Chris Tempel
Director
I've been telling visual stories since I learned how to draw flipbooks as a kid. I was given my first video camera when I was ten. At 22, I shot my first feature film. I've since completed three features and am working on my fourth. I also run a successful YouTube channel featuring my film work, religious content, and a popular survival show. When not making movie, I can usually be found doing parkour or backpacking with my dog.
It would be better if Adobe used a script based project format like Nuke. Every time you make a change, it automatically gets saved. I've never lost work on the rare event that Nuke crashes. The coolest part is that the script is human readable, so you can literally open your project in a text document and copy and paste into an email or the like to share the project with others. Avid (my editor of choice) also has something similar with the Avid Attic. In the five years I've been on Avid, I've had exactly one crash - which I was able to recover from the attic.
With both of these programs, everything is happening behind the scenes. I don't get interrupted by an Autosave box that prevents me from working until it's done (very annoying, especially on a feature where the autosave can take up to a minute).
Truth is, Premiere CS6 was the last great version of Premiere. They had completely re-written the software from scratch, so it was clean and stable. Unfortunately it took just two or three years to get bloated and crash prone again. In this business, stability is king.
I shot my last feature on a Canon Rebel T2i/550D back in 2010. In Oct 2012, after the initial excitement about it wore off and I was no longer moving DVDs (which did allow us to make back our low budget of $2000), I decided to upload it to my YouTube channel for free. I have a survival web series as well, but that last movie alone brings in about $125 a month on YouTube from the ad revenue. To date, my little $2000 movie has made $3300 just on YouTube. Add to it the DVD sales and it's made around $5500. It's not a blockbuster success by any means, but a success nontheless. I think YouTube can be a great source of income for an indie filmmaker (after you've exhausted some other options). And with YouTube's new rules for monetizing, that movie is what keeps my watch hours up and allows me to hit the $100 payment threshold each month, ensuring I get a constant stream of revenue.
I'm confused how Adobe could "fix" paid product placement? Starbucks paid $2 million for that two second shot. There's nothing to fix...
I'll do you one better -
How to shoot a feature for $2000
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHP4DthkCvg
I spent 9 years cutting on Vegas before switching to Premiere because my work was getting more VFX heavy and I used After Effects at the time. I quickly learned that once Adobe left CS6 and went CC, it was the most unstable editor I had ever used. After a few years of torture, I left everything Adobe behind (excepting Photoshop CS6) and now live happily in Avid land for cutting, Resolve for on-lining, and Nuke for VFX. You couldn't pay me to switch back to Adobe at this point, stability is more important than trendy features.
Here's a look at how we made an action film for $2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHP4DthkCvg
And here's the actual movie with around 1.5 million views on YouTube. To date, the movie has made $7000 through ad revenue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZd-J7Ucn-c