It’s officially a new year but we’re still not over how great our podcasts turned out in 2017. I’ve been sifting through all of the fifty plus interviews we did to find the best advice from some of the year’s most notable names in independent film to bring you these "Best Of" episodes.


Last year, we started doing interview podcasts every single week in addition to our Indie Film Weekly episodes. We’ve had tons of great guests from Sean Baker to Flying Lotus and everything in between. And as I said in our list of the year's 15 most popular episodes, we’re all really proud of the type of resource this podcast has become.

This is the third and final episode of our “Best of 2017”, but honestly, with the quality of advice we received over the course of our interviews last year, we could keep this going forever.  All of the excerpts featured in this week’s volume are part of what we here at No Film School like to call “Roundtable” episodes. We’ll try to record some of these group discussions at every festival we travel to.

The idea is to get a group of industry pros together and have them discuss their respective crafts in a forum where everyone can relate to each other and build off of their experiences. A lot of times they will be fresh off seeing each other's work so the questions keep flying between them and lead to some fantastic stories. 

We’ve selected three of these episodes—with a combined total of 17 filmmaker guests—to feature this week: “What It Takes to Get Your Short into Sundance,” “How to Get Your Midnight Shorts into SXSW,” and “DP Roundtable: The Shots That Almost Killed Us.” For those of you making short films, these clips should be especially helpful. 

Screen-shot-2017-06-12-at-09"Dawn of the Deaf" Credit: Rob Savage

If you haven’t heard all of our interview podcasts, these are great examples of the type of information you can expect to come away with after every listen.

Featured in this episode:

Listen to the episode by streaming or downloading from the embedded player above, or find it on iTunes here.

Please subscribe and rate us on iTunesSoundcloud, or the podcasting app of your choice.You can play all of our No Film School interview episodes right here:

This episode was edited by Jon Fusco.