Make My Own Damn Movie

January 30th, 2006

My brother gave me a copy of Lloyd Kaufman’s new book Make Your Own Damn Movie for Christmas, and I’ve been reading it on my lunch breaks. It offers a bit more practical advice than Lloyd’s first book—All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger: The Shocking True Story of Troma Studios. Lloyd Kaufman is, as I’m sure you’re all aware, the prolific independent filmmaker behind the Oscar winning films The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid. Lloyd’s lunatic anecdotes about the chaos of his productions is oddly appealing—at least to me. As I mentioned earlier, one of my resolutions for 2006 is to finally make a return to filmmaking in some form or another, and shoot my own Damn Movie.

The challenge of course is that I have very little money to put into making a movie, and Guelph isn’t exactly Hollywood—or even Hollywood North (aka Toronto). So I decided to see what resources we do have here…

It looks like the website for Ed Video recently received a much needed update, and is now considerably easier to work with. Ed Video is Guelph’s video arts co-op, offering a wide range of support for people interested in making movies. Filmmakers can rent DV cameras (including the Panasonic AGDVX100 which can shoot 24 frame progressive video), tripods, lights and audio equipment. They also make editing facilities and audition space available for aspiring film auteurs. Considering that they offer a handful of film production courses, it reminds me a lot of film school—only with more modern gear.

Ed Video had a link to ontariofilm.com, a new site intended to provide aspiring filmmakers that are outside of greater metropolitan areas access to a filmmaking community in Ontario. The messageboard is pretty quiet at the moment, but I’m not sure if that’s due to a lack of interest, the newness of the site, or people just not knowing about it. Maybe mentioning it here will help out with that last point.

Finally, anyone in the area who might be interested in working on an independent film this summer, send me an email and I’ll let you know when I’ve got things a bit more organized. Sometime after I finish the second half of Lloyd’s book.

Tags: books, designmeme, film
Posted in designmeme | 6 Comments »

6 Responses to “Make My Own Damn Movie”

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1 Kevin Feb 1st, 2006 at 12:48 pm

YES! You’re FINALLY doing the “Chortle & the Wheelies” movie, aren’t ya?
2 Michael Foster Feb 28th, 2006 at 4:03 pm

I willl be happy to assist you in your film making efforts sir.
3 Stuart Robertson Mar 1st, 2006 at 9:09 pm

Great to hear from you Michael. That would be just like the old days.
4 machinecinema Nov 12th, 2007 at 11:51 am

so, go do it. have a look at http://www.moviestorm.co.uk and the freeware (digital / animated) moviemaking application. Now it has some proper camera controls (depth of field, focal length, tracking, panning, etc) and some special effects (set things on fire) and rather clever actors (kiss, hug, punch, go to bed …) it can deliver some pretty good shorts which you can edit together into a movie quickly. there are some examples on http://www.youtube.com (search on “moviestorm”) but they are fairly early works, the best ones are in the directors pages on the Moviestorm sites.