Application

Money, money, money...

As soon as you start down the road of trying to make something that looks the part, will be professional and stand up to the competition, you inevitably have to start talking about money.

I believe people should get paid for the work they do, even if it's just a token gesture, a little something for time and effort is an important nod to the fact that a large part of film-making is about making a living too.

The thing about shorts is that there isn't a lot of money to be made once the film is complete -  no-one's going to get rich off the back of this.  Who knows what the future holds with the development of online viewing platforms and the long-term decline of terrestrial television, but none of this will happen in a time-scale that is useful to us and our film so I shall have a debate about the changing face of broadcasting at a later date.  (Although it does make me instantly think that there should be a clause in any contracts that the film has to be charged for when people view it in a capacity other than terrestrial TV and that some of that should come back to the filmmakers... to be continued...)

This, of course, all leads back to the same place: funding.

I mentioned previously that we are looking for the lion's share of our funding from Scottish Screen, our local funding body, and part of that process is putting in an application for funding.  I am pleased to say that our application appears to be getting closer and closer to completion.  The outcome of this will have a massive bearing on how we progress.  Without the funding I am not sure we will be able to go ahead.

Whether approaching your local funder or looking for private investment it is apparent to me that there are certain things that would help with any potential investor.  We're being very clear to identify all the people we want to work with up front, all the things that we predict will be problematic and trying to pre-empt as many of those problems as possible and, most importantly, making it clear where other investment is coming from and who those partners are.

This is conjecture but film making is an expensive endeavour and if the risk needs spreading then that's what you have to do.  The more people I talk to about funding short films the more parallels I see with the way independent films are financed, namely patch-funding.  For the uninitiated this means exactly as it sounds; funding is patched together from various sources in order to match what you have worked out is going to be the cost of making your film.

Of course this is by no means the only way of going about making a short film.  I have made a number of shorts with little or no money and pulled them together using a huge number of favours and some of the best films I have seen have been done in the same way.  This time, however, I am keen to finance the work and it's about time I took this step.  I should also point out that I am trying to make this film outwith the framework of a scheme.  This makes life a lot harder because many of the potential funders (government bodies, broadcasters etc) are not interested in spending money outside of their schemes.  I think they feel they already make a significant contribution to emerging talent.  However, there are always exceptions to the rule so why not try and batter the door down anyway. 

I am pleased to say that we have got some interest as a result of conversations in Cannes so perhaps I should retract my remark about it not being a useful place for people interested in making shorts, it looks like it might have been very useful for us.  We just need to firm things up now and get it all into our application.

Fingers crossed (as usual).