Freekstorm VFX Blog

This is a new experiment for us. In previous years we have not been interested in new year resolutions at all (because most people break them after the first couple of weeks) but personally I’m fed up with drifting along aimlessly, wondering what the hell we will be doing during the next year. You can’t make movies with vague intentions. Good film-shorts don’t happen by accident; they actually need a huge amount of planning and organising. This is not Rich’s forté – he can do it if he has to, but he’s far happier designing cool special effects and dreaming up stories, whereas it is my job a producer to make sure his dreams are realised by planning and organising the year ahead.

Last year went absolutely splendidly, as far as I am concerned. Considering this time last year we were utterly clueless when we came to filmmaking, we’ve certainly come a very long way on our vertical learning curve. We have studied, studied, studied some more, read tons of books, learned the basics of scriptwriting, producing, directing, acting, the fundamentals of VFX, spent way too much money on getting filmmaking equipment (that bit was not splendid), made loads of mistakes (not splendid either, but necessary I guess), made two six minute film-shorts and entered two online film festivals. Oh and we designed a groovy new Freekstorm web site and started this blog too (which not only charts our progress but also propels us forward into action.) Yep, when you put it like that, crikey, didn’t we do a lot?! One year later, we’re still pretty clueless, but slightly less so than before. If we keep learning at this rate, think where we will be in a year’s time, or in five years time?! The mind boggles.

So what are our goals for next year?

Well, I’m including a few of the highlights here as an exercise in mass accountability.

Rich’s goals:

1. Make a blockbusting action epic in 6 mins!
2. Make a second movie-short that blows something up (I volunteer the barn in the garden – we need a new one.)
3. Finish the cyc-studio, with the possibility of hiring it out.
4. Continue to develop my skill set regarding filmmaking and special effects.

Lin’s goals:

1. Write a decent script for once!
2. Blog at least once a week, preferably twice (this not only helps develop my writing skills, but furthers my interest in film studies in general.)
3. Enter next year’s two films into DVX fests, which acts as a very useful mechanism by which to learn the process of making short films.
4. Learn how to better market our movie-shorts (and boy, do I have a long way to go!)

These goals may change and expand over the next year, of course, but by writing them down here now, it gives us a marker when this time next year we can look back and see how far we have come, and what we did/did not achieve and why.

One year from now, what do we want to have accomplished?

At the end of 2010, we both want to have made two movie shorts which have been entered into DVX festivals, with a view to moving beyond DVX fests in 2011.

So what is the purpose of 2010?

In a nutshell, Freekstorm is our way of learning about the art of making movies. During 2010 we will continue to train ourselves in VFX and filmmaking . We are not expecting Freekstorm to pay for itself during next year because we are still very much in the training phase – VFX and filmmaking are incredibly difficult to learn (especially without formal education) so we are pacing ourselves and trying to have fun along the way.

"Small moves, Ellie, small moves."

Labels: filmmaking, reviews