I’m Peter D. Marshall and I created this film directing blog in 2007 as an online movie making resource center for Independent Filmmakers like yourself.

(As of February 8, 1585 film making posts have been published on this blog!)

For over 38 years I’ve worked (and survived) in the Film and TV industry as a Film Director, Television Producer, First Assistant Director and Creative Consultant. (See IMDb Credits.)

In 1999, I started my website, ActionCutPrint which has grown into one of the top film directing websites for Independent Filmmakers on the Internet today featuring online movie making courses, film directing articles, film and television books and filmmaking workshops.

In 2000, I started publishing my free monthly film making ezine, The Director’s Chair which is currently read by over 6000 filmmakers in 105 countries around the world. (You can read 125 back issues here.)

To fulfill my goal of mentoring and teaching, I developed several filmmaking workshops that I have presented over the past 18 years: from Canada to Singapore to Dubai. I am also a directing instructor at the Vancouver Film School.

So if you want to keep up to date on the latest Online film and television resources, please Bookmark this Page Now or Subscribe to this blog to read daily film making articles written by myself and other film makers from around the world.

by Chandra Steele.

Every town has gone a little Hollywood this month. Cinemas are packed with theatergoers wanting to see esteemed Oscar nominees and this week’s Sundance Film Festival previews what could be the next gleam in their eyes.

One of the Oscar favorites, Hugo, is an uncommonly gentle film from Martin Scorsese that’s a love note to those who go to the movies and also to those who create them.

Whether it’s a recent fancy or a long-time fantasy of yours to make a movie, now’s the time. Most filmmaking tools are low-cost (or even free) and easy to use. Here’s what you’ll need to create everything from the opening scene to the end credits.

Read the rest of this article from PC Mag.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

by Matt Soergel.

When Patrick Barry was in high school at Bishop Kenny, in the dark ages of the late 1990s, filmmaking was his passion, though it wasn’t an easy one to follow.

“But I guess we just did it,” he said. “You got your friends together, got to the thrift shop, found the funniest costumes you could and built around that.”

Not many amateurs were making movies back then, he says, and no wonder: Shooting and editing on bulky video camcorders was awkward, time-consuming. Then converting that video to film, so your work actually looked good when you showed it to an audience, was way too expensive.

He’s 30 now, still making movies. And things have changed greatly since the dark ages: The number of today’s budding filmmakers is “absolutely, without a doubt” booming, said Todd Roobin, head of Jacksonville’s film and TV office.

Just consider the advantages offered to them, after all: Digital technology makes shooting, editing and distributing your film far easier than the video and film cameras of the past.

Read the res of this article from Jacksonville.com

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

from The Daily Beast.

Ever since his 1995 directorial debut, The Brothers McMullen, which grossed over $10 million at the U.S. box office on a budget of just $23,800, Edward Burns has been at the fore of cutthroat,low-budget indie filmmaking. With his latest film, Newlyweds, released Dec. 26 on video-on-demand, the director opens up about how independent film distribution models have changed, and what it means for the future of indie moviemaking.

Sixteen years ago as a film student at Hunter College, I made my first movie—The Brothers McMullen. While film technology has made rapid leaps and bounds since then—I shot my most recent film on a Canon 5D—the method of exhibiting indie films theatrically has seen little change over the years, and it is still as difficult as ever for independent filmmakers to reach a sizable audience in movie theaters.

Read the rest of this article from The Daily Beast.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

by Kim Voynar.

Last time on Adventures in Filmmaking, I told you all about the awesome crew we’ve lined up to shoot my short film, Bunker, and promised that I’d write another journal entry about the art design and such. Then things got a little busy, what with going off to NYC a week before my shoot, but I thought I’d take a few minutes out of my day to catch up on this before I disappear into the netherworld of last-minute pre-production and shooting for two 12-hour days this weekend.

One of the things I see lacking on a lot of low-budget indie films is production design. I was reading an article in Filmmaker Magazine about how the economy and budget crunches are affecting below-the-line spending and how art direction is one of the areas taking a hit with this, and how more and more filmmakers are using their own furniture and such in their production design to save dollars.

Certainly this has been the case with Bunker. We’re spending a lot of money on this film, for a short film (and we’re still looking at doing a crowd-funding thing to help defray some of our post costs, even though we’ve managed our expenses as well as I think we could have while getting the level of crew experience I wanted), but when it came down to the bottom line, I felt like I needed to focus our spending on those areas in which I have zero experience or knowledge (all the tech stuff, basically). If I wanted to get the best folks for those jobs, something was going to have to give.

Read the rest of this article from Movie City News.

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by Joe Nalven.

I love going to the movies. But my understanding of this art form is limited to the avid filmgoer.

When I saw that Art San Diego was featuring a short film program, I looked over the list of films. I found the name of someone whom I had met only briefly, Mauricio Chernovetzky. Perhaps, I thought, Chernovetzky would reveal something more about what it is that makes movies compelling. If I understood his approach, I might see more than I usually did.

I work almost exclusively in static 2D art. Video is something I enjoy, but it is pretty much a mystery of how things get put together. Any thoughts for an outsider?

Read the rest of this article from Sign On San Diego.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

by Cynthia Reid.

I have to admit, I’ve been in a time warp when it comes to music lately (I’ll take Sade and Public Enemy easily over Lil Wayne).  However, when the Watch The Throne album by Jay-Z and Kanye West dropped recently, I had to stop and take notice.

While the opinions of the album ran the gamut (Ava DuVernay calls it a “Black Nationalist Masterpiece for the New Millenium” HERE), I was more impressed that this genre of music can still generate so much frenzied anticipation and is still relevant thirty plus years later since its inception.  That got me thinking…What can the new, emerging black film movement learn from the hip hop scene?  Yes, I know hip hop has its share of ugliness but what positive pointers can we take away and apply? Here’s my list:

Read the rest of this article from IndieWire.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

from Screencoyote.

International filmmaking takes a giant stride with the launch of Screencoyote.com, an international filmmakers’ network, dedicated to facilitating cross-border collaboration.

Scheduled to launch this month, Screencoyote promotes cross-border and local collaboration as a way round the financial pressures faced by independent filmmakers. It is also a means by which filmmakers can gain newer cultural perspectives, and achieve real influence, locally and internationally.

“The aim is to link up filmmakers all over the world, so they can pool their skills and tools to make commanding films, with or without finance. This is the kind of thing filmmakers have been waiting for,” says Screencoyote’s founder, Ishmael Annobil (above).

“The idea is simple-—if a filmmaker wishes to make a film in another town or country, but cannot afford to take crew and equipment along, he or she can simply elect fellow Screencoyote members over there to get the job done, on equitable terms,” Ishmael explains.

Read the rest of this article from The Bahamas Weekly.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

Review by Philip French.

Numerous directors and a fair number of cinematographers have written autobiographies, but although there are useful books on the art and craft and editing, the only memoir I’ve come across by a film editor is the eye-opening When the Shooting Stops… the Cutting Begins by Ralph Rosenblum, the New York editor who saved Mel Brooks’s The Producers and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall from catastrophe.

It appeared in 1979, and towards the end of it Rosenblum says of his trade: “The profession selects in favour of caution, timidity, self-abnegation, tact, ‘a diplomacy’, says British editor James Clark, ‘which would normally put us straight into parliament’.” Now in retirement, Jim Clark has put aside his diplomacy to write a revealing, funny, devastatingly frank account of a lifetime spent editing film.

Read the rest of this article from The Guardian.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

by Dani Valent.

The creation of Here, a road movie, was something of a road movie itself.

TEN years after I started writing Here with New York filmmaker Braden King, I arrived on set in Armenia: a puddled driveway, a crumble-down hotel, a gleaming church backed by a shy rainbow. As I was introduced to the 40-person crew, the script supervisor, Gaby Yepes, hid the script from me. ”You don’t want to see this,” she said, letting long hair fall over her clipboard. ”There’s red pen all over it.”

Her job was to record what happened as the film was filmed.

The script, the document that I knew intimately, every comma, every nuance sweated over, was victim to reality: actors changed lines, night fell so shots were rethought, sheep didn’t dart across the road the way they were supposed to. I could have felt devastated, protective, outraged at the licence being taken (naughty sheep!), but I felt excited: how amazing to create a template for all this activity, close attention and each clapperboard call of ”Action”.

Read the rest of this article from Sydney Morning Herald.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”