We do waste too much time on the internet. I'll sit down to check emails and Facebook and Boom! an hour passed by. Like now, what am I doing? I gotta go write.. signing off..

No I don't. There isn't any money to be made with what I do. I'm trying to come to terms with that. Not enough people watch movies on services like Vimeo On-Demand. Maybe that will change in the future.

The problem is time. I finish a film and I want to get right back to making a new film. My movies take 4 or 5 years to make. I don't really have time for the marketing side of things. My ideal situation: 100% effort making the film, 2 or 3 months on marketing then hand it off and move on. Problem is that your film won't get watched if you don't market it. So how do you find the time to create and still sell? I had to give up on marketing Space Trucker Bruce www.spacetruckerbruce.com (see what I did there ) because it was taking way too much time away from making my new movie. Maybe the best thing is to find a partner who likes marketing and works for free.

I created my space based sci-fi film Space Trucker Bruce on about $10,000 over 6 years (www.spacetruckerbruce.com). The hardest part for me was to create the 8 sets with no money and little experience. I used a lot of cardboard, 1x2s, hot glue and Masking tape over 3 years. I got free paint from a local paint store's reject pile. Also I had the typical micro-budget filming budget problems like not being able to pay the actors, equipment I couldn't afford, computer problems, data storage, etc.. I am a programmer/engineer with CAD experience so I did all the spaceship modeling and animations myself using a free open source 3d program called Blender. I didn't know what I was doing at first but figured it out over the 3 years of post production. For me, time saved me money. I was able to do each part as I could afford it. I had an old Mac laptop collection which I sold pieces of for movie money. Most of my birthday and Christmas gifts were in the form of movie money. You do what you can to create your masterpiece. For me what helped the most to create my world was not worrying about getting everything perfect.

Some people get funding from sources like Kickstarter but the effort and awards can suck your time and budget. I've obtained a couple of $500 grants from my local arts and humanities group. I made a movie for $10,000 over six years doing everything myself and putting all my extra money into it. You can do it cheaply if you just start out with the idea that your budget is pretty much zero and plan based on that. Do everything yourself that you can. Buy used previous version software and equipment on ebay. As you probably won't make any money off your short, if you don't spend any money making it you won't have investors to pay back or nasty credit card bills. A recent sundance movie that someone made on iphones. it can be done cheaply.

My Blackmagic Cinema Camera is nice but the crop-factor can be an issue. You need a wider lens than with S35 or full sensors or stand back farther from your subject. I love that I can slap just about any lens on it. I've been able to scrounge old film camera glass from Nikon, Pentax, Yashika, and Canon cameras. I have lens adapters for each that cost like $10 on Ebay. The sound on-board is less than perfect. I ran into a hiss issue in my headphones that fortunately wasn't being recorded. External sound works better. The RAW files are computer intensive but very nice to work with in the included Davinci Resolve software. It's not the easiest camera to hold steady without some kind of rig or stabilizer. The high dynamic range is nice for a film look. If you want more information on this camera, let me know.