Finding Cast and Crew for Indies
How Two Low-Budget Independent Filmmakers Did It
Through ingenuity and determination, two filmmakers found low-cost cast and crew to make their dreams come true.
Ideally, independent filmmakers have wealthy investors and a drawer full of grants to help them finance their latest projects. In the real world, however, they often use creative ideas, rather than actual funding, to get their films made. These two filmmakers – both with long-term projects and short-term funds – offer their stories.
Corporate America Rocks: small crew, hundreds of extras.
First-time filmmaker Lance Ritchlin mortgaged his house to raise the money for his full-length feature film. Denver-based R-Star Productions, Inc. produced Corporate America Rocks, a comedy about middle-aged office workers who form a rock band to enter a national competition.
Writer-director Ritchlin used footage from a real 23-year-old music video of himself and two friends as inspiration for the semi-autobiographical film. Like Ritchlin, the other two musicians, Douglas Dekyne and Kevin Sullivan, also appear in the film as they are now.
Using a small crew, he shot part-time over a year instead of full-time for several weeks in order to ease scheduling problems for people who work at other jobs. This way, he could have access to talented people who otherwise wouldn’t have time to be in a feature film.
Stretching the production out over a year had its drawbacks, however. “There’s no immediate gratification when you’re working on a film part-time,” Ritchlin says. “Keeping the core members together and energized over a long period of time is quite a challenge.”
Although family and friends appear in the film, Ritchlin also got cast members through a talent agency. He faced another problem in shooting the performance finale with 300 unpaid extras. He turned the battle of the bands into an actual fundraising event for Denver Public Television. Audience members donated $10, which entitled them to the concert, gifts from sponsors, and a copy of the soundtrack CD.
Monster Road: from short documentary to full-length film
In 1992, Brett Ingram was in graduate school studying film at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. He met underground clay animator Bruce Bickford at a film festival there, and directed a short documentary of the artist in 1994.
“I knew then that I wanted to make a documentary film about him, but didn’t have the funds,” Ingram says. “So later with the DV revolution, it made it possible for me to shoot a feature-length piece. I brought along my friend and collaborator Jim Haverkamp to Bruce’s home in Seattle to work on a feature-length documentary about him. Over four years’ time, we made several visits until we finished Monster Road.
He chose Bickford and his father, George, as subjects because to understand one is to understand the other. “Here are two people who live like hermits and are very hard to get to know,” Ingram says. “Bruce’s animation is incredibly bizarre and violent, and intrigued me. I wanted to see...what life experiences would lead someone to create this kind of work.”
Ingram directed the 80-minute, Bright Eye Pictures-produced film, and he and Haverkamp served as co-editors and co-producers. He used a small crew with only one helper at a time, sometimes shooting by himself.
Ingram’s selection of cast and crew was determined almost entirely by budget. “If I wanted to make a film about a process – for example following a presidential candidate – I’d need to be there constantly. Here the story is just little episodes from Bruce’s life, so I could take my time. This allowed me to scrape up enough money to go out there for a week and then do it again later when I had the money….It would have been a different film if I had had more access to him.”
For more information about independent films, read How to Find a Distributor, Film Festival Screenings, and Short Films Find New Fans.
