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Ask a Studio Head How To Get Into the Movie Business
Larry Meistrich started making movies with next to no money. He's the founder and chairman of NEHST Studios, "a diversified film production, financing and distribution company" that opened its doors in May, 2007. As the above links show, Larry is a serious expert on the inner workings of the movie and TV production business, with a long string of production successes on his resume. Ask him whatever you like. Usual interview rules apply. And who knows? Maybe NEHST will finance your next movie.
Is there way to get your movie to "go big" without doing this fourth step and not starting with a big budget?
yes.
0 - find and get 16mm film camera and lenses. 35mm is better. shoot on this video will NOT get you in the big festivals.
1 - have a GOOD and INNOVATIVE script. (most important)
2 - get good actors for free.
2.5 - get a good DP for free.
3 - get a good editor for free.
4 - show movie to dentists and other rich people that wish to do the things that rich people do and get them to front you the cash to get the film printed and copied
5- get accepted and played at big festivals.
that is how you do that.
El Marachi and Blair witch are your examples of how the above was done.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I once recall a story(not sure how true) about Robert Heinlein being tired of being asked "how do I become a writer?". His answer was always along the lines of Write something. Finish it. Sent it to a publisher and see if they will publish it. Repeat.
If you start doing compositing more heavily, I recommend downloading the Personal Learning Edition of Fusion. It's a great way to migrate to a node based (rather than a layer based like After Effects) interface (http://www.eyeonline.com/) and it's fully featured and relatively cheap compared to some of the other solutions out there. Also fully featured, but now unsupported, is Shake, but I always found Shake to be a lot less user friendly- but Apple keeps slashing the price on a license so it's getting very, very cheap.
Major post houses and smaller post houses don't really look for part time people unless you're an old hand. Smaller post houses especially can't afford that, as the smaller number of people means everyone has to wear more hats and do generally more jobs.
Now, what sounds ideal for you right now is to find a small company that specializes in corporate videos/weddings etc. Every now and then some kind of effects shot comes up (it might be changing the logo on a jet, doing a quick green screen comp to place the CEO inside an architectural model of their new building, etc) when those shots aren't there, you could do motion graphic design work (DVD menus, titles, lower thirds, etc). This is pretty much the path I took.
What kind of engineering are you studying? System administrators are always needed, programmers are always needed, people who can write complex shaders for 3d work are always needed.. etc etc. At a smaller house, someone who can do those tasks AND composite are very valuable- more valuable than a person who just does one thing. A larger house on the other hand, is going to have more use for someone who only does something like that. For Speed Racer, Digital Domain spent a long, long time just researching how to render 3d cars correctly and built a bunch of new stuff for it.
Wish you luck.
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