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DIY Film Making: One Man's Journey To Sundance & Beyond

By Jacob Krueger & Chris Littler, ft. Adam Bower

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An article from our vault that is still relevant.  The first step is to take a step!  

As many of you know we are headed to Park City, Utah this week for the Sundance Film Festival, where we’re going to be hosting, in collaboration with our partner Stage 32, a series of free panels, lectures, pitch parties, and exciting events all throughout the festival.

So if you’re going to be in Park City, come join us! You can see a complete calendar of all our events and RSVP at: writeyourscreenplay.com/parkcity

In the meantime, in preparation for all the Park City excitement, we’re going to take a little detour from our regularly scheduled podcast and bring you an interview by Jacob Krueger Studio Director Chris Littler, with filmmaker Adam Bowers.

Adam shot a feature film, New Low, for $2000 and ended up a official selection of the Sundance Film Festival in 2010. He then managed to parlay that success into Paperback, a second feature at a much higher budget, which premiered at the Austin Film Festival this year.

If you are a film student here at Jacob Krueger Studio, you know it’s an extraordinarily exciting time to be a filmmaker. We are seeing more and more people like Adam, who are making their own material. These writers have stopped waiting for people to say “yes” to them, and instead started saying “yes” to themselves, developing great screenplays and going out and shooting them.

Chris sat down with Adam and asked him a bunch of questions about his process, about what it means to be an indie filmmaker, and how he managed to shoot a film on $2000.  He got some very interesting responses, particularly about some unexpected benefits of shooting micro budget, compared to his experience with a higher budget production.

Enjoy the interview!  And then get out there and make some movies!

 

Chris: I'm interested in the process of creating things, taking things from an idea to whatever it is at the end. And for you it's feature films, right?What had you done filmically before you took on a feature length?

Adam: Yeah, so I was trying to get into the film school at UCF which is in Orlando, University of Central Florida, and the first year I didn't get in. I was 18 I didn't have any real experience except for shooting sketches with my friends on weekends when I was in high school but they were all like terrible. And then the second year I forgot to apply in time. I remember sitting in class in one of my film pending, entry level film classes that you take before you get into the actual thing and I was talking to another guy who was getting into it and I was like "Hey, when are you gonna send in your application, and he was like that was due months ago now we're waiting to hear." And I was like oh my god.

So, at that point I really didn't like UCF, like I said Gainesville was a really good fit and Orlando was kind of like the opposite of that, it was a suburban sprawling kind of bummer place to live, so my brother went to UF so I got this idea from a friend of mine. He was going through the teleprom program at UF because UF didn't have a film school. He was going through the telecom program and treating it like a film degree where he was basically, because you got to make shorts in the program, so he would use that as a way to make short film, have access to the equipment and learn like basic things from his professors, but really take it upon himself to learn and make things and make his own technique and style.