This looks very interesting but there was not enough time to read the captions under the people being interviewed. I wanted to know what projects they'd done but it disappeared too fast. I'm sure it won't be an issue in the actual film.

This is wonderful! Cardboard is great for filmmaking! When you're making your own video and don't have to worry about impressing clients on a paid gig, this kind of stuff is perfect for saving money and getting the job done. Cardboard is mostly free and also easy to recycle. I use cardboard pretty heavily in set construction. I've made a couple of 30ft spaceship hallways out of cardboard and white poster paper. I've made lighting soft boxes using Costco frozen burrito boxes. It's not the best solution but it works. I'm using this display shade tip because I'm always squinting to see my BMCC display when outside.

I was thinking the same thing!

There are a lot of good points in this article. Trying to do your own thing and not imitate Hollywood is exactly what us independent filmmakers should be doing! Work within your budget and film what you want to film even if it may not appeal to a wide audience. I like that you didn't try to film the movie all on once and used evenings and weekends over a longer period of time. The drawback with that approach is retaining your actors over 2 or 3 years and keeping hair and weight mostly the same. I made a micro budget sci-fi movie called Space Trucker Bruce between 2008 and 2014. 6 years is a really long time to work on a single movie but one of the drawbacks of not having a budget is that you do everything yourself and it takes time. 100 space animations don't just happen. It took me 3 years to build the sets and film the live action parts then another 3 years to do all the post production. My current project has taken me almost 7 years which I think is way too long because I went a bit overboard. When you don't have a budget, you trade money for time. I avoided the festivals with Space Trucker Bruce because I thought it would be pointless and a waste of money. If you don't get accepted you lose money. If you do get accepted you have to pay for all the travel to attend and then maybe not get anything out of it. Instead I had several 4-wall shows which were all profitable and put the movie on Amazon Prime. After a year I made it available on YouTube for free. I've had way more people watch it on YouTube than in any festival and tons of great comments. What's killing me with my current project is that I went a bit overboard on the space scenes so I'm having to model and render a whole bunch of stuff. I use free software called Blender and I'm setting up a render farm of government surplus computers to speed up the animation process but it still takes time. A good goal for indie sci-fi would be to have the cool effects and a micro budget and still get the thing done in 3-4 years. It sounds like you pulled it off so congrats!

Don't use cheap equipment then let inexperienced people use it. I had a good rode boom mic but it was going into a $40 iRig adapter then into my iPhone. The setup worked okay but the gain adjustment dial started to wear out and you had to adjust it to get clean spots. Certain members of my inexperienced sound crew apparently heard the static in the headphones but didn't say anything about it. I had to ADR a bunch of dialog. All this could've been avoided if I'd spent a couple hundred on a Zoom recorder and also spent a bit more time training my mic operators.

The mixing shooting style mistake reminds me of a time where we hiked up to the Mendenhall Glacier and filmed along the way. All the shots were on a tripod and pretty stable despite a bit of wind. We were exhausted and running out of daylight for the final shot so instead of setting up the tripod I used the shoulder of a crew member to stabilize the camera. The shot was shaky as hell and I had to use software stabilization to make it work.

Another mistake is making sure if your actors wear glasses and the character doesn't, reminding them to take off their glasses at the start of each take.

I tried filming some kayaks from a canoe without a decent stabilizer. I ended up using the tripod and my body as best I could. Waves are a big problem in small boats. I did remember the waterproof case for the camera for while paddling and in case we had a problem and tipped over.

Bad sound equipment is also a problem, or inexperienced sound operators.