The Complete Idiot's Guide to Independent Filmmaking

Introduction

When I was in college, my best friend and I would daydream—usually during class—about running away from school and making movies in Hollywood. At the time, we thought that the only way to become filmmakers was to go to LA and work our way up through the system. For two rural college kids, filmmaking remained a fantasy, impossible because movie-making seemed too big, too expensive, too far away, and too scary.

A few years after graduation, I realized that I didn’t need to go to Hollywood to make films. There were film schools that would train me and give me the chance to make movies. But film schools, while closer to my grasp, cost money. The trade-off was having access to equipment and services that were otherwise too expensive ...