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The Rules of Juliet and Romeo PDF Print E-mail
Written by Stuart Jamieson   
Tuesday, 15 June 2010 09:00

Adapted from the Dogme 95 Rules these are the rules we will be attempting to abide by while shooting "The Transition of Juliet and Romeo"

  1. Filming must be done on location. Props *can* be brought in if a particular prop is necessary for the story, but otherwise props should exist in location.
  2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs within the scene being filmed, i.e., diegetic.
  3. The camera must also be digetic. Cameras can only be static where a camera may naturally exist (CCTV, WebCam) otherwise cameras must be held or placed by a character.
  4. Special lighting is not acceptable.
  5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
  6. The film must contain superficial action (conflict motivates the characters.)
  7. Temporal and geographical alienation are required (they exist as a metaphor for the character's alienation).
  8. The movie must cross combine multiple Genre's.
  9. The final picture must be available in 1080P digital format.
  10. The director must not be credited.
 
A New Way of Deferring Payment? PDF Print E-mail
Written by Administrator   
Tuesday, 01 June 2010 18:35

Starting off on the Microbudget trail, you have to do a lot of feeling your way - examining the routes that previous pioneers have taken and sometimes blazing a trail.

On my journey two issues have cropped up and aroused my attention, firstly the question of how do we market/distribute our film and during production how can we pay our cast/crew.

In the UK it has become apparent that the latter question is of extreme importance as our liberty to work for deferred payment is eroded by catch all legislation trying to stop exploitation of workers. We can work as volunteers but can't receive a gratuity payment or even a DVD that has intrinsic value.

In recent discussions and in following the Infinite Distribution panel on Twitter (#infdist) The question of how do we deal with the risk of Piracy as a loss and how do we make money when our film can be redistributed out of our control was raised. My solution was then and still is to license our film under a creative commons license that allows Non-Commercial use of it. This means it can't be pirated, it's free to distribute for anyone that obtains a copy; but leads to the bigger question of how do we make money?

As film makers today we need to be faster and smarter, identifying niches and quickly filling them. that might be the comic book adaptation, the soundtrack CD, Mugs, T-shirts, and also other DVD content which is not Creative Commons (Special features, making of's , Commentary tracks, etc;) and this is where we make our money - we then need pay back our deferments to our cast and crew from the sales of things they didn't have creative input into  - we want to be fair to them but we also have to be fair to ourselves.

 

So here is my suggestion instead of paying in cash lets pay cast and crew with a distribution license and a Vanilla DVD master. If the cost of producing a DVD is £1 ($1.5) the cast/crew member can individually sell that for £20($30) and that's 4 hours they worked on the film paid back to them sell 35 or 40 they can recoup a full wage for the time they spent on the film. If they can manage to shift 100-200+ then they're are looking at making a small fortune for work that might be small in comparison. It also gives them motovation to produce the best work possible because they need to sell it themselves when the shoot finishes not hoping that some distribution deal will bring their money to them.

So Creative commons for a lower resolution digital copy, A Vanilla DVD for Cast and Crew, and Full Featured DVD/Blueray for the Production company.

So you might be thinking but I'll be missing out on that potential revenue, but quite probably the cast and crew are going to be selling their copies to people who would not have been customers beforehand (their family and friends) and the attention drawn by this may make them want to be customers for your next film. The same applies to releasing a digital copy under a Creative Commons license, what's even better is they may like your film enough upgrade to your Full Featured version from their Vanilla or Creative Commons version.

It's a new model, so it's going to take some work and I don't see why the model couldn't be extended into giving investors (over say £20) a similar opportunity to recoup their investment. I'm looking for further improvement particularly for those of you who have self-distributed, how many of your Cast and Crew made referals that led to DVD sales? Also if you have any comments/improvements feel free to reach me:

Email me through the contacts page

on Twitter I'm @SJamieson79