Malta is the only country in the EU where a woman will be arrested for having an abortion. Here, the path to a legal abortion is fraught with barriers: it demands a consensus from not one, but three separate doctors, all agreeing that abortion is the sole measure to save her life. Abortion is illegal even in cases of rape and incest, making Malta one of the strictest anti-abortion nations in the world.
So when No Woman is an Island was invited to screen in front of the EU Parliament in a bid to help change Maltese law, I was honoured. To screen in Parliament, where MPs advocate, deliberate, and enact laws to foster positive change across all member states, including Malta ... Well, that was precisely one of the motivations driving my documentary work.
Read MoreThe indie film market is flooded with too many films. It has been like this for years now. Salon writer Beanie Barnes was complaining that indie film was “cannibalizing itself” back in 2014. Mark Gill, former president of Miramax Films, declared “the sky really is falling” on independent film in 2007. In the year prior, 5000 films were released.
How many more thousands of films are made each year now? An accurate number is impossible to determine as there is just so much content that flies under the radar. But if you go on film discussion social site Letterboxd you’ll find 18,989 feature films listed as released in 2022.
Read MoreMicro-budget filmmaking is bloody hard work.
After wrapping production on ForeFans – our sixth micro-budget narrative feature – at the start of the month, I can feel that in my tired bones. And creaky knees.
We spent two weeks filming guerrilla style all over Zagreb and Paris, 18 different locations, a skeleton crew of only three or sometimes two (only Sarah and I), 12 to 14 hour days, 5 hours sleep a night.
To say it was exhausting is an understatement. We were stretched too thin, multi-tasking like mad, putting into practise philosophies for micro-budget filmmaking that we teach in our own educational courses: “Use a small crew to move quickly and keep costs down.”
But halfway through filming I realized something about this philosophy and perhaps micro-budget filmmaking in general: I’m getting too old for this.
Read MoreThis week, the first volume of our Life Improvised series was released as a single anthology on Tubi. It consists of ten episodes of what began as standalone micro-shorts about the moments that make up human interactions and relationships. It is 49 minutes long and the episodes are grouped by themes: loneliness, a first date, betrayal, and change.
When we initially began filming these small short films three years ago, we had no thoughts of creating an anthology, or to even make enough episodes that such a thing was possible. For us, it was a way to explore small ideas between the bigger projects we do, to work with new actors, to experiment, even shoot in new locations. We released them on YouTube and that was that.
But releasing an anthology of Life Improvised made me pause and reflect on the power of time and consistency in filmmaking. If you do this long enough, if you create new content often enough, over time you will have a career as a filmmaker.
Read MoreOn May 20th, 2022, we released our latest feature film Machination via Vimeo On Demand. We knew this would be our release date since early April. We contacted a PR agency, October Coast, to premiere our trailer, spread the news about the release, garner interviews and reviews for the film, and basically help launch Machination. So far, so typical, right?
Not necessarily. The trend these days seems to be to release micro-budget films via a small distributor or a marketplace like FilmHub, wait for platforms like Amazon or Tubi to pick-up the film and randomly begin streaming it, and only then begin promoting the film. The idea is to release “everywhere all at once” so viewers have choices where to watch the film. They can also watch it immediately, instead of waiting for a particular date.
It is the instant gratification release, designed for an audience who have infinite entertainment options, and no patience to wait for your micro-budget film.
Read MoreI have been in Melbourne longer than intended. What was initially only meant to be a visit for a month or so, has stretched into a stay over four months as I’ve helped my mum move into a retirement village and sell the family home. Cleaning out the house has taken me for a trip down memory lane as I’ve discovered props, pictures, and DVDs from my first ever film: Shades of the Soul.
Hardly a soul has seen the film. Pun intended. I made it back in 2006 together with my friend Heath Novkovic, co-writing and co-directing. It is actually a feature film, 87 minutes long. I also played the antagonist, Leviticus, a military commander leading an expedition in the jungle when he is attacked and corrupted by a demon. He puts on a mask (we knew so little about copyright the mask in question is a replica from the band Slipknot) and begins gruesomely killing his own unit one by one, until the final confrontation with the lead protagonists and lovers Alexandra ‘Ice’ Peterson and Marcus ‘Dracon’ Maitlin. It was typical slasher fare with a touch of occult, only more poorly done than most, due to our total lack of experience and budget.
It’s such an amateurish film that it was never released, and I don’t even count it in my filmography. We were a bunch of dreamers running around the ‘jungles’ of Brimbank Park with camcorders, playing at filmmakers. But as I sat down and watched the film for the first time in many, many years, inspired by the nostalgia this trip to Melbourne instigated, I realized something: there is freedom in naivety.
Read MoreLast week I sent off a private screener of Cats of Malta to our Kickstarter backers. The next day I received a reply from an actor/filmmaker I knew from my past life working out of Studio 106 in St Kilda. Katrina asked me about our improvised process of filmmaking, how we make films, and if she could see an example of my favorite improvised NPG film.
This request got me thinking and sent me down a rabbit hole of reminiscing about our improvised work and how we started producing and shooting films using this unique method. All this thinking led me to Tubi TV and getting lost within the first twenty minutes of Friends, Foes & Fireworks – the first improvised film Ivan and I produced and directed, plus shot in a single night.
Within the body of the email reply to Katrina I pasted the Tubi TV link to Friends, Foes & Fireworks and filled the rest of the blank space with our improvisation inspirations, directors and films we admire – one of which is Mike Leigh. His name led me to thinking about the whole improvisation journey and business transition which NPG has gone through since making Friends, Foes & Fireworks in 2017. Again this led to yet another fond memory – the five days Ivan and I spent in Basel during 2019 taking part in the Character Based Improvisation (CBI) workshop Robert Marchand teaches.
I also mentioned the CBI workshop to Katrina, then I hit ‘send’. Sitting at my desk I realized it's been a few years since Basel, and that realization brought on some wonderful memories.
Read MoreGood, Fast, Cheap. Pick only two.
How often have you heard this adage? Maybe you have even said it yourself, especially if you have worked in the corporate video world and have dealt with clients who expect blockbusters on b-level budgets.
It is a popular and often hilarious meme, and an educational Venn diagram illustrating a reality check. If you want something fast and cheap, it won’t be good. If you want something cheap and good, it can’t be fast. Sure, you can create a great video or film with little money, but the trade off for not spending big is you’ll need to spend a lot of time and patience to achieve greatness.
But I am here to tell you that good, fast, and cheap is indeed possible in filmmaking. As micro-budget filmmakers, if we were to believe otherwise, we would be crippled with doubt before we even attempted to make a film.
Read MoreSome actors have a character they portrayed on the screen whose shadow they live in most of their lives. For Sean Connery and Roger Moore it was James Bond, Boris Karloff had Frankenstein, Bela Lugosi had Dracula and mine is Dace Decklan: Private Eye.
Who the hell is Dace Decklan: Private Eye, you might ask?
It all started as a twinkle in the eye of film director Ivan Malekin. How he ever came up with the concept of melding Magnum P.I and James Bond I will never know. Then again maybe I should just ask him? I just realised I never did.
Read MoreExposing the Double Standard Surrounding Sex & Violence in Film & Art
Our new film In Corpore is too sexy for Tubi.
This is something we learnt two weeks ago, and we’ve added Tubi to our list of platforms and apps we cannot reach with the film. All our attempts to advertise In Corpore on Instagram fail. Our trailers and teasers are flagged on YouTube. When we wrote in the film’s IMDB synopsis “a sensual, sex-positive exploration of contemporary relationships”, the synopsis suddenly disappeared. Trying to advertise the film through GoogleAds is an ongoing battle and we are losing – Google restricted our ability to market the new release through YouTube due to images being deemed “adult content”. Images, mind you, of people dancing, fully clothed. And for a year leading up to the film release, we couldn’t even share the In Corpore website on Facebook or Instagram because it was blocked by those platforms. The crime: too sexy.
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