Filmmaking / Directing

That's an interesting opportunity, and the focus on helping filmmakers retain ownership while accessing distribution is a significant advantage over traditional deals that often require giving up rights. What's the most important thing you've learned about distribution that you wish you'd known before you started looking for platforms?

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Abhijeet Aade hi again, Abhijeet. I think maybe indie filmmakers could still work to an indie budget in a natural setting, by using expansive landscapes.

As Samantha Rivera said, Denis Villeneuve has the knack of making a massive scale feel intimate, I think because he shows the characters in intimate settings.

It seems that the Studios have found a new market with IMAX cinemas. I can see an increase in the construction of more IMAX theatres, and owned by them.

I’m just wondering what it costs to use IMAX cameras on a production, instead of digital format cameras?

It's certain. :)

Opening weekend projection is $200 to $300 M for "...Doomsday" with $100 M for "Dune Part 3." That's a lot of total ducats to rake in over a weekend.

E Langley sadly there’s only one IMAX theatre in my city/region. We still haven’t been able to purchase tickets for it. It’s still sold out!

Life's a bitch and then you die.

Aggretsuko. It takes place primarily in an office with all the politics you’d expect and Retsuko is all of us who work and deal with the bullshit of adulthood lol

And if I’m allowed to toot my own horn, a big part of Metal Garden is the titular business. I tapped into my real-life experiences working a small business.

Waiting, Office Space and Succession all exhibited some true insight to the absurdities of the work place. I have worked in each environment portrayed in these pieces and part of their genius is nailing some of the subtle but so accurate situations.

I've definitely had to cut out scenes while writing plays in the past. Some scenes just seem irrelevant so I end up cutting them out. It also sometimes takes me a few years to write an ending. Sometimes I even feel like I'll go back to one of my screenplays and write even more because it feels like the journey of the character isn't finished. Sometimes I'll reuse the character in another play so the character can grow in that story. I think I have a problem with writing stakes into a play. At least I can't write high stakes into a play, maybe low stakes. I rarely put any characters into life or death situations.

@ Jeniffer Cole This is such an important point. Many writers try to fix a screenplay by adding more, when the real solution is often understanding what is already there and identifying what is missing.

I think character motivation is one of the hardest things to diagnose because when a protagonist’s goal and emotional journey are unclear, it affects structure, pacing, and even the ending.

A strong rewrite is not always about expanding the story, but about making every scene and choice serve a clear purpose.

The hardest problem to diagnose is often structure, because it requires stepping back from individual scenes to look at the overall shape of the story. What's the most common structural issue you've found in your own scripts?

Haley Mary Absolutely, Cutting scenes can be difficult, especially when you like a scene on its own, but if it isn't moving the character or story forward, removing it can strengthen everything around it.

Debra Withley Exactly, I think that diagnostic stage is where many rewrites become much more effective. Before changing anything, it helps to identify whether the problem is actually structural, character-based, or simply a matter of scenes not doing enough work.

Emil Soliman This is such an interesting question. I think the strongest true stories are built around emotional truth first. Audiences connect with the feelings, choices, struggles, and transformation of the characters, even when certain events are adapted for the screen.

Debra Withley, I completely agree. Emotional truth is what I want to protect most when adapting Beyond the Five Senses. The events may need to be shaped for cinema, but the feelings, choices, struggles, and transformation behind them must remain authentic. Thank you for sharing such a thoughtful perspective.

If you are developing your own, you’re probably too close to it to evolve the drama in a way to best make it dramatic in a cinematic sense. The expression ‘based on true events’ may assist and let somebody else have a pop at the script?

Hope this helps because it’s a difficult dilemma for you. Good luck.

Emil Soliman I approach real-life adaptations by first identifying what I would call the story's emotional spine the central experience, conflict, and transformation that make the story worth telling.

From there, I separate the material into what is essential to that spine and what is supporting material. I look at the key relationships, turning points, internal conflicts, and moments that changed the character, then build the screenplay structure around those elements. That helps determine which events need to remain intact, which can be condensed or combined, and where chronology can be adjusted without compromising the underlying truth.

I also think the adaptation needs to work as a screenplay on its own. Even when the audience knows the story is based on real events, they should experience tension, progression, discovery, and emotional payoff rather than simply watching a sequence of things that happened.

With a story spanning Egypt, Italy, and Spain, I imagine there is a lot of rich material to work with. The challenge would be choosing the moments that give the audience the clearest emotional journey through all those experiences.

historically accurate is important to the story, emotional truth shuts down the story and makes it one of those, you want to make a movie. This is your thing make it. Cinematic experience better have a lot of both of those things you talked about, for an example a biopic. If it is just filming real life then this is where you need to seek other projects like Euphoria for instance where the truth didn't matter as much as what was felt.

Excellent continuation of the series. I especially appreciate the emphasis on physicality, subtext, timing, and vocal control. These elements show how much an actor communicates beyond the words on the page and how performance can add depth to the storytelling.

The point about subtext particularly stands out when an actor understands what a character is feeling but not saying, it can make a scene much more powerful and authentic. Looking forward to the next article on your definition of good acting.

Great breakdown, especially the subtext point on Anton Chigurh, that's a good reminder that the best performances usually start on the page, not just on set. An actor can only convey subtext, physicality, and vocal texture if the script actually builds room for it, if every emotion is spelled out in dialogue or action lines, there's nothing left for the actor to discover or perform underneath the words.

That's something I think about a lot as a screenwriter and script editor, writing scenes that trust actors with silence, restraint, and implication rather than over-explaining intention. A script that gives an actor like Bardem material to work with isn't accidental, it's built into how the scene is constructed. If you're working on a script and want a pass focused on making sure your scenes give actors that kind of room to perform rather than just deliver lines, I'd be glad to help.

I understand what you mean, Dwayne Williams, and data provenance is definitely something worth being aware of.

When I call Nika fictional, I mean that she was not created from, named after, or intentionally based on any identifiable real child. I’m not suggesting that the technology itself exists independently of whatever data was used to develop the underlying model.

And I actually agree with your second point - that’s very close to why I opened this discussion.

The experience has shown me how vulnerable a production becomes when too much of the workflow depends on one platform. If that platform changes and you don’t have another technical route to achieve the same result, suddenly the project itself is at risk.

Thank you, Karolina Ferguson. That’s exactly the problem I’m facing, Nika isn’t a minor detail I can simply replace or redesign halfway through the film. She is the emotional center of SPEAK FOR ME, so continuity matters a lot.

And yes, this has definitely changed the way I think about production planning with AI. From now on, I’ll be much more careful about having backup workflows before getting too deep into a project.

I’m still hoping I can find a way forward without compromising what the film is supposed to be.

That’s a fair distinction, Mike Boas.

What I mean is that Nika is "not based on any specific real child or actor". Her appearance was generated from scratch within the AI workflow rather than created from photographs or the likeness of an identifiable person.

So yes - “fictional character” describes the story role, but not the production distinction very precisely. “AI-generated original character” or “synthetic character not based on a real person” is probably closer to what I’m trying to say.

Thanks for pointing that out.

Exactly, Realt Grace. That’s the distinction I was trying to make.

I support strong safety rules, especially where minors are concerned. What caught me off guard was building most of a film around a workflow that was functioning consistently, only to discover that the same workflow could suddenly become unavailable.

It’s definitely a lesson in production dependency. For future projects, I’ll be thinking much more seriously about backup tools and alternate workflows before getting this deep into production.

Thanks! I’m still trying to find a way to finish SPEAK FOR ME without compromising the character or the continuity.

Give it to another AI

Hamza Mushtaq So I am going to answer honestly here, since you asked a serious question and I see no one else has responded. I will start with your last question:

• What would you improve before presenting the project to producers?

This is unacceptable commercially and cannot be fixed. You must start from scratch or not do it at all. Remember that visuals support story, not the other way round.

First, what are you trying to sell? Are you a writer selling scripts, or are you a producer trying to find financing and/or production partners? If you are a writer selling scripts, you need logline, synopsis and script. That's it. Maybe treatment if asked for. Everything else actually just adds more reasons for a buyer to object.

If you are trying to finance and produce this yourself, then something like a trailer may be useful, but again, financiers cannot unsee this and it has serious issues,

The basic story idea seems to be interesting.

The rest: The trailer displays all the problems and challenges of AI generated video. The visual styles move from quasi-photorealistic to cartoon to compositing both. Movement is unnatural and slow, character animation is unnatural, the AI narration is dull. The characters are generic. It feels very unfocused. In a piece less than three minutes long you are still introducing characters over a minute in. There seems to be two or three different stories. It is not commercial in any way.

If you really want a trailer, I would advise not trying to fix this, but starting over with a cohesive production design, good actors whether for live action or voice over, and only use AI for composited background plates, if at all.

Reshoots do not immediately mean "disaster". In fact, it's equally possible that reshoots will make the movie better. Maybe they're necessary because of something needing to be replaced onscreen. Maybe the script needed to change due to audience feedback. Really, the only way you'll know if it's "worth it" is what the audiences say afterwards. In fact, many times the budgets account for possible reshoots (thus acknowledging that it's a necessary possibility).

Re-shoots aren’t necessarily a sign of failure. Sometimes they’re simply part of discovering what the film actually needs once everything comes together. The real question is whether the additional time and money make the final film better.

I grew up in west Texas. It wasn't the end of the earth, but you could see it from there. My film school was small town theatres, drive-in movies, television (black & white, of course), and an affiliation as an actor in a community theatre. My parents saw to it that I got exposure to Broadway shows, many of which became movies. We have a large collection of movies that kept us entertained during the COVID pandemic. Growing up, art imitated life. That seems to be reversing somewhat, but I continue to look for those films that evoke real feelings. So, as many readers of this will have guessed, I am so old that I can remember when sex was dirty, and the air was clean. Regards == Barry

I had an unusual route. I went to film school, but studied dramatic writing. So I got a lot of story theory and the language of cinema, but no production whatsoever. I also got a lot of schooling by watching westerns and war movies with my father, classic story structure. I only later went to production school by working on sets. My first time producing, I'd never been on a set before. Trial by fire, but eventually I did every job on a set except for hair and makeup. Rough way to learn, but man has it helped me as a filmmaker.

I grew up in Appalachia in the 1970s and got interested in films at an early age through the old and more recent movies constantly being shown in television. Our local public library had a collection of 8mm home films from a company called Blackhawk of old silent Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and DW Griffith films that I checked out regularly and studied on our cheap home movie projector. I couldn't really afford movie film, so I would do "remixes" of films I recorded off of television with a hand-me-down 1960s reel to reel tape recorder, reediting the movies to tell a different story or combining different movies together.

In college, I majored in Public and Applied History, focusing on media history and film courses, hoping to work in an archives, but I needed a graduate degree for that. After college, I was laid off from my job because of the crappy Gulf War economy, which ended my intentions of saving up money to go to grad school.

So, my "hands on" film school, was going in debt on my credit card and independently shooting and editing three feature-length documentaries, editing them on a primitive desktop computer digital video editing system I assembled from scratch. My first documentary was the first feature-length digital video work completely edited and output from Adobe Premiere and I worked with a beta tester for Adobe to pull it together.

I eventually went to work in a university, teaching faculty how to improve their own teaching. On a practical level, I was able to use the skills I learned in filmmaking to help faculty when the started creating video for their own courses (and eventually for streaming classes) starting in the early 2000s.

I kept up screenwriting and researching and writing about film and broadcast tv/radio history as a hobby. Now that I'm retired, I'm focusing on some screenplays and tv pilots I've developed the past few years.

Great post mine goes back to 1984 my brother had an old cine camara and we made a film ( The Golden Wheel) we only had a 7 min real , it was a Bruce Lee stlye action and had to do it all with my brother in law filming, my sister doing the sound effects eg. gun shots using a live 12 bore shotgun and my brother and me doing the action, all on our family farm where we grew up, we did put a copy on video years ago, fast forward to 2 years ago I wrote my first novel ( Echoes of Atlantis The Legacy of the Gods) and decided to make a film version using the latest technology and a lot of AI, I made a 30min film also called ( Echoes of Atantis The Legacy of the Gods) but have had to cut a lot out of the book to get it down to 30 mins, it's now doing the film festival circuit in 12 festivals around the world , but waiting to hear if it gets selected by them for a screening between now and August 2027. will definaitely make more films and more books in the future .

Kind of All 3 My Film School was DVD stores, Theater Backstage working, Personally Connecting with Associates and Co Directors before beginning to work for guidance, Film Making Institutions were 0.001%