Mike Wilde's Opinion Of Indie Films--Amaateur

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Also it's fair not fare :P
 
Web series are amateur films. Short films (not including docos, sit-coms, commercials, music videos and Industrials) are amateur films. No budget films are amateur films. Non-union films are amateur films.

We inherited the terms Amateur and Professional from the theater. Amateur meant unpaid. Professional meant paid. But Amateur also means uneducated, untrained and ignorant in the area of filmmaking.

Amateur filmmakers refer to themselves as "Indie filmmakers". They use the term to legitimize themselves, but what they actually do is make the term meaningless. The true meaning of an "independent film" is where the funding for the project came from investors directly, not the studios. It is actually still the case.

Amateur filmmakers do crowd funding because they are ignorant and uneducated in the area of obtaining funding for their projects. They don't know how to obtain investment and don't know how to approach qualified investors in film. The business of filmmaking is no longer taught in film school, which is why our industry is being overrun by amateurs and con artists are promoting "Learn filmmaking in 2 weeks" courses.

The most dangerous person on a production is the 1st AD. The majority of deaths and injuries on set are caused by untrained and poorly-trained 1st ADs.

How do you discern an untrained or poorly-trained 1st AD? You talk to them. The next rung up the career ladder of a 1st AD is Production Manager. The 1st AD works for the Production Manager and is assigned to the Director to do their admin paperwork so they can focus on directing. If the 1st AD is under the delusion their next rung up the career ladder is sitting in the director's chair, not only are they not working for the PM, they are so poorly trained, they will kill somebody.

Extras are not employed to do stunt work! But you can bet your boots, it was a poorly or untrained 1st AD that put an Extra in the position of being struck in the head with the sword. If there was a stunt coordinator (which I doubt) they should have been fired on the spot (along with the 1st AD) and handed to police.

So what's the solution?

1. Laugh scornfully or sarcastically at the people who introduce themselves as an "Indie filmmaker", note their name and don't work for them. They aren't going to pay you anyway.

2. If they look like they have an IQ, have some aptitude and genuinely want to work in film (not use it as a way to big-note themselves or think filmmaking is a get-rich-quick scheme) take them on as a paid intern while giving them a real hands-on old-school education in filmmaking they aren't taught in film school. They should be allowed up to 15 hours a week study (after work) at your company. You get tax breaks for in-house training.

3) If they are going to work in ANY admin position in your company, include in their training Budgeting and Scheduling (taught on-line by Norm Berns). So if they do go out on their own, they are not going to budget their project below the WGA minimums for the screenwriter and attempt to pass it off as a production. And they get to know what real-world filmmaking is.

The only way to get rid of these amateurs is to close them down - get them off the streets - and make it possible for them to be real filmmakers by employing them as interns and training them.
 
This guy has a lot of rage.

In my business, we don't rip people apart. We help those who ask questions. It is easy to work for a big business than to start one from the ground up with nothing or next to nothing.

If he wasn't so hateful, I'd take him up on his offer to train in how to make real budgets and schedules and approach investors. I have been looking for someone who can do that for years.
 
Seems to me he is implying that someone cannot be self taught and make it on their own. I don't buy it.. it's possible to do this without being an intern. Not everyone has to be taught some people can learn on their own.

But sure, there is a lot of crap out there.
People that put out films that aren't finished because they 'need to move on to the next project' or whatever their excuse is. It makes all of us look bad and it makes people much less likely to check out short films on the internet. Because they've been down that road and it's a terrible experience for the audience.
 
I work 9 to 5 in a highly regulated industry where many people think they can create a business, they try, they fail, and they get sued for cutting corners in order to save money. Those imposters are creating a bad name for the industry.

If the professionals are basing their opinion off bad Indiegogo campaigns and Youtube, I kind of can't blame them for forming that opinion. It's easy to take offense at his opinions and I'm sure many of us don't fit his description of "amateur", but you gotta admit that good independent filmmakers are outnumbered by uneducated, untrained and ignorant ones.
 
In the solutions we can see this rant is (at least partly) money based.

I don't know the writer.
Has he been insulted by underpaid work offers?
Did 'amateurs' cross his wheels during funding?
Does he consider himself an indie filmmaker seeing how his 'branding' loses the meaning it had?
Does he feel threatened (business and creativity wise) by amateurs?

SixOhThree said:
........................
but you gotta admit that good independent filmmakers are outnumbered by uneducated, untrained and ignorant ones.
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This goes for (almost) every skill/craft.
There are a lot of bad musicians and bands: far more than there are big stadion filling acts.
The same goes for writers, poets, football and soccer players...
 
He appears to work for a company in the entertainment industry, according to his profile. He appears to me to be an outsider ti our low/no budget films and believes he was somehow cheated.

His paragraph about the 1ST AD with stunts makes me wonder if he got injured doing stunts and the producers could not help him with a hospital bill.

He is obviously filled with rage at small filmmakers, however.
 
Modern Day Myth Prod. LLC said:
He appears to work for a company in the entertainment industry, according to his profile. He appears to me to be an outsider ti our low/no budget films and believes he was somehow cheated.

His paragraph about the 1ST AD with stunts makes me wonder if he got injured doing stunts and the producers could not help him with a hospital bill.

He is obviously filled with rage at small filmmakers, however.
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I believe the whole industry was affected by the recent death and lawsuits from those train tracks.
 
I disagree, to a certain point, with his assessment of all that is amateur. But even if that were entirely accurate, who cares?

1362283-0000leo_haters_gonna_hate.jpg
 
Will Vincent said:
But even if that were entirely accurate, who cares?
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^

He seems to equate amateur with something bad/wrong, making the assumption that an amateur film can't be good. Which doesn't seem particularly accurate (granted it is in a lot of cases). He does make a few good points, but it's nearly lost in the bitter rant.
 
The word amateur comes from the French, "lover of". An amateur filmmaker is someone who loves filmmaking. I prefer to focus on that (and even if I never go pro, I love making film music)
 
Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut that his 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much was "the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional."
 
Is this supposed to be an article? Or just a stream of consciousness thing? He doesn't really even articulate his argument very well. His comment about budgeting below WGA minimums suggests he's on the writing side of things, but his writing (in this case at least) wouldn't suggest he was a "professional" writer.

The only way to get rid of these amateurs is to close them down - get them off the streets - and make it possible for them to be real filmmakers by employing them as interns and training them.
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The problem is being employed and trained in the industry doesn't make one a "real filmmaker" any more than getting a job as a mechanic makes one a "real race car driver". There are thousands of professionals in the industry who are very good at their particular specialty, but aren't in any way 'filmmakers'.

We inherited the terms Amateur and Professional from the theater. Amateur meant unpaid. Professional meant paid. But Amateur also means uneducated, untrained and ignorant in the area of filmmaking.
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That's the issue right there - he's basically defined amateur as "uneducated, untrained and ignorant", and then based the rest of his argument on that. The problem is amateur can cover a wide range of experience, training, skills and interest, but he's not interested in acknowledging that because it makes it difficult to generalize the way he is.

Personally I'm striving to be an amateur filmmaker - I realized long ago that doing it professionally held little long-term interest for me. But despite my amateur status, I'd consider myself well educated, trained, and knowledgeable in filmmaking - exactly the opposite of how he defines amateur.

The truth is when I started this 20 years ago it wasn't really possible to do much as an amateur, at least not on a high level, because the resources - for both learning, and actual production - were simply out of reach financially unless you were independently wealthy. The only practical way for people to get experience and access was to get a job in the industry. Times have changed though, and now it comes down as much to your willingness to learn and practice the craft as anything else. If your goal is to make a career out of it then you'll certainly still probably be best served by getting a job in the industry, but it's no longer the only practical route to becoming a filmmaker.
 
"Is this supposed to be an article? Or just a stream of consciousness thing? He doesn't really even articulate his argument very well. His comment about budgeting below WGA minimums suggests he's on the writing side of things, but his writing (in this case at least) wouldn't suggest he was a "professional" writer" IDOM.

It is a thread he posted in the Film and TV Professionals Forum on LinkedIn. n From what others have posted before, that is the general feelings they have for "Indie" filmmakers.
 
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Modern Day Myth Prod. LLC said:
Do you think he is being faire?
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While I would argue with a lot of individual points and there's a bit too much of the rant to his post, as a very broad generalisation I tend to agree with the gist of it.

Modern Day Myth Prod. LLC said:
In my business, we don't rip people apart.
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Your business obviously isn't the film/TV business then! I'm not saying it's right but the film/TV business is extremely harsh and this Mike guy is certainly not being any harsher/more hateful than the industry as a whole. Look well beneath the surface of pretty much all the professional arts and eventually you'll find a reality which is deliberately hidden from the public eye. This is certainly nothing new, I particularly enjoyed Tchaikovsky's assessment of Brahms in the 1880s: "Today I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius.". These kinds of sentiments are completely common in the professional arts but usually only known within the industry.

sfoster said:
Seems to me he is implying that someone cannot be self taught and make it on their own. I don't buy it.. it's possible to do this without being an intern. Not everyone has to be taught some people can learn on their own.
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As a generalisation, I would agree with the author of the article and disagree with this comment! Professional workflows, techniques, hierarchies, approaches, ways of doing things, etc., have evolved over the decades as the most efficient means of arriving at a suitable end product. Much of this knowledge is barely touched on in most film schools and trying to learn it by oneself, by trail and error, is obviously impossible according to any kind of logic. For your statement to be true, you would have to have the combined intelligence/insight of many of the great filmmakers and film crafts-people AND be able to condense that learning from the 8+ decades it's taken the film industry down to just a few years, all of which is patently impossible.

It's certainly possible (though very difficult) to be self taught and make a good film (by amateur standards) but the jump to professional almost invariably requires a steep learning curve and at least some type of internship. The danger for most self-taught amateurs is that they aren't aware of what they don't know and therefore obviously can't judge the importance/value of what they are not aware of! In virtually every area of filmmaking there are important things or important bunches of things one is just never going to discover on one's own.

G
 
Some of what he says is absolutely legitimate.

I'm a hobby filmmaker. I have no intentions of quitting my day job any time soon and I am fine with that. This was really all brought on by the digital revolution that lowered the price of admission to film making to virtually zero. 20 years ago you needed a hundred thousand bucks just to pay for the film and the processing now that cost its totally gone. That means every yahoo with a 7D can call themselves an indie film maker. That has a HUGE upside. It also has a downside.
 
AudioPostExpert said:
It's certainly possible (though very difficult) to be self taught and make a good film (by amateur standards) but the jump to professional almost invariably requires a steep learning curve and at least some type of internship. The danger for most self-taught amateurs is that they aren't aware of what they don't know and therefore obviously can't judge the importance/value of what they are not aware of! In virtually every area of filmmaking there are important things or important bunches of things one is just never going to discover on one's own.

G
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I think the jump to professional just requires good enough amateur films that you will attract professional help or investment to your next project.

Certainly you're going to need great actors or great sfx if you want to make a great feature film.. professionals do need to be involved but as a film maker you'll never be doing this alone anyway
 
I taught myself MS Office. I never took a formal class in it. I bought early copies as far back as when I started my home publishing company, CVK Publishing. I bought the small business version as well as MS Works. I bought books and learned how to make invoices, inventory sheets, and business stationary.

So, later when we were expected to know MS Office for my day job, I was more advanced than others. Does that make me an amateur?

I also am self taught in desktop publishing. Part of that is learning color theory and color scanning.

I was selected on my day job to service color printers and copiers. My group would always send me to service customers in the desktop publishing and pre press world where customers used Macs and had issues with color matching from screen to print and I knew how to resolve them from my outside learning more thaan from what I learned in company classes. If something went wrong, a multi-billion dollar global corporation would back me. That is what makes me a professional. It is resources behind you when something goes wrong.

So, don't let the term "Amateur" bother you. If we are pissing them off, let them get pissed off as we keep doing what we are doing.

I we make a film that draws enough public interest, they will come knocking at our door. Money talks and BS walks.

I already called out Mike Wilde on his comments with a reply. Essentially, I told him the following.

It is easy to put people down when you are inside a big company. Try starting up your own business and see how great it is working with inexperienced people all around you trying to make something, but turning out something not as good as hoped.
 
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