Filmed in Exile

After years of using Final Draft I recently discovered Celtx. I have little use for it as the copy of Final Draft I purchased ten years ago more than does the job for me, however, as a screenwriting teacher at Grub Street, as well as Bishop Hendricken High School, I need to be able to get my students to use correct format without asking them to spend a couple hundred bucks. In that search I found Celtx. The students rave about Celtx and the little I have worked with it shows it will do the job and even has a few nice features. For anyone just beginning in screenwriting, getting used to the format is essential. Celtx will let you do just that without spending money you could use on shooting your movie.

The Rhode Island Film Collaborative (RIFC) is an organization brought about to help bring democracy to filmmaking.  The organization is a non-profit started by a group of filmmakers who decided they could help other filmmakers by pooling resources and building the film community in Rhode Island.  It was co-founded by myself and Broto Chakrabarti, director of Sleep: A Novel.  At the time we started RIFC a few years ago, this was a relatively new idea, and is probably still in the idea stage.  We have two-thousand people on our e-mail list and a group of a few hundred that we all know by name, but we have yet to truly fulfill the promise of what we started.

The idea was to build the film community, share equipment, connections, actors and everything else in order to overcome the need for money.  Almost everything needed to make a movie costs money, however, with a community that comes together to donate and share resources and work on the movies for experience, the cost of filmmaking can be reduced down to videotape (or hard drive space) and food.  Most importantly, once we acquired the resources we opened them up to everyone, and resulted in helping dozens of films get produced.  

I am sure there are other organizations doing the same thing all over the country.  I am not sure if we were the first, probably not, and I know we’re not the last.  Since we sprouted up several other groups have shown up with similar concepts, such as the Boston-based Beanywood and the Connecticut based SECT.  Ideas like the RIFC, SECT & Beanywood can help usher in the digital revolution by cutting down costs and encouraging collaboration.  Check out these organizations and let me know if you know of one I have missed.  And if there is not one in your neighborhood, maybe you should start it.  I’ll talk you through it.

M