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It's never easy. We all know that. Fiscally speaking, the life of the independent digital filmmaker is about as rewarding as playing the lottery. Week in and week out we take chances, quietly hoping that this gig or project or music video could be the winning ticket to a staggering amount of dollar signs. In reality, most of us will never reach the lifestyles of the rich and famous. And that's okay. We're artists after all. What's not okay is not learning to cope with all the in-between stages, which makes up about 90% of our life. It's the the day-to-day, the hustle, the grind. I usually try to avoid the cliche "tough skin" speech but it's getting harder and harder to soften it up for peers today. To succeed--and by succeed I mean, to stay (somewhat) gainfully employed AND creatively challenged--in this niche business of passions, you need to have a killer instinct. Yes, some days are better than others but everyday that you wake up you're ...

One of the special features on the DVD of Jean-Luc Godard's Week End (New Yorker Video label) is a short interview with director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas). Halfway through the interview, after pointing out the iconic and technical significance of Godard's body of work, Figgis makes a fascinating aside: Godard's recent reaffirmation as a "modern" filmmaker is a direct result of his singular commitment to expressing a cavalcade of ideas without ever giving his audience a shred of attention or consideration. In short, Godard was the uber-artist for employing tunnel vision in his approach to the medium. Yes, he was a philosopher and a technical wizard in the art of filmmaking. But audience engagement was the last thing on his mind. Godard never aimed to capitalize on a single idea or selling point--he wanted to avoid making industries of such things. So you can see why I sat up and panicked. It's December of 2011. The new year is days away. Furthe...

"Piracy is great." - Harmony Korine Last week Facebook pissed off a lot of its users, detractors and indifferent site visitors when it introduced its new feature : the "Timeline." As if privacy was erased yesterday, a good chunk of Internet bloggers questioned the ethos behind having one's entire life available in a social media platform. But am I missing something? Aren't we over the whole privacy hump already? Are people still under the spell of attaining some romantic mystery? These people need to get with it. This is OUR era: An open, free network of information, ideas and innovation. Non-transparent walls are not welcomed.   Facebook isn't doing anything it wasn't bound to do anyway. A massive social network that spent years building a base of active users HAS to raise the level of access and interactivity at some point. The only logical way of doing this is by highlighting and exercising the key trait of every user (and of every...

"I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick." - Maya Deren There is a negative sentiment shared by some in the industry these days toward the term "DIY": For those individuals, going DIY can be a precursor to failure . Of course, that kind of connotation doesn't benefit anyone of us who are plugging away at our own DIY endeavors. As DIY filmmakers, we're prone to suffering. We can take it. This was never going to be easy. Besides, whoever said that the DIY mindset/route was the ticket to becoming a conglomerate movie-producing titan? Or that anyone of us could become blockbuster filmmakers? The line in the sand needs to be drawn. DIY, at its core, is the lifestyle of the true independent artist. It's about risking life and limb (and that's not an exaggeration) to attain a truly fulfilling work-flow of creating engaging and valid content, without compromise. And if we can somehow leverage today's new media tools ...

  There have always been the core ingredients behind the act of storytelling but as we propel wildly into the new media age of digital storytelling, we're seeing that most of the dialogue among content creators moves away from the storytelling fundamentals and more towards brass tax questions like--why aren't we making money at this? An interesting thing has happened among the independents. For the first time--at least in my lifetime--we're seeing more of a gap between seasoned mentors and hungry apprentices in our workplace. The democratization of film has left up and coming indie filmmakers to become more cavalier and guerrilla; these days the indie industry resembles a volatile landscape packed with hungry and desperate artists.  On the other hand, seasoned industry pros seem to have become blindsided by the digital revolution, not knowing what to make of the fall of print journalism, the demise of regional film criticism and the introduction of non-traditional...

A common oversight in our creative field is the curation of GOOD or STIMULATING content. Social media platforms like Vimeo give us all megaphones that can sometimes create more white noise in our arena; this can hinder the validity of an emerging new wave of indie filmmaking because there is such a high flux of content coming and going. The bottom line is that most online content (video, film) is quite bad. And not bad in an intentionally volatile or spiteful way. It's just that everyone is putting everything online. So where do you go? How do you compete with the dancing cat videos when your content is a 7-minute silent film? The key is going to be in the "micro"-curation among the independents . It's going to involve some meticulous cross-promotion of engaging or interesting works by our peers. This is harder than it sounds. The reason is that much of our time is already dedicated to actually creating content and then promoting ourselves as branded entities o...

In the wake of a tepid  Oscar  telecast and the mass media channels becoming flooded with fashion and gossip centered content, I thought I'd point my fellow indie filmmakers to some powerful words. They come in  Steven Soderbergh 's concise and stirring acceptance speech from winning the  Best Director  Oscar for  Traffic . To this day, it remains one of the more memorable speeches and  reaffirms the validity of our artistic drive .

The need for neoauteurs is great. Probably more needed than ever. And not for conventional reasons of industry argument either (e.g. to exist as the antidote to such Tinseltown dreck as Avatar or The Ugly Truth ) but because this recent democratization of film has given birth to a wave of faux novice filmmakers who are more in love with their camera--and not their content. Our indie cinema needs more narrative risk takers and more artists challenging our perception of the world. I'm not saying that there aren't any neoauteurs around right now but with filmmaking 2.0 being available at every corner, it seems that now is the most opportune time to really experiment with conventional form, delivery and method . A few years back a colleague of mine, James Choi , managed to get a few questions in with one of my favorite filmmakers Harmony Korine down at the SXSW Festival. It's a gem of an interview because Korine plays his usual role as a subtle prankster, challen...