Peter Biesterfeld

If you’re doing video production because it’s a wonderful hobby and you’re okay with spending your own money to make your video creations, you probably don’t need to read any further. But if your plans include providing video production services, or at least recovering the costs of your next indie movie, please read on to learn how to build a film budget. Creating a budget is the most important part of pre-production planning.

The orbit of John Grierson’s legacy touches almost everything we know about documentary. The five-foot something Scotsman with an orator’s voice single-handedly birthed the documentary form when cinema itself was still in its infancy.

Audiences won’t buy into a movie, the story and the characters if the acting is not believable. It doesn’t matter how impressively staged the action is, how clever the plot or how dazzling the effects, if authentic human emotion isn’t up on the screen we lose interest. And that’s where good directors stand out. They’re superb at directing all of it—the camera, the action and the actors. The quality of the director-actor relationship can make or break a movie.