About This Site

This site is for those of us who love film. We thought it would be a good thing to pay it forward and provide a free resource for low-budget film makers. The aim was to create a site which we hope is informative, entertaining and inclusive.

Within these web pages, we are putting down what we believe is a substantial bulk of the information you need to make a full length low-budget digital feature film. Before embarking on our own journey to make Man In A Box we had so many questions and struggled to obtain accessible, practical answers. The sorts of question we were asking ourselves were: where could we hire good quality digital cameras? Where could we find cast and crew who might be prepared to work on a profit share basis? And practical questions such as how to obtain insurance to cover us when shooting. It was a long list of questions. We personally wish that something similar to this site had existed before we started on the Man In A Box project. There are many mistakes which could have been avoided if we'd had the information contained here. Oh how we wish we hadn't wasted money on those filters, or story-boarding every single shot, or hiring all those lights!

We have made Man In A Box on an absolute shoestring budget, but it is obvious from the footage that we've managed to get maximum bang for our bucks. We hope that this site will demystify the whole film making process. Film making is very labour intensive and hard work, but doesn't have to be complicated. You can achieve amazing results on a tiny budget if you substitute energy and ingenuity for money. The title Films For Nothing doesn't quite cover it, in that you do need some finance for unavoidable costs, but you will be able to make a film for next to nothing if you ask questions and learn from our experiences.

You can read about our endeavours in our movie-making diaries. Some of us have kept these diaries since the beginning of the Man In A Box project and they are, we hope, an accurate reflection of all the trials and tribulations we have gone through. They are genuine 'warts and all' accounts of the whole film making process from the initial idea through to pre-production, through to writing the script, the shoots, and post-production.

In addition, we very much want to hear about your experiences and you will be able to share clips of your work, ask questions and receive advice. The site also has subsections on which you can view clips from Man In A Box, stills photographs, hear the music, and so on. What the site is not designed to do is provide any information outside of our own personal experiences. We are not able to tell you about obtaining sources of finance; we funded our movie entirely by ourselves. We are not able to explain the intricacies of shooting on 16 or 35 mm; everything we've learnt is about digital film making only.

Overall, we think the site is of most interest to those people who are either currently making a low-budget feature length digital film, or those aspiring film makers who want to. And hopefully those who simply share our passion for movies and movie making.

Enjoy.

SRLewis - 03/07