The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.

18, 10(12

Jim Cummings Follow

.lmmaker / @jimmycthatsme
Nov 11 · 14 min read

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum

A Field Guide to Making Movies in 2018

1. Manifesto
No one is going to help you. You will have to do it yourself.

The industry of 8lmmaking is changing so quickly towards producing

content that everyone, even brands are becoming media creators. All of
them understand the power of owning content, the modern War for
attention, and all of them are years behind you as an actual 8lmmaker.

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 1 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

Jim Cummings
@jimmycthatsme

When I was a nobody, with zero connections in

Hollywood, I got a team of friends together for a one

By gathering your friends, family, and talented, enthusiastic people you

can shoot a feature 8lm in 10–14 days, or a short 8lm in 1. Technological
advances have enabled consumers to perform the entirety of a studio’s
production and post-production inexpensively. The Democratization of
Feature 8lm distribution has resulted in a vacuum of predatory buying
practices which won’t keep 8lmmakers above the poverty line. Now,
anyone can pay to get their 8lm onto iTunes and pitched to NetKix
through inexpensive aggregators like Quiver. Paired with a genuine and
long-lasting care for the 8lms, 8lmmakers like us can impersonate and
outperform small to mid-range distribution companies. Facebook
advertising has become so comprehensive that anyone with a little
creative thinking and a Facebook page can 8nd their 8lm’s exact
audience while maintaining all of their ownership and income in
perpetuity. I will never understand why 8lmmakers give up every
percent of their 8lms’ rights, and all of their income, to people who don’t
actually care about their movie.

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 2 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

Jim Cummings

This is not the future, it’s the present. We are living in a moment where
seizing the means of production can translate into a long and industrious
career for yourself in 8lm.

Jim Cummings

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 3 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

People will attempt to convince you of otherwise, they will say you need
to work inside of their company or their system to qualify as a real
8lmmaker or to be taken seriously. They do this because if you work
inside of their system, you are their subordinate and they won’t have to
worry about you as their competition. Let’s be perfectly clear: You are
their competition. By pushing the boundaries in ways that they cannot
as a company or studio, you will win their audiences every time.

The current Hollywood systems, alongside a political-generational shift

towards sanitized 8lmmaking, has created a chasm in the market for
8lms that use the full breadth of the 1st Amendment showing realistic
profanity, realistic violence, realistic sex, realistic characters, and
therefor realistic humanity, which is all that audiences connect to.
Companies like A24 and Neon have made millions and won Oscars
scratching this itch amongst adults, and it is so crucial for us to join in.
Only we, as independents, can hurdle these uncool people to become the
direct competition to their craftless and forgettable 8lms.

We are the Backyard Pixar Revolution. We are coming for you.

. . .
https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 4 von 23
The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

A 90-year-old man walks into confession. He says, “Forgive me

Father, I’ve sinned. I slept with two 20-year-old women last night
outside of wedlock.” The father says, “That’s terrible, my son. When
was the last time you made confession?” He says, “I’ve never made
confession before father, I’m Jewish.” The Father says, “You’re
Jewish? Well what are you telling me for?” He says, “Well, Father,
I’m tellin’ everybody…”

There is little diWerence between oral storytelling and cinematic

storytelling; both are equations of dramatic and comedic set-ups and
payoWs. A 8lm should be equally compelling when told aloud. I record all
of my screenplays as podcasts and mix them to music and sound design;
I feel it is always better display of what the 8lm will be. Performing it out
loud forces you to think hard about each moment; how can we make this
stronger, what is the best version of this scene, how can we best use this
moment to conduct our audience’s emotions at this point of the story?
By focusing entirely on audience engagement, imagining that you are
the conductor of the rollercoaster at each moment, you are already
ahead of most.

2. Ideation
The ideation period for a 8lm is diWerent for everyone: some have scripts
delivered to them and they take their pick, Stephen King scours
newspapers for interesting stories, Christopher Guest tries not to think of
8lms for a full year and then an idea will hit him. Ideas come to me over a
long time and then all at once.

I never thought I was an artist, I looked at movies like a science: giant

formulas of light and sound that are structured to get emotions out of
audiences. I still think this way, but for years it discouraged me from
having con8dence in the arts.

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 5 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

Jim Cummings

I think about what will move people. I usually think about the drama
8rst because I always 8nd it easier to make something funny, it’s harder
to make something realistic, or life-a]rming. I say “listen to your
biology”. What actually makes you cry? You 8nd yourself crying, alone in
your car or at the cinema. Bing Bong’s big scene in Inside Out. The
illiterate player from A League of Their Own. Jonah Takalua. Write these
moments down. Ask yourself why are you moved by them. Analyze the
craftsmanship of the writing and the editing and the set-up that brought
you to this moment emotionally. It’s a magic trick. It’s sleight of hand,
you were distracted with the left hand using comedy or action, while the
right was setting up heartbreak. It’s a punchline.

Find what moves you, 8nd the humanity of the story, build your 8lms
from there, ask yourself: “how does this story work best over 90
minutes?”

3. Writing
https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 6 von 23
The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

3. Writing
There is a well-subscribed community who propagate and idolize
screenplay format, it’s a cargo cult that’s maintained by these
daydreamers, which almost exclusively glori8es and bene8ts old men.
The same goes for 35MM 8lm.

Screenwriting, as a professional fascination, is built on desires for

personal approval that can be as fruitless and full of wish-thinking as
gambling-addiction. Screenwriting is not 8lmmaking, it’s a part of
8lmmaking, it’s one of the blueprints, but it is not a good litmus test for
the quality of a movie, clearly; Studios sign huge checks to great
screenplays to then receive the worst Rotten Tomatoes scores in history.
The Thunder Road Screenplay received multiple 3/10 ratings on The
Blacklist. Yesterday, The Academy’s screenplay library reached out to
have it added to their collection. The screenplay for Dunkirk is 70 pages.
The only thing (Academy Award Winning Screenwriter) Diablo Cody
knew about screenwriting when she wrote Juno was that “the dialogue
is in the middle.” It’s ok to suck at writing screenplays if you know what
will make a great movie and if you want to understand how people
engage with movies in 2018, don’t study the script for Seabiscuit, get a
Reddit Account like a normal person.

Jim Cummings

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 7 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

A movie is meant to be performed, act every scene out and write down
the best dialogue. When most screenwriters write, they sit at a computer
and hear the characters speaking in their minds and they write that stuW
down. But by actually performing each scene aloud, you 8nd incredible
improvised moments that may take the scenes in better directions, and
the dialogue is authentic and not over-scripted because it is actually
coming out of human vocal cords.

Once the 8lm is written (once you have a good draft), record it as a
podcast. Record yourself reading it in a closet on the VoiceMemo App,
bring it into an editing software, mix it, add music and sound design. It
is easy to misinterpret an email, do not let someone misinterpret your
script. Share it with trusted friends and fellow 8lmmakers. It is the best
example of what your 8lm will be, and most importantly, no one will
ever read your script. That’s very important to remember: almost no
one will read your script.

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 8 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

Jim Cummings

When it comes to script notes, listen to the problem, not the diagnosis. If
people are saying “It feels slow here, maybe have the character do XYZ.”
All you have to hear is “It feels slow here-”, you’ll know how to 8x the
problem.

Anyone can do this.

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 9 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

4. Pre-pre-Production
Start an LLC speci8cally for your 8lm, you’ll need it. Open a business
checking account. Run a Kickstarter campaign. Shoot a video of you
discussing the project. Mimic the Thunder Road Kickstarter page; create
rewards that bring people on as Associate and Executive Producers,
include an email address at the bottom for people who want to invest
more in the 8lm by purchasing 1% of your 8lm’s LLC. Create a Facebook
page and global ads for your campaign that are driven speci8cally to
people who like similar content to your Film and then narrow that
audience to people who also like Kickstarter. Sell percentages of the 8lm
to cool and interested people: they will become your Hollywood.

Finding Producers

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 10 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

Hire your friends. Do not wait for or approach producers who you don’t
know, imagining that they’ll be fair to you in a contract. Recruit
producers who you like, who have made cool stuW on small budgets, who
can be scrappy. Empower the juggernauts around you, and if you don’t
know any, ask people who do (ask me!). There is also an incredible
Facebook group called “I Need a Producer” that is open to anyone, and
by posting about your project you will get submissions and meetings
with talented people in your area. My Producer’s name is Natalie
Metzger, she’s wonderful and always here to help:

Natalie Metzger (@metzart) |

Twitter
The latest Tweets from Natalie
Metzger (@metzart). Producer.
Director. Bookworm. Futurist. Nerd.
Los Angeles, CA
twitter.com

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 11 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

Jim Cummings
@jimmycthatsme

You need no one’s permission or acceptance to make

Actual Pre-production
PRODUCTION TEAM — Set meetings. You are welcome to have them at
our o]ces anytime. Get close with your production team. Share the
podcast with them. Discuss everything. Know exactly what needs to be
in the frame at all times. Basically, produce it with them until a few days
before production.

LOCATIONS — Find your locations by asking on Facebook, Craigslist,

AirBNB, or by dropping hand-written letters at good candidates.

CAST — Never wait for celebrities, make celebrities. Find the people who
get it. Who you could tell this story with, and who are up to the
challenge of making their performance a showcase of their abilities,
people who can give you options in rehearsal but who will spend their
own time rehearsing it to make it perfect and form-8t to the story.

CREW — Cast your crew with people your DP and Producers trust, who
are also willing to be scrappy. Find people who are talented and
enthusiastic. Hire people who you want to eat and drink with.

5. PRODUCTION
https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 12 von 23
The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

No jerks on set.
Work harder than anyone else. Hurry everywhere. Be incredibly kind
and loud. You are a camp counselor. If people are noisy before a take, say
“Quiet is nice. Quiet is nice.” Never be rude. Apologize. Always be lovely
to everyone, your crew is carrying heavy equipment up Kights of stairs
for you.

Be kind. That shouldn’t have to be said (our industry is insane). Make

sure people are happy and every department is genuinely listened to.
Schedule a meeting at the wrap of each week for each department to
raise any issues to prevent problems in the coming days.

Hire an on-set editor (if you can), have them set up at production
headquarters. Invite everyone to watch dailies. Be as inclusive as you
can, this is a learning experience for everyone and it can help the crew to

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 13 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

better understand the language of 8lm in general. It’s also fun. This is a
family.

SOUND
Record “wild-lines” and wild-sounds in every location immediately after
you camera-wrap a scene. This is crucial. You’ll need it in post.

Great sound makes the movie. Hire an on-set sound mixer who is
constantly conscious of the quality of the sound. Be considerate of how
sound can help to tell your story via transitions and elementally in each
scene. Buy or borrow a Zoom recorder and play with it. Lay sounds into a
scene to make it feel fuller; it’s always a surprise to see how much it
betters a scene.

6. POST-PRODUCTION

THE EDIT
Use Adobe Premiere. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you anything else.
AVID spends a lot of money to convince people to join their cult of
clunky, expensive, and complicated bullshit; Kodak 2.0. If you know how
to edit, amazing, if not, hire someone who will spend the time that is
needed to make your 8lm a masterpiece. Stay up late. For weeks, stay up
late. Finish the 8lm. Tweet that you need commercial work throughout.
Get a day job, come home and edit.

(Also, learn how to edit on YouTube. Everybody’s doing it.)

COLOR
Hire a colorist who you like and trust (here’s ours: Bossi Baker). Never
feel bad about pushing back. Bossi once said to me, ‘Dude, let’s make it
perfect. I’m on for a week, you’re the one who has to be happy with it for
the rest of your life.’

7. DISTRIBUTION AND ADVERTISING

Deliver the 8lm. Export it. It’s done. Host screenings for friends, submit
it to 8lm festivals based on this FilmFreeway list, if you have the money,

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 14 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

invest in an Indee.tv account because it’s fucking incredible and you

can watermark your screeners and also see how much of the Vlm
people watch. Otherwise, upload it to Vimeo with a password
protection and submit it to fests (it is ok to submit a screener without a
8nal mix or color, just keep uploading new versions to the same link
through Vimeo’s incredible “Replace Video” functionality).

Cut a trailer. Make a poster. Make them cool; they have to be cool. Reach
out to press through 8lm festival’s Attending Press Lists and ask them
kindly to write something about the short 8lm or trailer which is being
released next week. Use twitter to reach out to your heroes, ask for
advice!

Reach out to the Vimeo StaW on twitter! Ask them to consider your short
8lm as a Vimeo StaW Pick!

VimeoStaS (@VimeoStaS) |
Twitter
The latest Tweets from VimeoStaS
(@VimeoStaS). We are the staS of
Vimeo.
twitter.com

DISTRIBUTION:

Classic Distribution
You own the 8lm. You now have the ability to impersonate the job of a
distributor by selling your 8lm to buyers in diWerent territories around
the world, entirely on your own.

To 8nd 8lm buyers, most hire a sales agent, but you won’t need one, you
can become one. Google the buyers and distributors of your favorite or
similar 8lms in each territory. Find them on LinkedIn or Twitter. DM,
Email, or call them: “Hi, I’m representing the 8lm ________ and I’m
wondering if I can send a screener for consideration in your territory.”

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 15 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

Send the Indee.tv link, you’ll be noti8ed when they watch it, and how
much of it they watched. Reach out to the 8lmmakers who have worked
with them in the past. Ask about their deal, most are very cool and
transparent about it. Ask the distributors to make an oWer. You are now a
distributor.

Jim Cummings

We met a wonderful team of French distributors called Paname and they

distributed Thunder Road across France this September. Altogether, so
far, the 8lm has made more than $500,000 USD through French ticket
sales alone. We’re currently making deals for French TV and Blu-Ray
sales as well.

Aren’t they lovely?

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 16 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

My French family: @PanameDist

 — @jimmycthatsme

Self-distribution:
Start a Quiver account, create a project for your 8lm to be released on
iTunes and any other platform that you can aWord.

It takes 60 days for iTunes to release the title after everything is

delivered, set the pre-sale window to 30 days before the release.
Tastefully post about it everywhere.

In Theaters this October / Pre-order on iTunes today

https://t.co/koD5BtNWzf
https://t.co/PGjFFRcJ0t

 — @jimmycthatsme

Release the trailer on Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo only when the
iTunes pre-order link goes live. Make square videos for Instagram (under
15 seconds). Post the trailer to Reddit.

Create Facebook Ads for people who like movies that are similar to
yours. Narrow this audience to people who also like the iTunes store and

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 17 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

trailers. Include the pre-order link as a button under the trailer: this
allows audiences to be two thumb clicks away from buying your movie.

Coming Soon https://t.co/koD5BtwlaF

https://t.co/5WLcMXjSkZ

 — @jimmycthatsme

8. Hollywood
Only 18% of the music industry’s income last year went to musicians. This
is not the future of the 8lm industry, because all of our underlying
grandeur and infrastructure is becoming democratized. A lot of the
industry was created as a Social Network to separate the stars and
creators from the public. These organizations started as glori8ed mailing
addresses and call centers created to prevent fans from 8nding the
homes of the famous, but with the advent of Social media, and even
electronic mail, these older gates have less and less utility.

By building Facebook ads that hit your exact audience, you are doing the
work of 25 people in any distribution company or studio, for free, and
you are doing it cheaply and better and you still own the Dlm.

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 18 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

This is all that we had to edit, release, market, and

distribute our feature film. Whenever anyone makes
you feel like you need a lot of money or a studio to be
taken seriously, remember this photograph.

 — @jimmycthatsme

9. Work/Life Balance
This one is hard. I’m not going to pretend to be good at it. It’s not easy. Be
nice to your partner, if you have one. It’s ok to relax. It’s ok to take a
break. Making movies with your best friends can be an endorphin rush,
your brain is surged with excitement and oxytocin and the aftermath of
that experience can feel like a vacuum. You may feel lonely while
spending your nights struggling to make this dream come true for your
team in the editing room. Change before you have to, and if you are
down and out, I am always just a Facebook call away.

Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of a snakebite,

and furthermore always carry a small snake." - W.C.
Fields

 — @jimmycthatsme

Overall, you are the person who does the thing. You make movies,
everybody else just talks about it. People will bring you in for meetings
just to talk, it’s a compliment! They’re looking for an in-o]ce 8eld trip to

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 19 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

meet the factory workers. If you’re lucky you’ll get a ton of those.
Hollywood often idolizes nice clothes and business talk, it emulates the
Winklevoss Twins, but never forget that along this new landscape, you
are inventing Facebook on a laptop in your dorm room (in pajamas) and
that’s ok. Your ability to “seize the means of production”, your potential
to grow an audience for yourself, and your wherewithal to self-distribute
will often remove these people from their professional necessity and
eventually their relevance.

You know what you want to be. Work in a way that maximizes that
future.

Learn every job in film. Surround yourself with people

who are serious about movies. Push each other to
make better work. Look over each others' shoulders to
learn. Examine how YOU tell a story. Work toward
making a film that you can make on your own every
day.

 — @jimmycthatsme

. . .

Here are many of the O]cial Selection Short Films of Sundance and
SXSW. I regularly turn to these to guide my metronome for what artwork
is considered currently signi8cant by the people who watch everything.

https://www.shortoftheweek.com/channels/sundance-8lms/
https://www.shortoftheweek.com/channels/sxsw-collection/

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 20 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

The 2018 Short to Feature Lab Fellows

*This guide was written by me, a dude who has had the privilege of learning
every job on a Dlm set, who produced and edited videos for 10 years, and
learned what made ineJective Dlms not work from the inside before making
movies on his own. It is often based on the presumption that you know how
to edit video and that you’ll be handling a lot of the post-production yourself
or with friends and inexpensive partners. If not, I will provide other helpful
insight however needed. If you believe that these are unrealistic
achievements, or that I am the victim of Survivor’s Bias, know that I once
believed that too, and that while you say “I can’t”, pout and cross your
arms, someone else is taking your spot.

-Jim Cummings

Support us by buying our movie!

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 21 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

Thunder Road is now on iTunes in the USA. You can

literally watch it right now.
https://t.co/koD5BtwlaF

 — @jimmycthatsme

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 22 von 23

The Short to Feature Lab Curriculum – Jim Cummings – Medium 14.11.18, 10(12

https://medium.com/@jimmycthatsme/shorttofeaturecurriculum-b645dbaeae25 Seite 23 von 23