IFH 801: Breaking the Rules: Crafting Powerful Films Without Hollywood Money with Shawn Whitney

Alex Ferrari 1:49
Enjoy today's episode with guest host Dave Bullis.

Dave Bullis 1:54
My guest this week runs micro budget film lab. He has directed two micro budget features and is in pre production for a third with guest, Shawn Whitney. Hey Shawn, thanks a lot for coming on the show.

Shawn Whitney 2:08
Thanks. Thanks very much for having me Dave. I really appreciate it.

Dave Bullis 2:10
Oh, you know, my pleasure, Shawn, you know, I've seen everything you've been doing with the micro budget film lab and all the great things that you're doing over there. But before I even, you know, we start talking about all the things you do there. I wanted to talk, you know, about your career and about, you know, getting started. So, you know, we're growing up. Shawn, did you always, you know, have this, you know, this hobby of film, or this love affair with film and and, you know, did you make films growing up as a kid?

Shawn Whitney 2:35
No, no. Short answer, no, no. I mean, I always was. I've thought of myself as a writer since I was probably 10 or nine years old. But, you know, there was no, we didn't have any video cameras or anything like that, like it just, we just didn't have them, so they wasn't really around. I watched a lot of old movies. You know, it was back in the days, first before cable and then cable and so, you know, we would get like, channel 29 from Buffalo, and we would watch, you know, bad movies, or not bad movies, but old movies from the 50s and 60s. But it wasn't really until much later that I decided to pursue film, actually.

Dave Bullis 3:16
So did you end up going to college for film?

Shawn Whitney 3:20
No, no, I so I went to I went to University in Toronto, at the York University, and I did a liberal arts degree in humanities, kind of cultural studies, and then I did a master's in interdisciplinary studies that was focused on writing for the theater. And I'd started a small theater company that was doing like Brechtian musical theater. And we did a bunch of really great productions. And, you know, I wrote stuff, and I was doing that, and then, but then I went, decided to make a turn towards film, really, in about the year 2003 I guess. And at that point, I just began writing, you know, I'd done, I tried to do, actually, a theater production, I did, like a workshop production, and it went really badly, and I lost a lot of money, and I was really depressed, so I kind of hit, hid in my basement for about three years, and just started writing screenplays and just sort of learning how to write screenplays on my own. And then, I guess, three or four years, and then I ended up getting accepted into the Canadian film center, which is kind of like the American Film Institute, Institute. And that was my kind of, you know, my formal, the formal, official part of my education was that residency there

Dave Bullis 4:35
You mentioned writing your own screenplays and sort of teaching yourself how to write screenplays. You know, that's sort of something I did a few years ago, you know. And I think that helps out a lot. And what I want to ask is, you know, was there any particular books or even scripts or even movies that you sort of use to sort of pick apart, you know, and how to, sort of teaching yourself how to write?

Shawn Whitney 4:57
Yeah, there was a few books. I mean, Sid Field, I think was maybe the first book screenplay that I that I read, and that kind of opened my eyes to, you know, structure and all that kind of stuff. And then I read another book by Epstein called crafty screenwriting, which was really good. And then the most recently I read, a few years ago now, I read save the cat by Blake Snyder, and that was, I know, it gets, it gets, you know, a lot of bad people go on about it now, because it has become kind of the dominant model in Hollywood, in many ways. But it's, I still think that it's a really powerful machinery that you can use, you can bend it to kind of more unconventional structures, but it was really useful for me in terms of creating a kind of method to approach the screenwriting process.

Dave Bullis 5:49
Yeah, I have noticed that save the cat has gotten a lot of flack. I mean, I think if you're at the top of any field and you know, I think save the cat has sort of gotten to the upper echelon now, because, I mean, well, Sid Field has passed, and so has the person who made say the cat has passed. But I mean, I still think that it's been able, it's been it's been sort of passed on through his through his program, and I think now, when you're at the top field, when you're at the top of any field, I think you're gonna get flack for a lot of things.

Shawn Whitney 6:20
Yeah, totally, I mean, and it's partly, it's because of the way that Hollywood approached the whole process of storytelling. I mean, it really is the kind of formula that's in save the cat is used constantly, like you can watch a movie and time, it's kind of just the same cat structure and and I think people get because of that, and because a lot of Hollywood movies are pretty, you know, they're pretty empty, sort of commercial properties that are really, you know, not about, they're not about art, they're about they're a product, right? And I think people confuse the power of the story structure with the vacancy of the content. And I think that's where a lot of that comes from. It's like, you know, Hollywood movies are kind of empty, or not all of them, but a lot of them are empty, and it's because they all follow this model. And I, and I think it's, it's a little bit of a misrepresentation,

Dave Bullis 7:10
Yeah, and, you know, I know you can't see this because it's a podcast, but I have a huge screenwriting book library right next to me, to my left, and I sort of did what you did, you know, I wanted to figure out, you know, screenwriting, the nuts and bolts and getting down to the absolute, you know, sort of atoms of it, and figure out, you know, what makes a great screenwriter, what makes a great screenplay. And I sort of just, you know, would buy these books piece by piece. Some of them you could buy, I mean, for pennies on the dollar and Amazon. Others, you know, they just came out, and they're still full price. But, you know, there's a lot. There are some that really speak to to me, and there's others that I read. And I'm just like, I don't know, maybe, maybe this is lost, because, you know, I'm sure it happened to you too, Sean, where you have people recommend books to you, like screenwriting books, for instance, and you read them, and you're just like, what was the big deal about this you know?

Shawn Whitney 7:59
Yeah, yeah, totally. And a lot of them end up, I don't know, after, after a while, if you read a few of them, it's like, okay, this is, I'm kind of reading the same thing again. And at a certain point, you need to just get a method that you're going to use and then apply it, and then learn from it and find it, find ways to advance upon it. You know, I don't think there's any absolutely perfect or the right method, exactly. But you just need a method. You can't just be It can't just be anarchy.

Dave Bullis 8:25
Yes, absolutely. I think a method is key, finding your routine also, which I guess, is another way saying method, but, you know, finding your routine and making sure, you know, okay, well, 11 o'clock today, or maybe a little earlier, or maybe I'm gonna get up at two, you know, an hour early today, and I'm just gonna write, you know, I'm just gonna write for, you know, 45 minutes to half an hour. And you and you're absolutely right, you know, finding that process is key, because, like you just said, when I would read some of these books, I would I felt like I was reading the same thing, same things, over and over again. And I'm just like, I didn't just read this book, like, with a different cover and my different author, but, I mean, but that's bound to happen. You know, once you start, you know, getting to a certain point, you're gonna start seeing all that same information, just basically, you know, used again or maybe presented in a different way.

Shawn Whitney 9:11
Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, there's only so many ways, in a sense, to tell a story. And if you're telling a three act story, or a story that has a beginning, middle and end, anyway, there's only so many ways to do it. And, you know, the interesting thing because I read a lot of scripts in my development job, and I read tons of scripts, and what you see mostly is that is not, I mean, you do see scripts that come in that are kind of, you know, soulless machines. But mostly what you see from screenwriters who aren't established is that they just don't have the structure. They don't know how to tell a story that keeps moving forward. And you you really need that. And so to go back to what you're saying is so it feels repetitive on the one hand, and it is repetitive in a lot of ways, but it also is like people need to learn this, because otherwise they can't tell a story.

Dave Bullis 10:10
And you touched on something through Sean, you know, you said the that some of the scripts that come in are like a soulless machine, you know, I know you can't go into specifics, or, you know, anything like that, but is there anything, any sort of thing that that that writer might be doing wrong, whether it be structure, or is it because they don't have a voice that makes it sort of like that soulless machine?

Shawn Whitney 10:30
Well, what it is, is that people write to the market, and because, you know, people want to make a living, and so they think, Okay, well, you know, like, for a while, we were getting all these found footage scripts, for instance, which you know were the rage, and they would come in, and people would follow the beats, you know, would like, x would happen on page 12 and Y would happen on page 23 or whatever. But what was lacking in them was that they were just, you know, it's like, it's like watching a plumber fix your pipes. It's necessary work, you know, but it's not interesting. Besides, for you, because, you know, your toilets overflowing, but for most people, it's not going to be that, that interesting. And so what I find lacking is a kind of, some kind of universal, universality to it. So you need to have, for instance, your characters. It can't just be about, you know, chopping up zombies or aliens or whatever. They have to be going through an inner turmoil, because really, what stories are about is they're an argument, you know, about what makes the good life, and you're making an argument, and if you're not making an argument, and if it's not being felt through your character, then it just feels like watching a plumber fix a pipe or watching somebody build a house. It's kind of interesting to see the structure of it, but it's not emotionally moving.

Dave Bullis 11:41
Yeah, I just took a webinar. Was a free webinar, but by Doug Richardson, who did wrote, who wrote, Die Hard 2 and he actually was saying, you know, that whole thing about an argument, and his, his whole thing was, hey, structure is an argument. You know, how you structure your film should be an argument for your whole movie. And you know that actually really stuck with me. And it No, just great that you hear, I'm just hearing you, you know, say something similar about your characters and argument as well, which, again, is I agree with 100% as something I've learned with screenwriting is that and that, you know, you we, we sort of when we were making characters. I think sometimes screenwriters have a tendency to write themselves, just like you said. You know, we put ourselves as the main character, and I think that sort of ends up hurting us, because the main character ends up becoming almost like an A shell, and everybody else is sort of, you know, having all the having, sort of, you know, like the witty banter, or maybe they, they're actually the ones that are actually going through a transformation. And the main character just, sort of, you know, is just sort of there, going from, you know, basically just going basically just going through the motions,

Shawn Whitney 12:44
Yeah, yeah, totally. And, I mean, it can be you, but it has to be you in a universal way. It has to be universal, you you know, like you have to, you know, there's things about your life. You know, there was a film, a micro budget film that I talk about a lot called bell flower from a few years ago, think 2011 that was shot for like 17 grand, and it did really well. I think it went to Sundance at to Sundance. Actually, it went to Sundance. It got distribution with oscilloscope. It's a great movie, and it's about his breakup. So it's a very, in some ways, a personal film, but he took his breakup and he turned it into a kind of universal, crazy story about young male rage and representations of violence and stuff that's a lot of fun to watch and has has universal value to it, because he what he does is all the parts, the soul of it all fits together. So the characters are characters journey fits with the theme of the movie, and the theme of the movie fits with the visual styling of the movie, and with the visual elements in the movie. And that all fits with what's happening with the the secondary characters and so on. So it works together as a as a machine, but a machine in the good sense that machine in the sort of emotional, emotional sense that all the parts are firing, all the pistons are firing.

Dave Bullis 13:53
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. It kind of reminds me also of sort of Mad Max, you know, Mad Max Fury road, I know what we're talking about, now, you know, with, because, with the main character, but a Mad Max. So he never really changes, you know, but, but that, again, is the whole point of Mad Max, is that he Max is never actually the main character name any of his movies, you know. He's just go, he's helping everybody else out as they're going on their adventures. And I think, but going into those even, well, that made me probably that may be probably starting the second one, but in road warrior. But even, even, you know, road warrior, then you have beyond thought of dome, and then you have the newest one, Ferrari road you kind of see that formula at work, and it actually works, like we were just saying, it actually works for that. But anywhere else, you kind of be like, Well, what the hell is going on here? You know, it's not complimenting itself, if you know what I mean?

Shawn Whitney 14:38
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean that the model, the Mad Max model, is also the model for noir, you know, like noir fiction and noir films is about this cynical, scarred human in the world who is giving us an entry into the world to see the journey of other people and we become where the sort of cynical we're the sort of bring brought in to in the same. Way, in the same state as that person, and then we're learning through that process, the argument about that world and what's valuable, you know,

Dave Bullis 15:07
Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point. Kind of reminds me of Chinatown in a way. You know, Jack Nicholson, you know, at the whole end, he was very, very sort of scarred, and by the end, you know, I don't know if he really changed, but, but the whole, but, the whole venture was absolutely amazing.

Shawn Whitney 15:26
No, absolutely

Dave Bullis 15:27
So, you know, as we talked more about, you know, your career, Sean, you know, you obviously knew you taught yourself how to write screenplays. And, you know, so where was it, where you actually started to sit down and actually you made your own film?

Shawn Whitney 15:41
So I had after, I actually, shortly before, I went to the film center. And then after I went to the film center, I made a few shorts, and kind of, you know, I'd read, I read a few things about, you know, how to shoot, not cross the line, you know, coverage, that kind of thing. And then I sort of shot some, some shorts that were, you know, from moderate to bad and but it was really fun, and I loved it. And I learned a lot as both as a filmmaker and as a writer, because I learned, okay, well, that doesn't work. You know that, you know, a block of dialog that long isn't gonna work, saying it this way isn't gonna work, like you just you you see it being played out. And so it's an extremely useful experience, even from the point of view of being a screenwriter. And then, you know, and then when I came out of Canadian film center, and, well, a bunch of stuff happened. I had a script options with, like, an Oscar nominated producer, and it all looked, you know, great. And, you know, I was counting the money and thinking my career was about to take off. How could things go wrong? And that was 2008 and then at the bottom fell out of the financial market, and in subsequently, all the money dried up for indie films, and Hollywood's reverted to just, you know, retreads and remakes and tent pole pictures. And so while I got a job out of that in development that I still have, I my career as a filmmaker and as a screenwriter kind of came to a halt, and so after a number of years of having done that, I just was, like, one day, sitting in my office with my wife, feeling frustrated because I was reading a script that I that I thought was kind of bad, but was, you know, was financed because it had some a list cast, and I turned to my wife, and I'm like, This is ridiculous, like we're helping, you know, she's a wedding photographer, so she helps people realize their dreams, in her way. And I was doing it with, you know, story editing, and I said, you know, why don't, why aren't we? Why are we just the bridesmaids, you know, why don't we make our movie? And and so we decided at that point, then we just started talking about a story. And then it happened,

Dave Bullis 17:42
Yeah, the the bottom fell out in 2008 for man, for so many people. I mean, I was so tragic. And, you know, I know other people as well who've had, who had things in development and 2008 hit. And, my God, I mean, and here we are in 2016 and we're still recovering from that here in America, but, but, yeah, you know, and the shocks were sort of felt well wide, but, you know, you you able to regain, you know your composure, you know, regain, you know your motivation, and you know, so, so what was, what the ended up did, your first movie ended up being.

Shawn Whitney 18:20
It ended up being, I mean, it's a con. It's like a sci fi comedy called a brand new you about a widower who can't get over the death of his wife, and so he moves into this house, and after trying to failing at committing suicide, he convinces his landlord and his roommate to help him try to clone her in the living room. Because his landlord, it turns out, is this disgraced biochemist, and so it's about him trying to kind of recreate this moment that is lost. But it's a comedy, so it's funny, but funny sad, I guess

Dave Bullis 18:50
So is that available to watch online or through VOD or anything?

Shawn Whitney 18:55
No, we're we got a sales agent, and we've been going through the hell that is known as deliverables. And we just sent off for the second time for you have to get a, you have to get a quality control report before your film, like we've done all the the rest of the stuff, I think, I hope to God, and then we needed to make this quality control report. And so it goes, you know, you send it in. Cost, you like, 1500 bucks for, you know, four passes to cover your video and all your your audio tracks, and they send you a report, and if there's any problems in there, you know, and it can be any kinds of thing, and then it comes back to you, and then you have to fix those, and then you have to send it back. So we got that back and send it to our audio editor and our editor, our picture editor and and so we've, we've just sent it off for the second QC report, and I'm hoping that it's good enough.

Dave Bullis 19:44
Yeah, those deliverables, Shawn, the more you know, I didn't know too much about deliverables to a few years ago, and then I found out all that is in that is involved with deliverables. And even when talking with, you know, my friend, Jason Brubaker at the stripper, you know, just getting involved with those deliverable deliverables, you end up it's like a like, you said, it's like, what did you call a living hell? I, I think that's pretty accurate.

Shawn Whitney 20:18
But yeah, yeah, it's totally brutal.

Dave Bullis 20:20
So, you know, so right after you finished your first movie, and again, you know, that was a micro budget film, and you know, you made your second film, which, by the way, I love the name of this, of this film, by the way, fucking my way back home, that is a very, a very good title, by the way. And also, it's very eye catching. So even if I didn't know what it was, even if I didn't know what it was about, I could just imagine what that what that is about, but, but, you know, so where was the impetus to make your second film? I mean, did you already have this script, you know, written while you did your first one, or did you sort of just, you know, have a lot of motivation to sort of make this script?

Shawn Whitney 21:00
No, we were, well, we'd, we'd done the kind of the festival thing with the first one, and gone, gone to a few festivals, and won some awards. And we were like, What are we gonna do next? And so we, you know, I had some other scripts that we wanted to do, but they were bigger. They were like, you know, at least $100,000 kind of thing. And, and we're just, we're not in a position to make $100,000 movie, unfortunately, at the moment. And so we, you know, my production partners, there's four of us in the company, and we said, we know, what are we going to do next? And I had this story that I developed with another writer years earlier that he and I were going to shoot together, a wonderful writer named Rhys Carruthers, and but it just never happened. We both kind of gotten busy with our own things. And so I spoke to him, and I said, Hey, dude, can I take our story and write it up as a script so we can shoot it? And he was like, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I then I wrote it up, and we started editing, you know, getting notes back and forth. And, you know, I don't know how many months later, eight months later, maybe nine months later. Then we shot the movie.

Dave Bullis 22:04
So when you shot the movie, did you have a slightly bigger budget than when, when? Then with your first movie?

Shawn Whitney 22:10
No, you know, the irony is, we learned a lot from the first movie. You know, we made mistakes that cost us money, and we got better at improv, improvising. And so the first film cost us, I think, 22,000 or something, and the second movie, we shot for 7000 but it's actually more complicated, and there's more locations, and we a lot of it takes place in a car going around the city. So we had to tow the car, because our driver, like he plays the driver in the in the film, is, is like, maybe the worst driver on the planet. So the idea of him acting while driving this like 1974 Supreme was was a horrifying thought. So we had to, like, tow the car around.

Dave Bullis 22:51
So when you had to tow the car around the I guess the biggest, then the biggest part of production budget, then, was obviously a tow truck, a driver in the tow truck, you obviously had to get, like, a, some kind of, I guess you had a route that you wanted to go, you know, again, I'm just, I'm just thinking with the producers hat right now, Shawn, what was,

Shawn Whitney 23:08
Yeah, yeah, no. Well, you know, we went, so our Plan A was okay. So Plan A was we thought, you know, we had a connection with the post production house, and maybe he could get us a deal with a, you know, rental house whites in Toronto. And he contacted them for us, and they got back, and they were like, oh, yeah, you can get a, you know, you know, a tow vehicle, but it's like, $10,000 a day, plus you need to get cops, right. You need to have off duty, you know, paid, paid duty officers. And we're like, well, it's more than our budget. So we tried U haul, and we did a taxi, we did a test shoot with a U haul trailer, pulling it around and so on. And that seemed like the way we were going to go, but that was going to be, I think, about 1000 bucks with insurance, and that still seemed high. So what we ended up doing was a guy who owns a cafe around the corner from my house had a tow truck and, well, he had a car. First of all, he had this Cutlass Supreme. And I was like, Hey, man, can I rent your car for the shoot? Your car is, like, this big, ugly beast, and it's a beautiful sky blue color, and I really want to use it, because it really looked good. And he was like, yeah, yeah, totally. And we told him we were going to tow it. And he was like, Oh, hey, do you want to you want to rent my, my, my pickup truck, like these little Toyota pickup truck, like, Yeah, sure. So we rented it off him for a few $100 and then we went on Craigslist, and we found somebody who rented, like a car tow trailer, and we rented it for two weeks for, I think, $300 so in total, you know, car tow vehicle and trailer was like, 800 bucks. 700 bucks.

Dave Bullis 24:43
Wow, that, you know, again, that's amazing how you know, just by just sort of putting on your producer hat, you can actually, you know, get that down further and further and further and again, I imagine also you're going to have insurance, because I could just imagine, you know, towing a car around. But. Yeah, so it was insurance included in that $800 or $900 cost?

Shawn Whitney 25:04
Yeah, we got it. We got production insurance, and that was more that was for the entire production. And I think it was about 900 bucks maybe to cover the whole thing. And it was a bit dodgy, like we told them. They were like, you know, we have this car, and we'll be towing it to locations and then putting it off the trailer and shooting it in locations. And so they, you know, if they found out we were shooting with people in the vehicle, towing it around, we probably wouldn't have been covered, so we would have had to evacuate everybody from the car if we got into accident. But luckily, we didn't. And there was no, there was no insurance claims were made.

Dave Bullis 25:38
Excellent. You know, it's always going every and whenever. You never have to make an insurance claim, right? So, yes. So now, Sean with sort of finishing the film, is it? Is it on VOD yet? Or are you putting that together right now?

Shawn Whitney 25:54
Yeah, we just got picture lock like last week, and so we've sent it off to the composer. We've sent it off to the audio mixer to begin that process, and we've sent it off to the colorist.

Dave Bullis 26:08
So now, now, so, so now that that picture is locked. Now, now, again, I'm cheating, because I have your whole info in front of me. I know you made a third movie, so we get a third movie that's actually in development right now, correct?

Shawn Whitney 26:23
Yes, yeah, yeah. There's a, we have a, we have a script that's written that's, I think, a second draft at this point that we're hoping to do a little, little higher budget, if we can raise the cash, or, I guess, you know, figure out the, whatever the equivalent is of, you know, a tow trailer for for our, our spaceship, because it all takes place inside a spaceship.

Dave Bullis 26:43
And that's called the century of redemption, right?

Shawn Whitney 26:46
Century of redemption, yeah, yeah.

Dave Bullis 26:48
So obviously you're going to shoot that next year. And you know, again, I wish you the best with shooting that. And so what I wanted to ask about was obviously your micro budget film lab, you know, you know, you sort of started this, and what was sort of the impetus to actually start micro budget film lab?

Shawn Whitney 27:08
Well, when we shot the first film, I mean, finding information was, it was really dispersed, you know, we could find an article here, an article there, and get, you know, pull some tips here and there. But a lot of it was really learning on the fly, which added added stress to the whole process. So and, you know, we were borrowing money and, you know, figuring out how to finance it and all that stuff that we had to kind of build the machine from scratch, as it were. And so my thinking was that it would be great for because there are so many people out there who want to make a micro budget, or who budget or who want to make a feature and are just waiting. They're doing like I did, you know, they're waiting for years, and, you know, submitting to contests and spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on contests. And, you know, sometimes contests don't even send you the results and never mind notes. And I was like, you know, people need to have that resource, and so I want to be that resource, and I wanted it to be different than, you know, no film school, which is a great site, but as you know, it has a lot of gear focus. And I'm, you know, because of my background coming in from the point of view of story and from screenwriting, I was kind of more interested in the esthetics and the story construction side, and how to do things differently and how to create a kind of shared esthetic, like, I mean, I wrote a post a little while ago called about, you know, we need a micro budget movement, and I've been thinking about that a lot, and the need to, kind of for us as micro budget filmmakers, to move beyond simply, you know, atomized individuals all struggling to make our films. And I'm happy to help people out on that basis, just like the technical side of how to make a movie, but also, you know, where there have been successes in the past with people outside of the system. They've generally been coming from people who exist as a movement. You know, you look at dogma 95 or mumblecore, or the neorealists or the French New Wave, and they part of their marketing buzz and part of their power comes from this esthetic challenge to the dominant storytelling models and cinematic models. And so I wanted to kind of create a space where that kind of could gestate, and that's what, that's kind of where the name lab came from. It was like a laboratory for for film movements, we can

Dave Bullis 29:22
We can do a lot of like experimentation, right? Yeah, yeah, like, sort of mixing chemicals, like a mad scientist,

Shawn Whitney 29:28
Yeah, yeah, making drugs.

Dave Bullis 29:31
But we know, but experimentation film, I think that's what allows, you know, with making micro budgets, and you know, even, even when I, you know, made my own student film, it allowed for more experimentation. Because obviously, number one, we had no clue what the hell we were doing. And I mean, me personally, I had no clue what I was doing when I was making my student film. Two, the budget was like the change, you know, people have in their pockets. And three, I had no weird answer to so any, any weird, wacky thing we did, you know, is it funny? Okay, let's put it. Let's put it in there. But, you know, with micro budgets, you know, you know this is it's always, you know, encouraged to for experimentation. Because, I mean, you know, Sean, if you had a couple million dollar budget, and you had people are reporting to every day, you know, you try to do something out of the norm, and they're gonna say, What the fuck are you doing?

Shawn Whitney 30:31
Yeah, yeah, totally, totally, yeah. There's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of there's a lot at stake. When you've got a million or 10 million or $100 million you know, they they want you to do what works and what works is what worked last year or the year before, and so they just want to repeat the same thing, because it's a formula that makes money. But that, that formula that works for Hollywood for ten million movies or $100 million movies doesn't work for micro budgets, because they just look like cheap knockoffs, right? Yeah, and they look like, and they look like, they look like cheap knockoffs. But more than that, they ex all the flaws of Hollywood can be are kind of hidden by the the the money that's poured into the great effects and the great sound and the great light, and, you know, these awesome actors who are loved and so people forgive them, you know, any errors or whatever, all that stuff allows Hollywood to kind of smooth out the problems in their in their in their storytelling, and, you know, the the conventionality of their their cinematics, technique or whatever, you don't have that in a micro budget. So you you get none of the good of Hollywood, of the all that that money, and you get all of the bad when you're trying to just replicate a Hollywood formula film on like, you know what? They see their budget for their coffee cups.

Dave Bullis 31:45
So true. Shawn, you know? And again, yeah, you know, if you try, yeah, you're right. If you try to, try to emulate that, you're just going to end up, you know, shooting yourself in the face. And that's something that I found as well, you know, I tried to emulate, uh, different action movies, so, you know, with my second and third student films. And I'm like, holy crap. I don't have the time, the budget, the resources to do all this stuff, so I can't make, you know, a whole scene about gunplay, or, you know, I can't blow up this whole building even with, you know, Red Giant effects, you know. And it sort of reminds me also of there was this panel of discussion was watching on TCM, and one of the guys who host TCM said he actually loved the era of the 50s and 60s with movie making, because they didn't have a budget to blow up buildings or anything, so they had to focus on the story. And to me, that's where we are again is, I think, a hallmark of a filmmaker nowadays is you have to make a micro budget film set in one to three locations, very minimal, and the story and the concept have to be, what, what is your main selling point of this whole thing?

Shawn Whitney 32:50
Yeah, I mean, I don't know about, you know, I there's some dog move films that I really love, like celebration I really love. And, you know, they had their bow of chastity, or whatever that was very, very strict, and most of them ended up breaking it. And I don't know about all of the rules in terms of restrictions about what you can and can't do, because there's, you know, there's a film monsters by Gareth Edwards, who went on to do Godzilla. And Godzilla apparently, sucks. I've never seen it, but, you know, they've got bad reviews and so on. And monsters did really well. And monsters did really well, I think because kind of move what you're you're saying about story, because it was a, it was a really fresh not to monster movie. But it's not about the monsters. The monsters are just the backdrop to this road movie and this relationship between these two people in a structure that's not, it's it's much more open and and alive than than really tight, tightly bound Hollywood structures where, you know, there's a monster and they kill people one at a time in the woods and so on. And it wasn't that. And so he used, you know, there's a lot of effects in that, but he shot it for like, 15,000 bucks. And then he just happens to be this, you know, special effects wizard who has worked for years for the BBC, doing, you know, crazy compositing and all this incredible stuff. So he had those, he had that talent. And so, you know, kudos to him to bring that talent. But then, you know, where he couldn't, he couldn't do the kind of practical effects that that you can do with Hollywood. So his his shooting was, was this story, this really simple, beautiful, little story about this relationship between these people, and that's what gave the movie its power. The the monsters was, you know, sometimes kind of was neat or whatever, but that's, you know, when he got to Godzilla, then he could, then he didn't have to think about story so much. And so he ended up with a much weaker picture than monsters, which was made for, again, like the coffee cup budget for Godzilla. And, you know, I don't know what he's doing next, but that, that point that you make about story being so important and breaking with the the conventions of what Hollywood does with stories, and really allowing yourself to, you know, to take advantage of the freedom that you have as a as a filmmaker, because you don't have that 100 million dollar weight hanging over your head that you have to recoup,

Dave Bullis 34:58
Yeah, and it's, I was always. Reading something about this as well, where a lot of studios now are looking at, you know, the the micro budget film, the micro budget film world, the independent film world. And they're taking directors who maybe made a movie for a million or less, and all of a sudden they're make, giving them all this, you know, all this money to sort of make these, these franchises. For instance, Josh Trank with Fantastic Four prior to that, he made Chronicle for, I think, what, $3 million and, you know, I've seen stuff like that. And I think also, I don't know how well that's transferred over, though, I think that I don't know if the studios are rushing because they're so desperate for a hit to sort of prop up the other properties. Or if maybe, you know, these, these independent directors, maybe aren't there yet. If you know what I mean?

Shawn Whitney 35:45
I think it's more, I mean, they're trying to I think there's two things. I think that often, as as artists, often we don't know what makes us special. Or, you know, our artists, artistic production special. You know, we're not super self critical all the time, and so we don't know how to necessarily replicate it. And when we're put in a new situation where suddenly you've got 10 or 100 or whatever million dollars you're you're in a new situation. And so you're not you have, you know, before there was all kinds of pressures on you that forced you to be the kind of artist that you were, and now there's different pressures on you that are changing you in a different direction. So there's, there's, there's that, but there's also Hollywood is, isn't interested in what is magical about the really small budget movies. What they're interested in is the buzz and they are the cache and the, you know, the edginess of them, but they, those are just words for them, and they don't really know how to capture because, again, they're they're thinking about, it's 100 million bucks that they just invest in. Just invested, and they need to recoup that. And so they need to take all the edges off, because you want to appeal to, you know, you know, it's like I had a meeting with a sales agent on a completely different project A while back, and the first question they asked me about the project was, who's your white male lead? And it was sort of eye opening to me, you know? And this guy was probably a nice guy, whatever. And whatever, and, you know, probably not a racist, but he, he is speaking about how the market, the superstitions of the market, conceive of it, because they're like, well, black guys and women and, you know, lesbians and gays don't sell in China or they don't sell in Africa. So we need somebody who's like the universal icon, or avatar for money making, and that is the white male dude between the ages of 35 and 50. And so that's the kind of the way that they think about it. And so even when you get an edgy director up there, you know, like Gareth Edwards doing Godzilla, now they're trying to fit it into the money making mold that they know, and it has to fit into that. And so even, you know, you know, you go into, it's like the old joke, right? Oh, I joined the government to change it from within. And then instead of changing the system, the system changes you and I think that's what happens,

Dave Bullis 37:56
Yeah, it's, it's very true. And you know, you know, as we were talking about, you know, budgets. You know you have currently, you know, micro budget, you know, film lab, fun competition, which I think is amazing. So could you go into a little detail about that?

Shawn Whitney 38:11
Yeah, you know, I was, what I wanted to do was to create a screenwriting coaching program. Because, I think often people, you know, because there is so much emphasis on gear, because gear has become so cheap and made it so possible to make micro budget films now, whether it's camera gear or sound gear or whatever, and people get so hung up on gear, and they become gear heads. And, you know, people talking about, oh, the latest RED camera and black magic. And, you know, blah, blah, blah. And they and the scripts I read are, and, you know, I read about 150 scripts a year, like, I've read well over 1000 scripts in the last eight years, and I'm telling you, most of them are, are very weak and not developed. And it's kind of part of my my argument to my my community, is you need to develop your script. So I was like, How can I motivate people to develop good, you know, edgy, fresh scripts, and get them to focus on that so that they can make some great pictures and, like, really go deep in terms of the stories that exist inside themselves. So I thought, well, I'm going to do a screenwriting thing, but how can I get people interested? So I decided to come up with this screenwriting coaching intensive that would last over a period of three months, and I would work with a, you know, a relatively small group of people to go through each stage of the screenwriting process, from how to come up with a story for a micro budget, how to create a log line, how to create a story structure, developing characters, theme, all that stuff, right through to revising, how to revise your script with a micro budget in mind, and then have this and provide feedback the whole time, and then at the end, have this potential award. So that you know, of the first 10 scripts that are submitted at the end of this process, I would give like a full story edit of their scripts, which is what I do professionally. And I would, you know, meet with them over Skype. And then the best script of those 10 I would give them an, you know, I would invest $2,500 into making their movie. And so that's kind of how it was born.

Dave Bullis 40:19
And I also, like, you're doing the video question and answer section, because I imagine, as soon as you announced the competition, this flurry of questions came in. And I'm sure, and it's a great idea, by the way that you're doing it through video, because video is, you know, it's always, obviously, it's a great promotional tool. And I think also a lot of times, people, more, especially filmmakers, more adapt to watching a video tutorial or explanation, if you will, than just, you know, reading sort of like a blog post,

Shawn Whitney 40:51
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I try to mix it up a little bit, and do do a bit of both, but yeah, and it's kind of nice to do, you know, like with the FAQs that I've done, I can just, you know, I get tons of you know, questions, and I, you know, went through them and found some of the most common ones. And then I could just go up on my roof. You know, there's a terrace in our apartment, so I went up on the terrace and and just sat there with my coffee. And, you know, could just talk into, you know, my selfie stick that I put an elastic band on to hold it to a chair, and I could just talk to it and answer the question, like, like, we're sitting down having a coffee.

Dave Bullis 41:27
Yeah, it did feel that way as well. And so obviously, just to sort of answer a few of those questions, I know you already answered them, but just, you know, for, obviously, for the listeners, you know, like, I guess the one would be, you know, who actually owns the script? At the end of all this,

Shawn Whitney 41:43
The writer slash filmmaker owns the script. The only deal is for the money. The only conditions, I guess, is that it's an investment. So there'll be an investors contract, and if the film makes money, then you have to pay back. You have to pay back the money, you know, and which seems reasonable. And I want people to take some responsibility for the process of, you know, their their contributors, to their to their film. And then that money, it won't come back to me. I'll put it into another fund so that I can grow a fund to ultimately supply, you know, help other, other people in the same, in the same corner sort of way. And then the second thing is that the money will be released on the first day of principal photography. So you actually don't just write a script and get the money. You actually have to go into the proper pre production. And I'll work with people through the pre production process to help them get the show on the road and on the first day of principal photography, that cash will be released from them from escrow.

Dave Bullis 42:39
And I think that's an amazing idea, Shawn and so, for So, for people listening, who might be interested in work, where could they enter, you know, this fun competition?

Shawn Whitney 42:49
Well, it hasn't. The doors haven't opened yet. I've been taking because I got tons of feedback from people and what they felt should be in the program and so on. And so I'm going to open the doors to that. And as I say, it's not, it's not going to be to tons of people, because, because I'm giving feedback, I can only deal with so many people before I would, you know, have to start taking amphetamines and stay up all night. So that'll happen on not this coming Monday, but the following Tuesday. So a week Tuesday, I'll open the doors on that.

Dave Bullis 43:24
And is that for people just in Canada, or people in the US and UK?

Shawn Whitney 43:30
It's people internationally. You know, one of the cool things, you know, I've been promoting the Facebook page and the website and so on through Facebook, which is, you know, in terms of, you know, micro budget film marketing. Facebook is actually has a really user friendly, very powerful interface. But I've been, I was marketing, and I was marketing it primarily to the United States and Canada, because that's, you know, where I'm from. And by accident, I think I selected worldwide. And so it ended up promoting this thing, one of these posts out internationally, and I started getting, I'm like, why am I getting all these people with names, like Indian names? It was like, all of a sudden, like, literally, like, dozens of people contacting me from from India. And I realized I'd made this mistake. And it was awesome, because it's, I'm meeting these filmmakers from India. Like, I just interviewed a filmmaker last week, who did a micro budget film called D major, which is a beautiful film, and has gotten, is getting looks like it's getting distribution on the India's version of Netflix, and it's got him, you know, a producer is coming on board for his next film anyway. And it was a fascinating interview, just to hear how, in Kolkata, he made a movie for $3,000 and how they did it. And, you know, they didn't have a slider, so they put a camera on the sweater, and they pulled it across the table and this kind of stuff. But anyway, that's a long detour to say that the program is open internationally.

Dave Bullis 44:50
The reason I ask is because obviously America is my US is my biggest market, followed by the UK, followed by China, then Australia. Then Canada. So I just obviously, just wanted to make sure, yeah.

Shawn Whitney 45:05
So yeah, Chinese filmmakers are more than welcome as well, obviously, as Americans and Brits.

Dave Bullis 45:12
Excellent. And I was shocked, as everyone else, when I heard that China was my third biggest market. I looked at my numbers, I'm like, wow. Okay, but bigger bigger than, Yeah, seriously, who knew bigger than, bigger than the Australia and Canada. Wow. And, you know, So Sean, you know, I know we touched on this briefly, but, you know, sort of, you know, in closing, I wanted to ask, you know, what is there anything else that you're working on that we should know about?

Shawn Whitney 45:41
Well, I mean, in terms of my film, it's, it's the, you know, when you mentioned century of redemption, which is a space kind of, there's a sci fi, but all takes place in one location, though a fairly elaborate location. And then, I mean, I am on, I'm on a, I'm a senior programmer at the Victoria Texas indie film festival, which is a wonderful film festival just outside of Houston and and, I mean, I'm working on stuff all the time with this company I work for in Canada media biz, and I've been with them as an executive story consultant for about eight years, doing both story editing and also developing original content. So I have, I have some TV series that are in development that I'm pretty stoked about, and hoping something happens with them, but, you know, I'm at the point now, you know, if you've been in the film industry anytime at all, you know, you know, producers come to you and they're like, super excited about your project, and you get all excited and it's gonna happen, and then, then they don't happen. And so I'm, I'm, I still retain a small glimmer of hope in my heart, but part of me is always like, yeah, you know, I can't get, I can't get excited about maybe the mainstream stuff any longer, because it just so hard. It's so hard to get stuff off the ground. Things crash and burn all the time.

Yes, I couldn't agree more. Sean, I just was having this conversation the other day. It is so hard to get things without with, you know, even a pretty sizable budget off the ground, you know. And people who listen to this podcast on a frequent basis know that I talk about that a lot. I talk about my own projects and things that have just crashed and burned, and things that never really got off, and things that got off and still had a lot of problems on takeoff, but, but so, you know, in closing, Sean, is there anything we didn't talk about that maybe wanted to discuss, or any sort of final thoughts to sort of put a period at the end of this whole conversation.

Well, I think the main thing, and the main inspiration from micro budget film lab is, you know, following on from what we were just saying about everything's crashing and burning. And, you know, I looked up was reading some stuff on the the spec screenplay market recently, and the, something like 100,000 scripts are registered every year with the Writers Guild of America, and this year, less than 100 were purchased by the studios and the indie majors. And it can look really depressing, and you can sit around sending query letters forever, and it's just important that people know that you don't have to do that, and that there you can make a great movie, you know. And there are some awesome movies people, I think, forget, you know, the French New Wave breathless was a micro budget. It was under $100,000 and you know, some of these great movies for lovers, only made by the Polish brothers, was shot for like, zero and made $500,000 and but more than that, it was, you know, they made a really cool romantic movie. And so you can make really good stuff for not, not a lot of money. And so you shouldn't feel like you have to wait around for some benevolent producer to sort of land in your lap and do it for you, or some dentist with, you know, more money than than he knows what to do with, to invest in your film. You can, you can do it with, with a relatively small amount of money.

Dave Bullis 48:39
Yeah, you know that that's something I've been talking to Shawn about, you know, in a lot of my intros, about talking about this whole, you know, don't wait around, you know, figure out what you have at your disposal location wise. You know, what I call the resource list. You know, locations, actors and like, sort of like props. So if you can make those lists, and you can sort of brainstorm and sort of reverse engineer a script, because that way you're not, you know, if I, if I know my, my uncle owns an abandoned house somewhere. How could I use that for a film, you know? Or even if I use my own living room? I had a friend of mine who shot a film of his in his own living room, and he later regretted it, but because he wanted to do all this blood stuff, and he did it all, but then he said, Look, that smell got in the house. And so if you So, there's a tip, you're gonna use blood a lot, you know, a lot of blood. Maybe not. Don't do that in your own living room. But, yeah, but yeah, you know. And I think again, you know, Jason Brubaker calls it backyard Indy. I think again, this is going to be the Hallmark Sean, where you have to be able to sort of make a film in a very minimal location, with with very minimal locations, actors, props and beat and be able to to tell the best story you can. And I think that's going to sort of be like the Hallmark now, with how you know, you can sort of, you know, build your career from that

Shawn Whitney 49:56
Yeah, no, I think that's totally true. And I think that, you know, make a list of your resources is really important, and extend that list, not just to, you know, cool stuff that you have lying around and cool locations that you have, but also to your skills and the skills and the skills of people around you know, if you're like Gareth Edwards and you can do great compositing and great, you know, visual, you know, VFX on your computer, that's a resource also. Or if you can, you know, blackmail your brother in law to do it for you, whatever it happens to be, that's, that's a resource that you should, you should, you know, you should make the movie that you can, not the movie that you want, because it's, you know, what you've been told is the right kind of movie. Yeah

Dave Bullis 50:44
undefined I definitely agree. So Shawn, where can people find you out online?

Shawn Whitney 50:48
They can go to our Facebook page. They can just, I'm sure, search on Facebook to micro budget film lab, or our website is microbudgetfilmlab.com and they can find us there.

Dave Bullis 51:01
Are you on Twitter or Facebook? Well, I'm sorry you already said Facebook. So you're on Twitter or anything else.

Shawn Whitney 51:06
I'm on Twitter. A little bit Twitter I've never really gotten into we do. I do have a YouTube channel that I'm slowly adding material to, but those the primary locations at this point are Facebook and the website.

Dave Bullis 51:22
Shawn Whitney, I want to say thank you very much for coming on, sir.

Shawn Whitney 51:26
Thank you very much for having me. It's been great talking to you.

Dave Bullis 51:28
Oh, it's been great talking to you as well. And I wish the best of luck with everything.

Shawn Whitney 51:32
Thank you. You too. Good luck in China.

Dave Bullis 51:37
Thank you very much, Shawn. I'll talk to you soon, buddy.

Shawn Whitney 51:40
Okay, take care.

Dave Bullis 51:40
Bye! Bye!