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Breaking into Showbiz:
The Complete Guide to Finding Work in Movies and Television
Written by
Layne McDonald, Ph.D.
Introduction
There are essentially two types of aspiring showbiz professionals. There are people who think that there’s a lot of easy money to be made in Hollywood, and then there are creative, imaginative people who can’t see themselves fully committing to anything BUT getting into the entertainment industry. If you’re in the former category, stop reading right now, because the money in showbiz isn’t easy. If you’re in the latter category, we hope we can provide you with real, practical advice where most of these types of books only offer wishy washy, positive-thinking encouragement.
So You Wanni Make Movies…
…Or a television program. Well, here’s the first thing you need to know…
It IS Possible!
Believe it or not, it is entirely possible to get into film and television no matter who you are, no matter your background, no matter where you live or what you do for a living or what you’re good at or… Well, what we’re saying is anyone can get there.
It seems impossible, it seems like, no matter what you do, it takes the sort of luck you’d need to win the lottery, it seems like it’s just plain not going to happen, but… well, put it this way: SOMEBODY must make movies and television, right?
Yes, it’s easier if you’re lucky, it’s easier if you’re Francis Ford Coppola’s son, it’s easier if your family is rich enough to finance your movies for you, but in the end, the Martin Scorsese’s of the world, the Greg Incoterms, even the Roger Cormans, they don’t become legends of directing or movie makeup and effects or producing by simply getting lucky. They had the will, the passion, and the talent to create truly spectacular films (or in Corman’s case, some truly spectacular films and a lot of marketable junk).
So, somebody must make movies and television, and if you want to put the work in, if you want to study the art of film (and the business and marketing side, while you’re at it) and learn your craft, then that somebody could be you.
It all comes down to taking your far off, pie in the sky dream, and turning it into something practical and pragmatic: A Plan.
Planning
Arnold Schwarzenegger was filthy rich before he ever made a single film, and it wasn’t from body building competitions.
Oh sure, he made some money and fame as a body builder, but nowhere near the millions of US dollars he would be worth soon after.
Arnold managed to make a vast wealth before getting into film by simply setting goals for himself and doing what he could to accomplish them. At the start of each year, he would write his goals down on index cards and post them up on the wall of his home.
He would work towards each one of these goals, one at a time, every single day. Having these cards posted up on the well helped to keep him focused on the path he’d chosen for himself.
These goals were not along the lines of “Make a million bucks” or “Become a famous body builder”. They were real, practical goals that he could put some real work into.
So, these could be body building goals, like, say “Add thirty pounds of muscle mass”. As he hit that goal, he would cross it off. Then his next goal might be “Start a mail order business”, which he did, using money he’d won from body building tournaments, as well as from a brick laying business he’d started with a buddy from the gym.
Each year, he would look at his resources, his options, and his ultimate, long-term ambitions, and write down smaller “medium” term goals that could help him get there. So, one year he may have started with “Get a new car” and “Add some muscle mass”, but after earning enough money selling mail order exercise equipment, the next year he could write “Buy an apartment building to lease out to tenants”. That’s how he made his millions: Buying and reselling and renting property.
He started with a few small businesses and worked his way towards wealth one day at a time, so by then, he was only doing movies as a hobby.
This doesn’t mean that you must start a bricklaying business or become a millionaire before you ever dream of pitching that TV pilot of yours. It just means that a long-term goal must be reached by an ascending staircase of short-term goals.
So, if you have an idea for a TV show and you want to know how to get it on the air, start with one short term, practical goal that you know you can accomplish, with or without your “lucky break”: Write your pilot script.
So, we said that anyone can get into movies and television if they’re willing to go out and give it a try, right? Well, that’s easy to say, but you probably want a little more than some words of encouragement, so here are just a few examples of people who became big shots in film and television on their own terms, and through their skill and creativity alone…
Seth MacFarlane is the creator, one of the head writers, and the provider of several voices on Family Guy,which, honestly, needs no introduction. It’s one of the hottest shows on television right now, the second most watched show on Hulu, and usually beats out The Simpsons for total viewers each weekend.
Not only is Family Guy a hit of enormous proportions, but MacFarlane also produces the spinoff series The Cleveland Show, and American Dad. The money he makes on merchandising alone is simply mind boggling.
So how did he get started? Was he lucky enough to be a writer on The Simpsons or South Park when they were just starting, only to be given a shot at his own show when those series got big? Was he friends with the head of FOX? Did he have a rich father who could produce a high quality, professional pilot for his idea?
No. Seth MacFarlane was attending the Rhode Island School of Design, and for his thesis, he created a short, animated film called The Life of Larry. This cartoon would serve as the basis for Family Guy, with Larry, an older Bostonese having the same voice as Peter Griffin, and his dog, Steve, eventually evolving into Brian.
One of his professors was so impressed with the cartoon, he submitted it to Hana-Barbera, where MacFarlane found work as a general animator before being given a chance to animate another short starring Larry and Steve, this time with the money and resources available to the Hana-Barbera studio. The second short, simply titled Larry and Steve was caught by executives at FOX, who requested a fifteen-minute pilot based on the characters, who would evolve into the cast of Family Guy. MacFarlane spent hours on end just drawing in his kitchen, trying to get the pilot done in time on the fifty-thousand-dollar US budget he had been given.
MacFarlane did get a few breaks. Had Hana-Barbera and FOX not seen his work, we wouldn’t have Family Guy, BUT… The point is that he wasn’t just handed a job in television. He broke his back creating several short, animated films, solo, before anyone gave him a shot at the big leagues.
If you want to get into film or television, the point is that you can’t wait until someone just hands you a job. You’ve got to slave away to create something that you can use as a calling card, so when you do get the chance, you’ll be ready, you’ll have something to show what you’re capable of.
Robert Rodriguez is a legend in independent film. You may have already heard of his debut film, El Mariachi,but there’s no harm in recapping the story for those that haven’t.
Rodriguez had been working in Austin, Texas as a short order cook, making short films on his own time. He started by shooting on his parents’ camcorder and editing with two VCRs, eventually making a short movie on film entitled Bedhead, being a story of a brother and sister rivalry, loaded with low-budget special effects and an animated opening credits sequence. The short, which he really made just for fun, won him a lot of acclaim at festivals, which led him to believe that he might be able to do this professionally.
Of course, if he was going to get work making movies, it would be for feature films, not for shorts. So, he decided it was time to make a full-length film.
His initial plan was to produce a trilogy of action films and sell them to the Spanish language video market, where he knew competition would be slim (most Spanish language action films at the time were made by people who obviously didn’t really care about what they were doing), and that he could have an exciting, cool film that the distributors would be fighting over.
To make the first film, he donated his body to science. Yep. He went into a medical study where they would test medications on him for a few weeks. This earned him a few thousand dollars US, which he would add to the money his producer/star was putting up to make a total budget of seven thousand dollars.
This budget only covered the film stock, which is incredibly expensive. He made sure to do as few takes as possible to keep the cost of film and development down. He borrowed the camera, and only spent a few hundred, total, on things like props, gas, food, and so on.
He spent two weeks filming, a few more weeks editing, and then he and his star drove out to Los Angeles to shop the movie around. None of the Spanish language distributors were making big enough offers, but through them, he was pointed towards a talent agency, wound up selling his film to Columbia and being wined and dined by Disney, Paramount, Universal, all the big studios, looking to get the hot new talent before anyone else does.
Again: Lots of hard work, and one lucky break. That’s what it takes.
Lloyd Kaufman was accepted at Yale, but while there, he primarily went into Chinese studies. He really had no interest in film until he met Robert Edelstein, an aspiring filmmaker.
Through Edelstein, Kaufman discovered his own interest in film, and took what money he could get and produced Edelstein’s first feature, Frappuccino. The same year, Kaufman directed his own debut feature, an experimental black and white film titled The Girl Who Returned.
Neither film set the world on fire.
But… his work as a producer found him some work at Cannon films, where he would meet John G. Avildsen who, before going on to win academy awards with Rocky and The Karate Kid, would collaborate on several small, low budget films with Kaufman.
In 1974, Kaufman and his business partner Michael Hers founded Trema Studios. The studio didn’t set the world on fire, either.
In fact, Kaufman had to keep working as a low-level producer and assistant in Hollywood just to keep paying the bills at Trema.
In 1985, Kaufman created The Toxic Avenger, which DID set the world on fire. It was a hot seller on VHS, had some successful limited runs in theaters, inspired a comic book, a kid’s show, and a video game, and really put Trema on the map.
Now for those keeping score, Kaufman produced his first film in the mid sixties, and became a success in film on his own terms twenty years later in the mid eighties.
Kaufman never really got his big break, he had to keep working at it, just barely making rent on the fringes of Hollywood. He had to put HIMSELF on the map by making his own movies no matter the challenges.
Kaufman did it the hard way as he really didn’t want to work through the big studios, but sometimes, that’s the way it goes. But, if it’s what you really love doing, then you’re not doing it for the money.
3
CHOOSING YOUR FIELD
If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re reading an eBook about getting into the business, then chances are you’ve already found your calling… or maybe you haven’t… or maybe you can do all sorts of things and you’re wondering which one to pursue, or you want a backup plan, or you… well, the thing is, movies and television are really an effort that includes every single skill and craft.
A producer has to get together actors, directors, writers, storyboard artists, digital artists, composers, poster artists, sound technicians, sometimes they even need to have a video game created just for the movie, as in The Wrestler, where the director hired a programmer to create the fictional Nintendo game Wrestle Jam so that the actors could really play a video game during the scene instead of just pretending to.
The point is, there are a lot of ways in, and sometimes, the one thing you know you’re good at can allow you to branch off into other crafts, as well.
For example, let’s say you’re a musician and you want to compose music for film. Well, if you already have a studio set up in your garage, you can use it to record sound effects, too. Or you could get into voice acting and record dialog in there. If you want to be a cinematographer, you could learn a little bit about other aspects and branch off into directing. If you’re something of a daredevil, you could get into stunt work, then stunt coordinating, and even make your own action film.
There are a lot of options open to you. Here are just a few fields to consider…
Directing and Producing
If you want to really create film and television and do it your way, if you want to put your own signature on there and tell your own stories in your own way, producing and directing are the way to go.
The thing about directing and producing, though… You don’t get to just do your part and move on to the next job. You don’t get to sit in your home studio or office and work at your own pace. In these roles, you need to be there every step of the way.
You need to be The Boss, and sometimes that means being a disciplinarian, sometimes it means being an armchair psychiatrist, knowing what to say to your actors to get the performance you need from them. It means being a safety director to make sure that stunts go according to plan. Producing means that, when the movie’s finished, you don’t get paid until you find someone who wants to buy the movie or distribute it.
It’s a lot of responsibility. If you want to get into film and television for an easy paycheck, you can forget making your own movies. Yes, you get paid to do what you love, but as a producer or a director, a bad movie is always going to be considered your fault. Ever heard of “director jail”? This is what happens when a director creates a big movie that tanks and they don’t get any more work for years (or sometimes ever).
For a producer, if one big movie doesn’t make a profit, it may be years before you have the money to invest in another project.
If this is what you want to do, if you can handle the risk and the responsibility, then go for it. Just don’t think it’s easy.
The thing about writing is that… even though you’re the starting point, even though it’s your story being told, writers really don’t have much power in Hollywood.
If you just want to get paid to tell great stories, go for it. But the writer is really at the bottom of the ladder in the creative department.
Many screenwriters find the whole experience heartbreaking. You sell a screenplay, and the studio likes it, but they want one more draft to make the dialog a little snappier, so they hire someone else to patch it up. Okay, it’s still your story, right?
Until the director gets there. He wants a big car chase scene at the end even though it’s a romantic comedy. So, they have another writer put the chase in.
Now the leading man has a few issues with the script. He doesn’t like this or that, and another writer hacks away at the script.
Now the leading lady doesn’t like what these changes have done to her character, she requests some changes.
Now the director drops out and does some other project, so they hire someone else, who asks for more changes.
Finally, the movie is finished. Nothing left to do but show it to the studio people. It’s not what you wrote anymore, except for the fact that the hero is still an insurance salesman with one leg. But the test audiences find the one leg thing weird, so with some reshoots and CGI, he’s given his leg back.
It’s not always like that, but that is, quite often, how it goes.
A writer/director has a lot of power. A writer who works as a partner with the director has a lot of power. A writer, going solo, has almost none, and when all’s said and done, you don’t really have anything to show for it but a paycheck.
In television, they tend to stick to the original script a bit more, but you’re usually working from tons of notes from the stars and producers of the show, so it’s about working your own personal touch into a structure and story and characters that someone else already laid out for you.
Writing is rough, but now and then, you write a script that a director falls in love with, and they do it justice. No matter how many times you must see your work butchered along the way, that one great film is always worth it.
Music and Sound
If you look at the credits for a hundred major Hollywood films from the last few years, you’ll find far fewer than a hundred composers.
When it comes to music, Hollywood tends to just hire about a dozen guys and have them do everything. A composer can turn out a score in a week’s time, so it’s easy for them to do dozens of movies in a single year, and the one thing about Hollywood that makes it hard for people to break in: They like to play it safe.
So, even if you could create a truly brilliant score, the fact is that your work hasn’t been proven to work, yet.
It’s dumb, yeah, and we’re all getting a little tired of John Williams and Danny Elman in Every Single Movie Ever, but that’s how it’s done.
Sound work is a little easier to break into. Studios are often just looking for the lowest bidder, there. Music, though, is tough.
Your best bet for any sort of sound work would probably be to hook up with an independent film production. Believe us: Indie directors are just dying for free music, or music done on a percentage rather than pay up front. If you compose music for a few dozen indie productions, all it takes is for one of them to get big to lead to further work.
When it comes to things like CGI effects, visual arts, poster art, storyboarding, stuff like that… it can be tricky to break into and, again, your best bet is to offer your services for free to an indie production.
A lot of CGIS is farmed out to foreign companies these days. The technology has gotten cheap enough that companies in Hong Kong and India can produce CGI effects as well as anyone, and producers usually look outside of film, towards comic book artists and so on, in order to find concept designers, posters and story board artists, so to get into that sort of thing, you probably want to forget film for the time being and try your hand at the world of graphic design.
Same with CGI, but there, you’d probably want to investigate making video games for awhile so you can hone your craft and maybe get some movie and television work on the side.
Some fields are easier to break into than others, but it always comes down to your skill level. A good composer or graphic designer might find it hard to get their foot in the door, but a bad writer will never sell a script, and a bad director won’t find work.
4
LEARN BY DOING
We’ve emphasized the importance of being good at what you do… Actually… being the best (or one of the best) at what you do. Hopefully, you already have some experience, so now it’s just a matter of honing your skills. If you’re fresh to the whole thing, if you haven’t made your first project yet… then what are you waiting for? Get started now!
A great way to learn how to do something fast is to set yourself up to do one a day. If you want to do music, write a song a day. If you want to direct, make a short film every day. If you want to draw storyboards, draw a comic a day.
Don’t worry about quality, don’t worry about length, just do one a day. A short film could be twenty seconds long just so long as it really does have a beginning, middle and end. A song could be thirty seconds just so long as it has a nice hook.
A mistake a lot of people make when they try to get into a creative field: They start out by attempting to create a full-length film or record an entire album or write a 120-page script… It doesn’t work like that.
Obviously, you’re not going to be getting hired by Paramount to make a fifteen second feature film, but these tiny, micro-projects make for an intensive and immensely educational learning experience.
If you don’t think you can make great movies that are less than an hour long, look up “five second films” on YouTube. There are a lot of variations of this trend. Some people edit entire three-hour epics down into just the important parts at around five seconds long. Others create original projects with some impressive production value and acting. If these guys can make great movies in five seconds of running time, why can’t you do the same with, say, thirty to sixty seconds a movie? Or heck, look at comic strips. If you want to learn to do storyboards, most comic strips are made up of three or four panels. You can EASILY draw that in a day. Most cartoonists do several a day and take half the week off.
Of course, these little one-minute projects probably aren’t what’s going to get you your big break, but, if you put them online, they might net you a ton of views and they’ll give you the sort of experience you can’t get at film school.
Film schools can help, but they’re only there for people who have already gotten started and want to learn more. You only really make one short film while in film school, but to really learn how to make great movies, you need to make dozens and dozens of films to learn how it’s done.
Everyone has a few bad projects in them, and it’s better to get them out of your system in a week’s time with these One A Day Endeavours than to wait until it’s done or die and you’re working on the big project that’s going to make you a mogul.
What this means is that you must be doing with your small projects what you’ll be doing with your bigger projects. So, if you’re a composer, don’t just compose on your own time, try composing for any indie director you might now who’s in the same boat as you. If you don’t know any locally, just look on the video sharing sites, find some good videos that were muted because they used licensed music that they didn’t have the copyrights for, and say “Hey, how would you like to have some free music?”
Or you could take some clips from your favourite movies and redo the soundtrack.
If you want to do special effects, take Stephen Colbert up on his Green Screen Challenges. If you want to do sound work, redo the sound for a favourite movie. If you want to direct, then just keep making movies.
When you get into movies and television, you’re going to have to be working together with a lot of people… a lot of people you might not get along with… But you must make peace and collaborate with them.
Find a collaborator. An actor who can double as a writer so you can throw ideas back and forth, a co-director, a producer, a composer for your short films. Find someone who can share ideas with you.
In the end, it’s all on you, it’s your responsibility to see your project through, but along the way, getting a collaborator can make for great practice.
5
MAKING YOUR DEMO REEL
Your demo reel is your calling card, your resume, your application and your “employee referral” all in one. In the end, all they care about in show business is what you can deliver as an artist and as a craftsman, so it’s on the quality of your demo reel that you will be judged.
A demo reel means different things depending on who you are and what sort of work you’re trying to get, but to make a long story short: Your demo reel should at least include some footage from a movie or a television pilot that you helped to put together.
Ideally, your demo reel should BE a movie or a pilot that you helped put together.
See, when a movie works or doesn’t work, all people really pick up on, even industry people, is that the movie itself worked or didn’t work. When the script stinks, nobody says “The script stunk, but the music was pretty good”. Nobody says, “Well the movie was garbage, but the special effects were great”, because, well, everyone has great special effects these days.
Even if you’re not a writer or director, people want to see how your work helps the movie it’s attached to.
A good cinematographer can’t save a bad movie. All you have then is a bad movie that’s pretty, and that’s not earning anyone any work.
If you want to be a composer, an artist, a CGI artist, a writer, anything, look around and see if you can find any independent filmmakers who could use your help. If you can’t, or if you want to be a director or a producer, then it’s time to…
Short films, in the range of five to fifteen minutes, and features seem to work best if you want to put a movie out to show off your talent.
Now, you’re probably wondering… “Why make a movie myself if I only want to be a makeup artist/a musician/a special effects guy?”
Well, because that’s simply the best way to get your work out there, and great indie productions don’t just fall from the sky, so if there’s no opportunity out there for you, you’ve got to make your own.
If you’re a director or a producer, you’ll want to make a feature to show you can handle the big jobs. Otherwise, a short film really isn’t that hard of a thing to put together. Heck, if you want to be a CGI animator, you can do the whole thing from your laptop.
Besides, making it yourself, you can write and direct the film to show your work off better than anyone else could. Obviously, you need a good story, because the movie must grab the viewer’s interest, it can’t just be a tech demo. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take any opportunity you can to show off your stunt work by throwing in a few more action scenes than you probably need.
Woody Allen said that everything you need to learn about making your own movie, you can learn in a week. Robert Rodriguez says it only takes five minutes. We say it only takes fifteen seconds.
· Write a script, anywhere from five to ten pages. Don’t write anything unless you already know how you’ll put it on film, and don’t write any characters that you don’t think someone in your immediate circle of friends and family can play.
· Film it.
· Edit it.
Really, that’s all there is to it. If you haven’t made a movie before, start out by doing a whole bunch of smaller, one-minute movies for practice. When you think you’re ready, make the ten-minute movie that’s going to really show off what you can do.
If you’re an aspiring director, you’ve probably already been through the process of making smaller movies.
When you’re doing your practice movies, does cheap. Never spend more than a few bucks on each production if you spend anything at all. When you do your big movie, feel free to put a little more money into it, but remember this: It’s probably not going to make you any money back.
It might get you work, but it’s very, very rare for a small indie film to make its money back.
You want it to look professional, you want it to be the best movie you’ve ever made, but don’t think you can get a great film by pumping your entire savings account into the production. In the end, it comes down to your ability to take one dollar and make it look like a thousand.
Even if all you want is to do makeup, your resume is really what you can put on film. Studio execs don’t care about still photos and test shots, they want to see what your makeup can add to a movie. They want to see what your music, your special effects, your stunt work can do to help the director tell a story. If you’re not telling stories, you’re not in the movie industry.
6
THE NEW NETWORKING
Now that you’ve got your calling card, it’s time to get it out there and into the hands of people who could hand you the leg up you’re looking for.
“But I don’t live in LA!” Well so what? It’s all about the internet these days.
The New Networking is Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and when you make a few friends in the industry, chat programs. Forget those Hollywood parties where you try to bump elbows with Spielberg and Michael Bay. These days, you become an internet celebrity of some repute, you friend a bunch of other people trying to break in, and hopefully, somebody winds up riding somebody’s coattails.
Here’s how it’s done…
Put it on every video sharing site you can find. Some of these sites will even share some ad revenue with you, so even if you don’t “get discovered”, you might earn a little money here and there to tide you over.
Put your demo reel and your practice movies online and link everyone you possibly can to it through Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, every blog account you can get. Friend and subscribe to other accounts on the video sharing site.
Enter every video contest you can. Everyone is addicted to YouTube these days, including rich and powerful movie producers and directors, so you never know.
Will this guarantee your getting discovered? No. But, it will greatly increase your odds of getting there, and you’ll have an online portfolio to point towards when you get a chance to show it to the right people.
Of course, this might just wind up being the easy route. Some networks, distributors and production companies do take unsolicited submissions.
You can forget trying to get a major release in theatres through Universal by showing them the video you shot with your friends, but there are other options.
For example: Trema.
Trema Studios hardly pays anything at all for movies, but they do give everyone a chance. If all you want is to get your movie on DVD and in the homes of some die-hard fans, you can look at studios like Trema and other direct-to-DVD distributors and send each one a DVD of your work, and then see who can get you the best deal.
If you’re trying your hand at television, your “demo reel” can be a pilot for your own television series. Send it to the right people, and it might get picked up.
That’s how The Venture Brothers was made. It was animated in Flash and voiced by a cast almost entirely comprised of the creators’ friends and family, then sent to Cartoon Network who picked it up.
If you want to try this, just be prepared to be shot down several times before anyone picks it up… And if your work is impressive, just too weird to be marketable to a wide audience, you might just not get picked up, ever.
In that case, you can just try again.
If you want to pitch something to a studio or a network, just make sure you have something to show. A network is never going to sign you to a contract and pick you up for a season based on an idea alone. In fact, they might not even want to hear your idea for fear of liability issues. But a professional looking pilot for an animated series or a half hour drama shows them that, for one, you’re serious, and two, that if they don’t pick you up, somebody else will.
Again, it’s all about SOCIAL networking. That’s why the call them SOCIAL networking sites, after all.
If you want to get a lot of people watching your demo reel, your practice movies, listening to your music, then the trick is really to go out there and pick up new fans one at a time.
As you get more and more people following you on these sites, your visibility will only snowball. If you add ten friends, then ten of their friends might see you, ten of their friends might see you, and ten of their friends might see you.
Think of it like investing money, but you’re investing in your audience. By putting a paycheck into an investment where you can double your money, then putting your earnings back into that same investment and so on, you eventually have a nice little retirement fund. Same goes with finding people online to friend. The more friends and followers you get, the easier you’ll find it to make more friends and followers. Here’s what you can do to increase your social networking visibility…
· Friend a LOT of people.
· Comment on a lot of posts on Facebook.
· Reply to comments on your own account.
· Comment in highly visible accounts.
· Stay relevant, friend people because of similar interests or people will see you as just another Twitter-marketer.
· Sign up for every blog out there and cross-post your entries.
· Post everything you got through your blogs and social sites. Even that little thirty second film you’re not too proud of might really wow the right people.
· Check your stuff every day. You don’t need to check it every hour on the hour, but at least once a day.
· Post regularly. If you go a week without posting, you risk people removing you for lack of new content.
· Stay focused. Keep putting your videos, music, whatever on your accounts, don’t let it devolve into just another “How my day went” blog.
Now, there’s no guarantee that this will have you eventually getting your work onto Jerry Bruckheimer’s Firefox browser, but, at the very least, you might meet some like minded artists in your area and pool your resources. You should look at everyone you meet online as a potential path to success, because you never know when that band you friended is going to get a record contract and need a video director. You never know when that aspiring actor is going to get their big break and be willing to attach themselves to your project so you can get some studio interest. Everyone is a potential professional contact.
7
SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION
We’ve talked about networking, submitting pilots or films you made yourself for potential airing and distribution, but we haven’t really gotten into how to really promote yourself.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SELF PROMOTION
· Act like you’re the next big thing. Whether or not it’s true.
· Study your market.
· Don’t worry about being crass!
· Making yourself marketable is nothing to be ashamed of.
· Have a full package in mind.
· Know the identity you’re trying to put forth.
· Everyone is a potential fan, but you should…
· Know your demographic.
· Keep networking!
· Do somebody a favour (more on this later).
Acting like you’re the next big thing means… well, you’ve heard of Cosmic Wishing, right? Yeah, it doesn’t work. But the general idea behind it is essentially true: If you act like what you want to be for long enough, you eventually become what you’re pretending to be.
This doesn’t mean that acting like some big star, some prima donna, will see fortune and fame falling right into your lap (in fact, most celebrities who act like celebrities don’t remain celebrities for long, since nobody wants to work with them). Rather, if you promote yourself as if you’re already a popular film director/musician/makeup artist/whatever, then eventually, that will become true.
Lil’ Wayne is one of the biggest rappers around. Why are we talking about Lil’ Wayne in the context of getting involved in the production of film and television? Well, because he’s simply one of the all-time great masters of self promotion.
Ten years ago, Lil’ Wayne was part of a rap label, the Cash Money Millionaires. They sold their share of albums, but they weren’t really considered The Best of the Best. In fact, they would often be used as the punch line to any joke about rappers with shallow lyrical content and a lack of great mic skills!
Lil’ Wayne was one of the more talented rappers on the label, but was Just Another Rapper, for the most part. His first solo album made modest sales, but nobody expected him to ever get as big as he is now.
So, what changed for him?
Well, in interviews, he started calling himself the greatest rapper of all time.
When rap fans talk about “The greatest of all time”, that’s usually a title bestowed upon rappers like Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. by diehard fans. Wayne decided to simply self-apply that title, and… well it’s up to the individual listener as to whether it’s true, but the fact is that it made a big splash in the hip hop world.
Some people bought it hook, line and sinker (mostly younger rap fans, not old enough to remember Eric B and Rakim or 2Pac), older rap fans took offense and contested Wayne’s brazen approach to self promotion.
But the bottom line is that he got people talking about him. Online, in the magazines, at the clubs. People were talking about Lil’ Wayne. Love him or hate him, this is how he got to be one of the biggest rappers out there.
The end results. Wayne now has more than a few platinum records on his wall, he makes millions a year, and some people do consider him the greatest rapper alive.
With one sentence in an interview, Lil’ Wayne managed to promote himself more than millions of dollars in advertising and a big-budget MTV video ever could.
So, what we’re saying here is: Be Bold. Don’t be sheepish, don’t be shy about promoting yourself. Study your market, know who you’re trying to sell to, and don’t be afraid of coming across as a little crass, because nothing makes you more noticeable than a nice dose of controversy.
This is all well and good, but a controversial statement in a random Twitter account is no big deal. If you want to be able to really promote yourself, you must… well, you must get “internet famous” first, right?
So how do you do that?
We could give you some wishy-washy advice on how you may or may not be able to get there, on how it will come to you if you just make good content for the web, but let’s get into some real, practical advice here. Advice that is almost guaranteed to work.
Obviously, you want to provide good content, and you’ll probably do so with a video on YouTube or Reviver. So, the question is: How do you make a video go viral? Well, you can experiment and try your own ideas out, because you never know what will hit it big, but here are some things that do tend to garner a lot of views…
· Cute kittens and babies. Maybe this doesn’t have much to do with what you want to do for a living, but you could always use a video of puppies wrestling to lead people to your channel so they can check out your other videos from there.
· Star Wars. Yep, Star Wars. In fact, parodies of any big movie, song or cultural event can really help to bring in viewers. A fan film or a parody song, even a vlog review can really get a lot of views.
· Shorter videos. There are no ten-minute viral videos. In fact, most are less than a minute long. People want something they can comfortably watch on their iPhone while fixing their coffee at work or in the bathroom. When editing your video, cut out whatever you can to keep it as short as possible. The shorter the better.
· Politics. Nothing stirs people up like politics. If you have something to say, say it in a song, or a video, or a comic, or whatever you want to use to say it. You’ll probably have just as many fans as you do critics, but the fact remains: People love talking politics.
· Video games. If you look at a list of the most popular web series, most of them revolve around video games, like Red vs. Blue or The Angry Video Game Nerd. Most of the internet generation is comprised of gamers.
· How-to videos. Everyone loves learning bar tricks, they look up cooking videos, they look up videos on how to repair a car, how to defend themselves in a fight, even useless stuff like how to rip a phone book in half. People love how-to videos. In fact, consider this eBook you’re reading. You ever notice that almost all eBooks have “how to…” in the title? How-to videos get a lot of views, so whatever you can do that most people can’t, use it to bring in the viewers.
Now to be clear, none of these tips GUARANTEE a million views overnight, but they are all based on what tends to work.
Maybe you don’t want to do how-to videos, maybe you have no interest in video games, but there should be at least one point on that list that matches up with your interests, so give it a try. The guys who made Chad Vader have managed to make a living off their videos, most of which have nothing to do with Star Wars, simply because of Chad Vader.
If you want to market yourself, you must be marketable. If you think that’s too crass, too “pop”, if you think it makes you a sell out and you just don’t have any interests in common with the public, then… Well, there’s a place for you in the art house theatres, but making a living on your craft, making a living in entertainment, means finding what you have in common with the people who are consuming that entertainment.
Of course, whatever you like, there are other people who like it, too, and there’s an audience for everything, just… some audiences are bigger than others.
8
DOING FAVORS
If you want to get your big break through a “friend in the business”, it starts with doing favours. No, not other people doing favours for you, but you are doing favours for them.
Even though we talked about promoting yourself by acting bigger than you are, that doesn’t mean you can’t also be humble, helpful, and gracious. In fact, those are kind of the keywords, here as we get into the concept of Industry Karma…
No matter how talented you are, right now, in terms of your status in Hollywood… you’re just some random person, honestly. Talent alone doesn’t get you hired. Talent gets you started, but talent and status are what get you hired.
So “be humble” means… the first job you’re offered, don’t be picky, don’t be a prima donna about it. You’re not going to make six figures on your first gig.
In fact, most people start out by doing work for free on smaller projects. When you’re new to the industry, the prospect of getting your name on IMDB, getting your special effects company on the end credits of a movie that makes it into Sundance is, at this point, a lot more valuable than the money.
Whether you’re a cinematographer, a director, a writer, or an editor, at this point, getting your name out there is the most important thing. Donate your services to any promising indie project you can hook up with, work as an assistant or an apprentice to someone who’s already made it and thinks you show promise, work at lower rates for smaller productions.
Don’t bother thinking you can make it big by becoming an assistant to the needy celebrities on the sets of big movies or pulling cables, but you CAN get there by doing what you want to do in an entry level position.
Just because you’re doing people favours by working for free or at lower rates at this point doesn’t mean you shouldn’t really put your heart into it. Your early work is kind of like your job interview. Now, if you’ve ever had a job interview before, then you know that you put your best foot forward right up front, and you don’t start slacking until you’ve already been hired!
But in all seriousness, if you start slacking now, if you show up late and put in a weak effort, then who’s going to look at your demo reel and say, “Yeah let’s hire this kid!”? If you’re a cinematographer and you keep getting bored with the action onscreen and pointing the camera at passing trains and birds, that might go over in France as avant-garde cinema, but it’s not going to do you any favours in Hollywood.
Being helpful doesn’t just mean putting in a half-hearted effort until you get rich and famous, being helpful means being just as professional on a no-budget set as you would be on a multi-million-dollar production.
Here’s the core concept of this chapter: Favours go UP the ladder, first. This is how industry karma is built.
If you’ve done dozens of projects for free and still no call from Mister Spielberg on becoming his new director of photography, then… do a dozen more projects for free.
It takes a lot of hard work, but that’s how it goes: You keep grinding away at the lower level of show business, you keep doing people favours, and sooner or later, someone does you a favour.
It may seem like a lot of work for little pay off, since it really is something like a 100:1 ratio for favours you’re doing compared to favours being done for you, but remember, all you need is the one favour.
Maybe you’ve been directing videos for free for a dozen local bands for the last few years, but all you need is one of them to hit it big and keep you along as their video director. All you need is for that casting director you met at a party to show your script to one of their industry friends. One favour coming down the ladder can go a long way.
So be gracious, and if you have a friend who can possibly give you a leg up, someone who’s cousins with a famous director or whose uncle happens to produce movies, don’t nag them about it. When the opportunity comes, they’ll know what to do.
Karma is very real in the industry, and if you write a script for a local director, if you compose music for free for a short film, and if you make sure to cast a wide net when it comes to handing favours out, all it takes is one favour coming down the ladder to get you you’re “in”.
9
MAKING YOUR WAY OUTSIDE OF L.A.
Traditionally, you really had to live in Los Angeles or New York if you wanted to make it in film in the US. Now, that’s not the case at all. You can get into the business no matter where you are.
If you want to up and move to Los Angeles, that’s your prerogative, but let’s list the advantages…
· You’re closer to the industry and surrounded by potential industry contacts.
Now let’s list the disadvantages…
· You’re just a small fish in a big pond, and there are millions of other people in L.A. competing against you for the same jobs.
· Most celebrities in L.A. are tired of talking to wannabe directors and moguls and won’t give you the time of day.
· L.A. culture is incredibly shallow and more about pop star celebrity than it is about film as art.
· L.A. is covered by a thick layer of smog, and the whole city has a weird smell to it.
· If you try to make a movie in L.A., chances are everyone there will be too busy with their own projects to help you out.
· If you DO manage to make a movie, nobody will care, because everybody makes movies in L.A.
· Classic Hollywood is dead and gone.
· There will be a homeless person asking you for change on the corner of every block.
· You’re incredibly likely to get mugged, and if you do make it big, you’ll only be a bigger target.
· You’ll have to fight it out with the TMZ crew to get close to any film industry people.
· Los Angeles is incredibly expensive, with apartments costing more than twice as much per month as similar apartments just a few cities away.
We could go on and on, but the point is that the advantages of living in Los Angeles can mostly be chalked up to myth, and even then, they don’t outweigh the disadvantages of living in L.A.
So how do you make it in movies without moving to L.A.? Wait, haven’t you been paying attention all this time?
You can get into the movie business or television through the internet, of course!
Sure, if you ever do get the opportunity you’re looking for, you might have to go out to Los Angeles for business trips, but really, because anyone can post a movie online, network online and stay in touch with business contacts through e-mail and chat, there’s really no reason to go to L.A. until you’ve already made it. You may as well live somewhere inexpensive, somewhere you like, somewhere you have friends or family, and just make your own movies and work on your own projects there. Be a big fish in a small pond, not a small fish in a big pond.
10
WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS: SELF DISTRIBUTION
So, you’ve been plugging away for years now, doing favours for every other wannabe director and producer you can find. You’ve recorded hundreds of hours of music or stunt demos or film projects, and still, nobody’s offering you money for your work.
Okay, here’s the secret we’ve been trying to hold in for the last nine chapters, here’s the real trick to getting your foot in the door, to making a living doing what you love. Are you ready for it? Here it is…
Ten or twenty years ago, you had to figure out how to “get your foot in the door”. Today, anyone who wants to distribute their own movies or music or… whatever, can do it for free, AND make money on it.
If you can get a job directing films with multi-million-dollar budgets, more power to you. That kind of security and those studio resources can be a big help in bringing your vision to life. If you just signed a contract with Universal to compose, write, provide stunt coordination or special effects for a major motion picture, awesome. That’s a heck of a paycheck, and you can even retire on it if you’re careful.
But regardless, you must accept that sometimes, no matter what you do, you might never get your “big break”. Sure, if you keep grinding away, you greatly improve your odds, but it does take just a bit of luck for it to happen.
So, what you must acknowledge is this: You don’t need a big break to make it big. You don’t need anyone’s help, and you can make a living on your work entirely on your lonesome if you need to.
This could easily become one of those wishy washy, ambiguous self-help tomes about believing in yourself. We could easily tell you to stay positive without giving you any real, useful, practical advice, but we won’t.
Instead, we’ll provide you with a few business plans that you can make work for you.
We can’t list every possible business plan because, for one, we don’t have the space in this text, but more importantly, they haven’t all been explored yet. Right now, an all-new film industry is booming on the web, and people just like you are still trying to figure out exactly how it’s done. Who knows? You might be the first movie mogul of this new generation of film.
So here are a few ideas you might want to try out…
If you want to get your music into movies, here’s something you can try which has been proven to help a few musicians pay the bills…
· Write a ton of music. Just lock yourself in your studio and record, record, record. Record music of all different genres, all different tempos, all different styles and instruments. Try to play all the instruments yourself, if you can, because you’re making money here, and you probably don’t want to divvy it up four ways.
· Take the music and divide it up into albums by theme. You can decide what these themes are. Maybe you have one album full of fast paced songs, another with slower songs, others with mid-tempo songs. Or maybe you have your electronic album, your four-piece rock band album, and your symphonic album. But divide them up into ten to twenty songs per album.
· Start a website or a blog, and sell these CDs as “library music”, so if a director or producer wants to buy them, they not only buy the CD (or a digital download), but they’re also buying the rights to use it in the movie.
This business model helps in a few ways. First, you retain the rights to the music, the director or producer only has the right to use it in their projects. This means you have equity. You have something you can keep selling and selling and selling, you don’t have to go from job to job.
Second, the more people hear your music in the movies that use them, the more people will be coming to buy the music for themselves. Look, licensing music is expensive, and most library music is awful! So, if you can provide great music for cheap, you can really make some money.
If you want to make feature films for a living, we’ll be square with you: It’s going to be tough. Most first-time filmmakers lose money on their first project.
HOWEVER! This is because most first-time filmmakers believe that pumping more and more money into a project will make it look more professional.
Not so.
Have you seen Crank, or Crank 2: High Voltage? Did you know that the primary camera used in both movies was a consumer grade camera? Wanni know how much it cost. Less than a thousand bucks.
And that was a few years ago. You could find one now on an auction site for half that.
The main thing that makes a movie look cheap is that you can tell it was shot on video, so most directors think you can make a professional looking film by shooting on film, which will cost you five figures just to film a feature, never mind the budget of what you’re putting on film, the film stock alone will cost you more than you make in a year.
So, get a good video camera. If you’re shooting on standard definition or old mini-DV, that’s great for your practice movies, that’s great if you’re shooting for YouTube, but everyone has an HDTV now, so if you can, get yourself a nice HD camera.
Don’t spend a fortune, just get one that you can attach a few lenses to.
You can edit the movie on your computer, and here’s where some more money saving tricks come in.
Let’s talk about Crank again. All the aerial photography for that film was grabbed from Google Earth. Seriously, watch the movie, and you’ll even see the Google Earth logo!
You don’t have to use Google Earth for aerial shots, but you need to be thinking about your movie in that way.
Wanni make an epic sci-fi film? Well, did you know that all the footage belonging to NASA is one hundred percent free to use in film projects? So, if you paint a wall of your bedroom green or if you’re handy with CGI, you can film epic space battles using real footage from space.
Stock footage can really help you keep costs down. If you’re creative, you could create an entire film with nothing but stock footage. You wouldn’t be the first. Heck, look at Woody Allen’s What’s Up Tiger Lilly? it’s a Japanese spy movie that he dubbed with original dialog.
Wondering where you’ll get the rights to a movie to redub or harvest stock footage from? Did you know that Night of the Living Dead is public domain? So is just about every film from the silent era.
If possible, get your budget down to zero dollars flat for your first movie, because your first movie is probably going to be done at your own cost.
Now, how are you going to get it out there?
· Post it on a video sharing site that gives content providers a cut of the revenue.
· Shop it around to direct-to-DVD distributors.
· Offer it for paid download via a website with trailers put up all over the web.
· Get some DVDs printed and sell them through a website or at a local screening at the coffee shop or library.
Okay, the truth is, it’s still a wild frontier out there, and feature films are hard to sell on the web. The main thing you must look forward to when you finish a feature is having a DVD of your own film on your shelf, and having something to show to anyone who wants to see if you’re any good.
Some practical advice, though: If you want to make a little money on your movie, then study your market and know your demographic. Genres that tend to do well when not released directly to theatres include, in order from most popular to least: Horror, comedy, action and kids’ movies. Sci-fi is generally seen as risky, but you might hit it big if you put out the right project.
Netflix has begun buying up original independent films, so the market is changing, and soon, you might just be able to make a living making features for the web. Until then, if you want something that’s a little easier to make a living on…
We’ve referred to video sharing websites that split the ad revenue with the content providers. We haven’t listed many by name simply because the market there is still expanding and changing, and the one we recommend right now might not be one of the best tomorrows, so you’ll want to do some research on your own.
But the bottom line is this: Anyone can create a great viral video that gets, at least, a few thousand videos. If you post those videos on a site that splits ad revenue with you fifty, just one penny a view can earn you a little spending cash.
On the other hand, if you can create a popular web series where you’re getting hundreds of thousands of views every episode, you can easily make a living on that.
Look at the Angry Video Game Nerd. He films himself cussing at a Nintendo for a few hours a month and makes a very, very comfortable living on ad revenue. BUT! He also sells t-shirts and DVDs!
There are three points to a successful web series…
· They can be longer than viral videos, but the most popular web series tend to be ten minutes per episode or less.
· Keep people wanting more. A series of short films won’t work it has to be a real series.
· Most successful web series have been non-fiction, something like a review show or a vlog, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hit it big with fiction, just so long as you tap into something people like.
Here’s a business model you can use to help yourself stumble upon a popular web series: Create several pilots, like half a dozen. Whichever one gets the most views, make a second episode. If it keeps getting more views, keep making episodes. When it stops getting a lot of views, cancel it, and make six more pilots.
Sooner or later, even if it takes a year, you’ll stumble upon something that works, so just keep grinding away.
When all’s said and done, the one thing you need to keep in mind is this: Never quit. Never, never, never quit. Some people say you need to stop trying when it stops being fun, and to an extent, that’s true. But if it’s your passion, you should never stop feeling a rush at a finished project, you should always be able to feel that initial joy you felt when you first pulled your camera out of the box and smelled the new plastic. Keep at it and sooner or later, you’ll find a way to get paid just to do what you love.
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