David Mawson

1. You're confusing your personal ignorance-based opinion with evidence. They're not the same thing 2. Quoting an example where a movie had stars and lost money doesn't actually prove that you need stars to make money. This is appalling logic - you're arguing that because A does not always equal B then Not A can never equal B. It's a logical fallacy so silly I don't think it even has a name. Corman and Troma - and Hammer to some extent - ran on the no-stars model for years. Stars certainly increase revenue, but they have agents who negotiate aggressively to take that revenue. There is, in fact, no statistical correlation between star power and profit.

No, you weren't. You might have meant to, but what you wrote was My bold. Typical indy titles don't get bought by Amazon - it's extremely rare.

..Actually, seeing you obviously don't understand the real implications, I should probably explain. Someone comes to me with an idea that needs 100K. The upside is 200K, the downside is I lose the 100. I need odds of much better than 2 to 1 to justify the gamble. Someone else wants 100K. But this time if we lose I get 80K back. So I'm risking 20K to make 100K profit. That's a gamble worth taking at any odds better than 5 to 1. This a huuuuge shift in the investor's favour.

It might not have been clear to you. In which case I shudder to think what else won't be.... And again, I still don't think you understand what tax relief like this means in financial engineering terms. I'd have killed for breaks for investors like this when raising money in the past.

I see any reason why any sane person would believe that. Do you have data to support your case? Looking at the film I found figures for, the budget was 800K and VOD is 30K. Those are horrible figures. Most films will only get VOD through prime and under the new deal it will likely be 5c per streaming hour. Do you have evidence that the typical $1M indy is going to get 10M streaming views on Prime? Because I'd say numbers like that would be absolutely exceptional.

You're confusing "celebrating" with questioning. I didn't say "Yay!", I said "Why isn't this working?" One thought is that the tax breaks are so advantageous that, after some careful accounting, they don't require films to be serious attempts to succeed - that the financial engineering dominates over everything else. This was certainly the case with earlier attempts - https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/hmrc-tax-avoidance-film-making-scheme-little-wing/ Honestly, I don't think it's a problem that needs solving. TV is much more important culturally than film now. To the extent that perhaps the best film of the century so far, There Will Be Blood, is arguably inferior to a couple of episodes of the most comparable TV show, Deadwood. I'm just surprised that with tax breaks that high something isn't coming out of the system.

Yes. This is what tax relief is. And, again, 78% is a staggering figure. Nothing is "the sole basis" of any business. But 78% tax relief on your losses is off the charts. It means that if you make 10 films for 150K and eight are losers, one breaks even, and one makes a couple of mil then you end up with about 800K + 150K + 2000K => 3 mil. Troma or Corman would have gone crazy for a deal like that.

But with tax breaks that huge, it's almost puzzling why it isn't. You get 78% of your investment back if you don't go in to profit: that's phenomenal.

You were experimenting and knew it. Taking risks is a good thing as long as you're smart enough to look hard at the results afterwards. I think the bottom line here is that for every image you put on screen you have to ask "Why do people want to see this? How does it make them feel? Why are they going to keep watching?" With "Hey Boy" the director immediately opens a question in the viewer's mind: what's the connection between the group in the foreground and the protagonist? And creates a sense of threat. That's two compelling narrative points in the first 8 seconds. Those carry you through until the huge WTF at 40 seconds, then empathy and the curiosity already created - plus three excellent performances shot close-up - carry you the rest of the way.

This is very interesting. First there is a reasonably detailed breakdown of costs for a real 1M film - and for cinema and VOD revenue. (Both were tiny, but the producer believes that the film is a long term asset - which I think is crazy, but so it goes. The VOD was mostly Netflix.) Secondly there is information on the tax breaks in the UK - https://stephenfollows.com/full-costs-and-income-of-1m-independent-feature-film/

I thought you were talking about the Zacuto Z-Finder type gadgets that convert screens into EVFs?

You can make an excellent Zacuto replacement using one or two close-up filters and something to hold them.

It surprised me because with those odds I can't see why investors stay in the game. Re. non-cinema release, for most films this will mean Amazon Prime. Amazon's new revenue rules would seem to work heavily against low budget productions - they actually pay less per hour if a film doesn't include name talent: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/amazon-prime-video-direct-cut-royalty-fees-1203163736/ ...So call revenue 4-7c an hour - probably 10c for watching a whole film. So a million views in a year - which is doing amazingly well - is $100K. Perhaps we can be optimistic and assume that 0.5% of films are profitable after 5 years of Amazon Prime and the 25% tax credit are taken into account...

No. Because it was 1 minute 42 seconds before I noticed a zoom and I'd normally have given up after 20 seconds. Also the zoom seemed completely unmotivated, which itself is a bad thing. And to be honest, even if you'd started close and then pulled out, I don't think it would have helped. People don't want to squint at dancing ants. The point of a video is that something interesting happens on screen -

Does anyone have similar figures for US low budget films?

Try doing a patent search.

This is something Japanese crews really did - https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Film-Art-Industry-Expanded/dp/0691007926 Page 337 - https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&id=C2z3otM-y5kC&q=lights#v=snippet&q=lighting&f=false ...And instead of a boom, a grip was often dangled from the grid by a rope with a mic in his hands.

Female orphans often make a living collecting and selling them. Hence the famous job description "She sells sea-stands on the seashore."

Buying (or renting?) one of the rain covers made for the C300 would seem to be the obvious answer - https://www.camrade.com/products/wetsuits-rain-covers/camrade-wetsuit-eos-c300-500

Completely doesn't work. If you look at the frame as a whole for then your brain just registers tiny figures doing stuff repetitively. If you try to look at any particular figure, it's too small. The impression is more of a screensaver than narrative content.

It might be worth searching lensrentals.com. They're very good on that type of info. Otoh, this might put you off doing the shoot at all - https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2018/08/please-dont-take-our-photography-and-video-gear-to-burning-man/

Not necessarily. Different processor, better heatsinking. That said, buying Apple for - well, anything makes less and less sense. A lot of techies favour Thinkpads, especially the X-series. Boring to look at, but super tough. Big companies buy them, run them three years, then cycle them out - and they still have a decade of wear left on them.

That sounds very unlikely, at least for anything you'd want to do normally. I use a tiny years old fanless PC for writing - because it's convenient and silent. It has 1/10 the power of a current desktop. And it will still do typical stills processing - applying a curve, resizing, sharpening - in a few tens of seconds.

Then it sounds like a terrible time to buy an expensive camera. Have you thought of going waaay down in price and buying something a Fuji XT3 or GH5s, then renting for the jobs they won't cover? Those new 400Mbs hybrids are much more capable than the last generation - and quite a few people are ranting about the shorter post-production times they say come from using Fuji HLG.

....So you could say that you're experiencing Happy Days??? Heeeeyyy!