facebook
Davinchi
Epic
Soundcloud
AOL
and many many others

When you say, we won't make a product to sell until we get paid, you create a vicious cycle where no one that isn't already rich can ever possibly earn money in film. I think we're all rabbits caught in a snare made of ideas we've been taught.
 
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Nate North said:
What if people tried working together, collaboratively, rather than it being everyone doing one person's idea.
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In my opinion (and it's just that) because it rarely works for the same reason communism doesn't work.

I've only managed to get things done when I take the (proverbial) bull by the horns and make shit happen. And I assure you, I get paid less than anyone. But I AM good at organizing.

I'm not saying I'm right - just that this has been my experience.

And my comment re doing it my way was merely intended as a joke about my own controlling nature.
I'm a bit compulsive, which can drive other people crazy. But it's the ONLY reason that I've been able to make 2 feature movies.
 
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mlesemann said:
In my opinion (and it's just that) because it rarely works for the same reason communism doesn't work.

I've only managed to get things done when I take the (proverbial) bull by the horns and make shit happen. And I assure you, I get paid less than anyone. But I AM good at organizing.

I'm not saying I'm right - just that this has been my experience.

And my comment re doing it my way was merely intended as a joke about my own controlling nature.
I'm a bit compulsive, which can drive other people crazy. But it's the ONLY reason that I've been able to make 2 feature movies.
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I can identify with all of that, and I think you know that I don't wait around for others to take initiative.

yeah, communism doesn't work. Agreed. But teams of friends combining forces to pursue a common goal works all the time. You could make the case that it's the single most successful formula for any type of small business venture. Some businesses are actually best with just one person, but film isn't one of them, and anyone who has seen an end credits sequence knows that.

I feel there are external factors at play. The world has changed a great deal. In 2000, if I wanted to start a band on a friday night, we had 5 members by monday. This isn't some hard limit on film, I think the people have changed. I think our egos grew very gradually, so slowly that no one noticed, like when you gain weight in the mirror over a decade. There's no one day where you look much different than the day before, but now that I'm 40, I look, lol, not as good as before.

I know you're just joking, and it's funny. I get it.

I just think that there is a fundamental misunderstanding in the indie film world, about what a movie is. I'm not calling anyone stupid, it took me years to see it clearly, and I was paying close attention.

Those Steven Spielberg movies are great, and we say, that one guy made this great thing, I should be able to as well. It's not Steven that made that film great though, it was 100 people's combined talent, imagination, creativity, and work that you're looking at. It's all lumped together under this one name, so we think we saw a person do that amazing thing.

My theory is that no ONE person has EVER done anything as impressive as Schindler's List, and that one of the big sorting points that determines who is or isn't able to achieve such heights of expression is the realization that no single member of the team is actually that much bigger than life.

Going back to communism, I think it's the same binary thinking I encounter in political debates. I say "maybe we shouldn't pool all the world's wealth in the hands of .001 percent of the people until one person gets paid more to go to the beach than another is paid to work a decade of factory shifts" They say "so you want communism"

There are a lot of numbers in between 1 and 100. I don't want communism either, but the current system just gave 100 million dollars to one competitor, and 100 dollars to another. How in the world would we ever know who is actually good at the job if we just decide who wins the game before it starts each time?
 
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indietalk said:
Well imo it is a collaboration if you have a team of people that take pride in their own craft and not directing.
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I guess I don't see the problem with that. I am wondering if we have exactly the same definition of directing.

Directors don't always pick the scripts, directors are just another worker, and our job is to keep the team organized and focused on the task at hand. if everyone is thinking of a director as like "Boss" or "CEO" there's some truth to that, but I'm just another team member doing a job.

Do people think this is the most fun job? It's not, in fact maybe the opposite. Mara put it pretty well, it's boring and tough, but has to be done for all the fun jobs to gel into something worthwhile.

Personally, I think guitarist is the most fun job on a film set, but for some reason nobody argues about who gets to be the guitarist.
 
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indietalk said:
Save Point! 😂
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not neccesarily. Just suggesting pooling resources intelligently. If one of us has a great script, and another has a RED, and another one of us is Bruce Willis's nephew, it might make more sense to make a film with all 3 advantages, rather than one of us making a film with Bruce Willis improvising lines without a script in front of a cell phone.

This answer also applies to Mara's question.

SP does fit what I'm saying here, because it was designed around the same philosophy, but people still don't understand what it is. I'm just building a studio backlot. Just like 20th century fox did. I rent a camera, I build an old west town, I build a jail set, I buy lights. That's what it is. A place where we don't have to rebuild everything for every single film. Classic Hollywood Synergistics. It's not my story, it's not a story, it's a library where you can check out everything you need to make any story.
 
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if you see an amazing movie and shout about from the rooftops, it's so good everyones gotta see it.... only a rare person will listen to your recommendation and watch the movie. even if its a 100 million dollar movie that you have nothing to do with an youre totally unbiased, theres just too much damn content these days, people don't have time to watch it.

it takes a very compelling reason to get people to watch a film, usually a movie star actor they really like.
So if you're so dude with a great script but no money, people know your film isn't going anywhere, nobody is gonna even hear about it so why would they devote all the time to joining your team if you're a broke nobody?

Conversely if you are the REAL DEAL and you've truly got such an amazing earth shattering script.. why don't you have funding?
If it's really that great shouldn't you get funding?

Most people that are producing a great product have great funding too and its pretty rare to see someone that is truly intelligent, creative, pumping out good stuff without the financing to actually hire the team of people they need.

so in summary if youre good enough to be worth teaming up with, you probably have money to hrie people in the first place.
most of us just aren't as good as we think we are or as we wish we are.

can't blame people for not wanting to join my team and work on my films, my films get watched by like 500 people lol its a joke.
 
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sfoster said:
if you see an amazing movie and shout about from the rooftops, it's so good everyones gotta see it.... only a rare person will listen to your recommendation and watch the movie. even if its a 100 million dollar movie that you have nothing to do with an youre totally unbiased, theres just too much damn content these days, people don't have time to watch it.

it takes a very compelling reason to get people to watch a film, usually a movie star actor they really like.
So if you're so dude with a great script but no money, people know your film isn't going anywhere, nobody is gonna even hear about it so why would they devote all the time to joining your team if you're a broke nobody?

Conversely if you are the REAL DEAL and you've truly got such an amazing earth shattering script.. why don't you have funding?
If it's really that great shouldn't you get funding?

Most people that are producing a great product have great funding too and its pretty rare to see someone that is truly intelligent, creative, pumping out good stuff without the financing to actually hire the team of people they need.

so in summary if youre good enough to be worth teaming up with, you probably have money to hrie people in the first place.
most of us just aren't as good as we think we are or as we wish we are.

can't blame people for not wanting to join my team and work on my films, my films get watched by like 500 people lol its a joke.
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I get all that, and it's well reasoned for the most part.

Where your logic breaks down, and this is probably the most common logic error in American society, is the idea that anyone that was good at a job got funding. It's far more accurate that anyone who got funding ended up looking competent once they had immense help, at least in film. In basketball, the most competent people rise to the top, in film, it really does not work that way. There are no "talent scouts" it's a myth. A sports manager can't hire 10 people to make it look like a player scored a 3 pointer, it's live. But a studio can assign 10 people to run cameras, and will absolutely do that without watching one single demo reel from a "talented outsider"

Early days in the tech industry, a guy gave me some helpful advice. He said, "you're going to meet a lot of people out here with 5 million dollars, and you're going to incorrectly assume that they were smarter than you, or had a better idea, but 90% of them are just a person who was handed 10 million dollars and lost half of it because they were incompetent. That's the single most common story in Silicon Valley"

You say celebrities were special before they were hired. Sometimes, sure, but most of them were more average than you would ever care to believe, until a great scriptwriter put words in their mouths, until a pro lighting crew put them in the best possible light, until a team of makeup artists were hired to make them look way better than usual. It's just an organized effort to make you see wealthy people as better than us.

It's like if you told me that a guy deserved thousands of times my salary because he can lift 1000 lbs, but the reality is, that's just another guy my size with 25 people in the ceiling pulling up that barbell with invisible fishing lines. I've talked to people this year that were on set in Hollywood, and they didn't even know 10% of what I know about film production. They get paid 60k a year to turn the camera on and off and focus the lens. They don't need to know how to shoot a greenscreen, there's a helper that was hired to do it for them. Then don't need to write, helper. They don't need to cast, helper. These aren't superhumans. These are people that work less, know less, and get paid more than us, because they have the benefit of an organization.

Bryce Dallas Howard is great, and she's directed a Star Wars film. How sure are you that she even knows the difference between a Cooke S4 and an Angenueix 24-50? How about calibrating diffuser spill? Maybe she understands action keying with post additive motion blur? That's just a millionaire yelling action and cut, and yet I have no doubt in my mind that you would imagine the director of any Star Wars film as being at a dozen times my skill level. It's simply not true. But we elected a guy who inherited a skyscraper from dad, because we all thought he was a great businessman. After all, he does own a skyscraper. You know who has never been president? Anyone who actually had the intelligence to create the architectural blueprints for a skyscraper. That's a job 1000 times as difficult as buying a building with dad's money, but you don't know that guys name. The front of the building just has a huge sign that says the name of whoever had money, and we all give credit to that name, instead of the people that actually built the building.

I don't agree with manifest destiny. Creatives are oppressed by a system that makes every debutante look like they earned their way to the top, by rigging the game so heavily in their favor that everyone else begins to doubt themselves.

What about you Sean? Is every music video on MTV better directed than your films? I don't think so. But they all have more money than you. And if that isn't fair, what are we going to do about it? Wait to die? Compete solo against teams of 50? It sounds like a bad plan.

You know why I don't have funding yet? Because I don't have enough funding to even reach out to people that would help me if they ever did see my work. I came here to find connections, make friends, and network, and the results I've seen lead me to believe that about 1 in every 100 people would recognize the potential. In time, there would be 30-50 of us, and shortly thereafter, I'd have something I could take to venture capitalists for investment. My math shows this working.

But there are only 15 people here. I went to discord, and found film groups. 10 people exchanging memes, with an occasional post of a sunset shot on a vintage lens.

I went to facebook, and there were huge groups of people, with money, making cell phone films of their dogs. The cute dogs got more likes than everyone here's films combined.

I went to a crypto forum, and there were 16,000 members online, trading little pieces of paper with mario or luigi drawn crudely on them.

What I'm saying here is that the methods we've collectively been trying over the years have not been working, and the normal approach would be to try to switch up strategies. If nobody on the entire forum is making any money, I'm not sure what we have to loose. Our time doesn't really become valuable to others until we prove our competence, so why not try and make that a priority, via any means necessary?

Lastly, this thinking about the view count is another cyclic trap. I have low views so we shouldn't improve it and since we didn't it doesn't have many views so let's not improve it. A guy got drunk and fell in a swimming pool, 3 million views, is that the good filmmaker that deserves help? What about the guy who left his webcam on and fell asleep, and then got 16 grand in donations for snoring. He has more money than I do, do you think it's because he's a better director? Some of this logic is self defeating. Personally I hope you make it, and Mara too.

 
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Nate North said:
I get all that, and it's well reasoned for the most part.

Where your logic breaks down, and this is probably the most common logic error in American society, is the idea that anyone that was good at a job got funding. It's far more accurate that anyone who got funding ended up looking competent once they had immense help, at least in film. In basketball, the most competent people rise to the top, in film, it really does not work that way. There are no "talent scouts" it's a myth. A sports manager can't hire 10 people to make it look like a player scored a 3 pointer, it's live. But a studio can assign 10 people to run cameras, and will absolutely do that without watching one single demo reel from a "talented outsider"

Early days in the tech industry, a guy gave me some helpful advice. He said, "you're going to meet a lot of people out here with 5 million dollars, and you're going to incorrectly assume that they were smarter than you, or had a better idea, but 90% of them are just a person who was handed 10 million dollars and lost half of it because they were incompetent. That's the single most common story in Silicon Valley"

You say celebrities were special before they were hired. Sometimes, sure, but most of them were more average than you would ever care to believe, until a great scriptwriter put words in their mouths, until a pro lighting crew put them in the best possible light, until a team of makeup artists were hired to make them look way better than usual. It's just an organized effort to make you see wealthy people as better than us.

It's like if you told me that a guy deserved thousands of times my salary because he can lift 1000 lbs, but the reality is, that's just another guy my size with 25 people in the ceiling pulling up that barbell with invisible fishing lines. I've talked to people this year that were on set in Hollywood, and they didn't even know 10% of what I know about film production. They get paid 60k a year to turn the camera on and off and focus the lens. They don't need to know how to shoot a greenscreen, there's a helper that was hired to do it for them. Then don't need to write, helper. They don't need to cast, helper. These aren't superhumans. These are people that work less, know less, and get paid more than us, because they have the benefit of an organization.

Bryce Dallas Howard is great, and she's directed a Star Wars film. How sure are you that she even knows the difference between a Cooke S4 and an Angenueix 24-50? How about calibrating diffuser spill? Maybe she understands action keying with post additive motion blur? That's just a millionaire yelling action and cut, and yet I have no doubt in my mind that you would imagine the director of any Star Wars film as being at a dozen times my skill level. It's simply not true. But we elected a guy who inherited a skyscraper from dad, because we all thought he was a great businessman. After all, he does own a skyscraper. You know who has never been president? Anyone who actually had the intelligence to create the architectural blueprints for a skyscraper. That's a job 1000 times as difficult as buying a building with dad's money, but you don't know that guys name. The front of the building just has a huge sign that says the name of whoever had money, and we all give credit to that name, instead of the people that actually built the building.

I don't agree with manifest destiny. Creatives are oppressed by a system that makes every debutante look like they earned their way to the top, by rigging the game so heavily in their favor that everyone else begins to doubt themselves.

What about you Sean? Is every music video on MTV better directed than your films? I don't think so. But they all have more money than you. And if that isn't fair, what are we going to do about it? Wait to die? Compete solo against teams of 50? It sounds like a bad plan.

You know why I don't have funding yet? Because I don't have enough funding to even reach out to people that would help me if they ever did see my work. I came here to find connections, make friends, and network, and the results I've seen lead me to believe that about 1 in every 100 people would recognize the potential. In time, there would be 30-50 of us, and shortly thereafter, I'd have something I could take to venture capitalists for investment. My math shows this working.

But there are only 15 people here. I went to discord, and found film groups. 10 people exchanging memes, with an occasional post of a sunset shot on a vintage lens.

I went to facebook, and there were huge groups of people, with money, making cell phone films of their dogs. The cute dogs got more likes than everyone here's films combined.

I went to a crypto forum, and there were 16,000 members online, trading little pieces of paper with mario or luigi drawn crudely on them.

What I'm saying here is that the methods we've collectively been trying over the years have not been working, and the normal approach would be to try to switch up strategies. If nobody on the entire forum is making any money, I'm not sure what we have to loose. Our time doesn't really become valuable to others until we prove our competence, so why not try and make that a priority, via any means necessary?

Lastly, this thinking about the view count is another cyclic trap. I have low views so we shouldn't improve it and since we didn't it doesn't have many views so let's not improve it. A guy got drunk and fell in a swimming pool, 3 million views, is that the good filmmaker that deserves help? What about the guy who left his webcam on and fell asleep, and then got 16 grand in donations for snoring. He has more money than I do, do you think it's because he's a better director? Some of this logic is self defeating. Personally I hope you make it, and Mara too.

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I definitely never said that anyone with talent gets money.
I did comment on the rarity of true greatness, and rarer still an amazing talent that is languishing as a total nobody.

For me personally, i know i cant direct a music video good enough to be on MTV.
Those directors are all way better than me at directing music videos

As for you and your funding, my point was even if your idea works, you dont have the funding to market it, so where is it going to go?
I don't say that to try to bring you down but its just my own experience, i put out a short film i think is good, nobody shares it, the channel goes quiet. People want to join in on projects that have a marketing budget, etc, they want to join in on projects that will be succesful and a project without money or movie stars is like buying a lottery ticket except the price is an entire year of your labor.

You say the normal approach is to try switching up strategies, that's exactly what I've done.
I'm focused on books now, you don't need a team, youre not competing with a team of 50 people, you don't need money to produce it, and people still actually rely on book recommendations from friends (unlike movies) and its something you can do on your own and sell and potentially aquire some margin of wealth and fame, and parlay that book into a feature film with actual funds.

But yeah I have felt some jealous towards sibling directors like coen or wachowski that have a built in partner from the womb totally on their same wavelength, etc. its a great advantage.
 
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