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The most important thing that allowed us to shoot BLISS on Super 16mm was that Joe and I have always been in control of every dollar on our movies. (With the exception of VFW where we were basically hired by producers to film their script.) A thread for indie filmmakers. https://twitter.com/josh_ethier/status/1336883982135222274
So when Joe said BLISS would be budgeted just under $250k, and that he wanted to shoot on film, we crunched numbers, finding other areas where we could save money. @The_Prolefeed was brought on as DP, and he'd shot his last feature on 16mm. Mike also shot VFW, we love him.
Trying to find ways to save money is how I ended up being the colorist on the film. I already had a Da Vinci license, and knew the software. Once we got back dailies, we realized the 16mm was so malleable we could handle it ourselves. I bought a small console, and we were set.
For VFW, we wanted to do the same thing, but no matter how much we helped their team crunch numbers and move budgets around, no one at Fangoria saw the benefit of it, so we ended up shooting on the Red again.
After BLISS, some of our friends asked how it was possible to shoot something so low budget on film, and we tried to help them by sharing our workflow and connections in the film world.
Fotokem handled all of our film. They gave us a small (but incredibly helpful) discount, basically saying, "No one's getting rich off this movie, but we want to help you." They gave us 4K DPX scans (image sequences), and I made 4k Prores XQ masters from those DPX scans, myself.
Afterwards, I made DNX transcodes of the Prores for our offline edit, and later conformed back to the Prores for coloring/cleanup/visual effects. By handling the creation of new masters, editable media, and conforming/coloring the film myself, we saved around $30k, if not more.
That $30k was used to purchase film. We had a wonderful rep at Kodak who got us set up, got us some test rolls, and generally made the experience easier. They did everything they could to save us some money wherever possible, as they understood we were a small production.
All in all, it was more expensive than just renting a digital camera and lenses to shoot on film, but we made it work for us by 1. Doing the research (for any available discounts, connecting with people at these companies and building a relationship) and-
2. In my case, just knowing how to finish a film completely after it's been shot, almost entirely by myself. (H/T to @ShawnPDuffy (mixing) @stevemoore2600 (score) and our friend Brandon Christensen (VFX) for being the only other people involved in post-production on BLISS.)
So to sum up, you can shoot a movie on film. You just need to understand the money, and more importantly be in charge of the money. That doesn't even necessarily mean you need to find the money, it just means you should be where the buck stops.
It's a lot of work, but it's how we've been able to make three completely independent movies where instead of hearing, "No, that won't work." We say things like, "Ok, that sounds great. Now how the fuck do we pull that off?
