How to Budget an Indie Film: A Practical Guide for UK Filmmakers

Learning how to budget an indie film is, for most of us, a process of finding out what things cost at the precise moment you can no longer afford them. You plan the shoot, you get excited, you start pricing up kit hire, and somewhere between the camera package and the catering invoice you have a quiet sit down and a rethink. This guide is designed to spare you at least some of that particular experience — by laying out where the money actually goes, what you genuinely can’t skimp on, and where a bit of creative problem-solving goes a long way.

The principles here apply broadly to indie filmmaking wherever you are, but the specific figures, legal context, and funding landscape are UK-focused. If you haven’t sorted your funding yet, I’d suggest starting with the UK indie film funding guide first, then coming back here once you know roughly what you’re working with.




Above the Line vs Below the Line: What the Terms Actually Mean

If you’ve spent any time around professional film budgets, you’ll have encountered the terms “above the line” and “below the line.” They sound like accounting jargon designed to make simple things complicated, but the distinction is actually useful.

Above the line covers the creative elements: writer, director, producer, and principal cast. These are the people whose involvement is negotiated before the production begins and whose fees are often fixed regardless of how long the shoot runs. Below the line covers everything else — the physical and technical costs of making the film actually happen: crew, equipment, locations, transport, catering, post-production. On a big studio picture the split between the two is significant. On a low-budget indie, it’s less rigidly applied, but understanding which category a cost sits in helps you think clearly about where the money is going and where the decisions lie.

Pre-Production Costs: The Budget Before the Budget

Pre-production has a habit of being undercosted, because it happens before the shoot and therefore feels like it shouldn’t count yet. It counts. Everything that needs to happen before the camera rolls — script development, casting breakdowns, production design, location scouting, insurance, legal paperwork — has a cost attached to it, either in money or in someone’s time, and often both.

Script development is worth budgeting for even if you’re writing it yourself. Software licences (Final Draft and Fade In are the industry standards), printing costs for read-throughs and rehearsals, and any development notes you commission all add up. If you’re optioning existing material or adapting something, add the rights cost to this column.

Location scouting is time and travel. If your DOP is involved in scouting, which is good practice, their time has a value even if it’s not a line on an invoice. Factor it in.

Insurance — public liability at minimum, equipment and employer’s liability if applicable — should be arranged in pre-production and costed at this stage, because some locations won’t let you through the door without proof of cover. I’ve covered the legal paperwork side in more detail in the UK film legal basics guide, including what each type of insurance actually does.

Cast and Crew Costs

This is usually the largest single category on an indie budget, and the one where the temptation to work with “favours” is highest. Favours are a legitimate part of low-budget filmmaking, especially at the short film end, but they need to be handled carefully.

If you’re paying crew — even some crew, even on a mixed deferred-plus-expenses basis — BECTU publishes recommended rate cards that are worth knowing as a benchmark. You don’t have to hit those rates on a micro-budget production, but understanding what the industry considers reasonable puts you in a much better position when negotiating and helps avoid the situation where someone feels exploited after the fact.

Equity rates apply to any performers who are Equity members, and working outside those rates on a production with Equity talent is something to take legal advice on before you assume it’s fine. For non-union short films with cast who aren’t Equity members, the rate is negotiable, but “negotiable” still means “something in writing before day one,” not “we’ll sort it after.”

Expenses — travel, parking, meals taken outside of on-set catering — should be budgeted as cash costs even on a no-fee production. A crew member travelling two hours each way on their own money, for a shoot that then doesn’t provide lunch, is a crew member who won’t come back for the second day.

Equipment: Hire, Borrow, or Own?

Equipment hire is one of the most variable costs on an indie budget, because the range between shooting on a borrowed mirrorless camera with a couple of lenses and hiring a proper cinema package with a full lighting rig is enormous. Neither is wrong — it depends entirely on the project — but knowing which category you’re in before you budget is essential.

Camera hire in the UK typically runs from around £150–£300 per day for a solid prosumer or entry-level cinema camera package, up to several hundred per day for higher-end options. Lighting and grip add significantly on top. Sound equipment — a decent boom, a proper recorder, radio mics — is often underbudgeted because it’s less glamorous than camera gear, and the films that pay for that mistake in the edit are legion.

Hire houses often do multi-day or week rates that represent significant savings over day rates. If your shoot is more than two or three days, always ask for a weekly deal. Many will also give discounts to productions that can demonstrate a student or emerging filmmaker credential.

The “borrow a mate’s camera” option is fine for certain productions and genuinely not fine for others. If the project has any commercial intent, you need equipment insurance. If the equipment breaks, you need to know who’s paying. Get it in writing before it comes onto your set.

Location Costs

Locations sit in a strange middle ground between “free” and “expensive” depending almost entirely on who owns what and how well you can negotiate. Genuinely free locations — a friend’s house, a space you have access to through other means — still have indirect costs: restoration if you change anything, insurance requirements, permit costs if it’s council-owned land.

Location fees for commercial spaces vary wildly. A café or shop might want nothing if you’re shooting outside hours and leaving the place exactly as you found it, or they might want a few hundred pounds a day. Film-friendly locations increasingly know their market value. Budget for the fee you’d need to pay to secure the location rather than the fee you’re hoping to negotiate, and treat anything you negotiate below that as a saving rather than a plan.

London and other major cities have Film Offices that can advise on permits, fees, and council-owned locations. Outside those areas, your local council is the first port of call. Budget for permit costs from the start, because finding out a key location requires a filming permit three days before your shoot is not a fun surprise.

Transport and Catering

Two budget lines that get underestimated on almost every first production.

Transport covers vehicle hire if you need to move equipment, fuel for those vehicles, parking at locations (particularly expensive in cities and almost never free on a shoot day), and travel expenses for cast and crew who are coming from a distance. On a multi-location shoot across several days, transport costs can rival your equipment hire costs. Map out your shoot days against your locations before you finalise the transport budget.

Catering is the one I feel most strongly about. Feed your cast and crew properly. This is not a nice-to-have: it is the single most direct investment you can make in the quality and morale of your production. Hungry people make mistakes, work slowly, and don’t come back. A hot meal on a cold exterior shoot is worth more to a volunteer crew member than almost anything else you can offer them. Budget for it as a real cost from the beginning — a rough rule of thumb is £8–£12 per person per meal in the UK for a reasonably decent on-set catering arrangement, more if you’re going through a specialist film catering company.

Post-Production: Where Budgets Go to Die

Post-production is the budget category most likely to expand beyond its original estimate, because it’s the phase where you find out what the footage actually is rather than what you hoped it would be. An extra shooting day costs money upfront and is painful. An extra month in the edit costs money you may not have budgeted and delays everything downstream.

A realistic post-production budget covers editing (either editor fees or your own time, which has a value even if you’re not billing yourself), colour grading, audio post-production and sound mix, any visual effects, music licensing or original score composition, and the creation of deliverables — the specific file formats and technical specifications required by whichever festivals, broadcasters, or platforms you’re targeting.

Music is its own budget line and one that catches a lot of indie filmmakers out. Licensing existing commercial music for a film is rarely cheap, and the sync rights and master rights need to be cleared separately. An original score from a composer working on deferred terms is often the practical solution on a low budget, but that still needs a contract specifying clearly who owns the copyright afterwards.

Marketing, Distribution and Festival Costs

If you’re making a short for festival submission, budget for entry fees from the start. Major international festivals charge anywhere from $30 to $80 or more per submission, and submitting to ten or fifteen festivals adds up quickly. Platforms like FilmFreeway consolidate submissions, but they don’t make the fees disappear.

Promotional materials — a proper poster, a trailer, a press kit — have costs attached even if you’re doing some of the work yourself. Distribution, if you’re pursuing it, may require errors and omissions insurance (which I covered in the legal guide) and technical deliverables that cost time and sometimes money to prepare.

The Contingency: Non-Negotiable

Every film budget should include a contingency line of between ten and fifteen percent of the total below-the-line costs. Not because you’re planning for things to go wrong, but because things go wrong. Weather delays exterior shoots. Equipment fails. A location falls through at forty-eight hours’ notice. A key cast member gets ill. The contingency is not an optional buffer for if things get tricky — it’s the money that lets you finish the film when they do.

If you make it to the end of post-production with the contingency untouched, congratulations: you’ve just given yourself a marketing and festival budget. That’s a much better problem to have than discovering mid-shoot that you have no financial headroom for the unexpected.

How to Structure Your Budget Document

A film budget isn’t a single number — it’s a document that breaks a production down into every cost category, assigns estimates to each line, and gives you a running total you can check against reality as the production progresses. The structure matters because it’s what lets you make decisions: when something costs more than expected, you need to know immediately which other line you can adjust to compensate, rather than discovering the shortfall on the last day of the shoot.

The standard approach is to organise your budget by department and phase. Pre-production costs come first, then production broken down by department (camera, lighting, sound, art department, wardrobe, transport, catering, locations, cast, crew), then post-production (edit, grade, audio post, music, VFX, deliverables), then marketing and distribution, and finally the contingency at the bottom. Each department head should ideally have sight of their own section so they can flag early if their estimates are running over.

Within each line, break costs down as specifically as you can. “Equipment hire” is not a budget line — “camera package hire, 5 days at £200/day” is a budget line. The more specific you are, the less room there is for costs to silently expand, and the more useful your budget is as a document you can actually manage against rather than a rough guess you made in pre-production and then tried not to look at.

Build in a column for actual spend alongside your estimated spend, and update it as you go. The gap between the two columns is your production’s financial health in real time. If you’re significantly over in one area by day two of the shoot, knowing immediately lets you react. Finding out at the end that you’ve overspent means you’ve lost the ability to do anything about it.

UK productions should also keep records with HMRC in mind from the start. If you’re paying anyone as an employee rather than a self-employed contractor — and the distinction matters, with HMRC taking a dim view of misclassification — PAYE obligations apply. Even on a very small production it’s worth taking brief advice on how your payment arrangements are classified, because sorting it correctly from the start is considerably less painful than a tax compliance issue afterwards.

Budget Tools Worth Knowing

For most indie and short film budgets, a well-structured spreadsheet is perfectly sufficient. Google Sheets works fine and has the advantage of being free and shareable. Gorilla Budget is a free dedicated film budgeting tool that provides proper industry-standard budget templates and is worth downloading if you want something purpose-built.

Movie Magic Budgeting is the industry standard on larger professional productions, but it’s expensive and almost certainly overkill for a short film or micro-budget feature. Learn it later, when someone else is paying for the licence.

Where to Save and Where Not to Skimp

The areas where creative frugality genuinely works: production design and props sourced from charity shops and borrowed from cast and crew, entry-level crew positions filled by film school students gaining experience, location negotiation with local businesses, and shooting schedules structured to minimise kit hire days.

The areas where cutting corners costs you far more than you saved: sound equipment, insurance, catering, contracts, and post-production time. A film with beautiful cinematography and unusable audio is not a watchable film. A production without insurance is a liability the moment anything goes wrong. A crew running on empty by midday makes mistakes that cost you time you don’t have.

Budget generously for the things that make the film possible, and creatively for the things that make it look good. The two are not the same list.

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UK Film Legal Basics: Contracts, Releases and Permits Nobody Warns You About

Getting your UK film legal basics sorted is not why anyone picks up a camera. You get into filmmaking for the itch to tell a story, the thrill of watching something you imagined turn into something you can actually point a lens at. Then, somewhere around your second short film, you discover that half the job is paperwork you didn’t know existed, signed by people who’d much rather be acting than reading small print.

I learned most of this the hard way, which is the traditional method for indie filmmakers everywhere. If you’ve already worked through funding your production, this is the natural next step: here’s the legal groundwork every UK indie production needs, minus the bits that only apply if you’re shooting a car chase through Piccadilly Circus.




Contracts: Get It In Writing, Even When You Trust Everyone

The awkward truth about working with friends, or friends-of-friends, on a low-budget shoot is that goodwill doesn’t hold up when someone’s unpaid invoice becomes a dispute six months later. A basic deal memo or contract for cast and crew doesn’t need to run to twenty pages, but it does need to cover who’s doing what, for how much (even if that’s “expenses only” or “deferred payment”), and what happens to the footage afterwards.

Clear job descriptions and agreed terms aren’t just good practice — they’re the difference between a smooth shoot and a group chat that goes very quiet after wrap.

Cast and crew contracts don’t need to be identical, because they’re covering different risks. A cast agreement should nail down the role, the shoot dates you actually need them for, any nudity or intimacy clauses if relevant (and whether an intimacy coordinator is involved), credit billing, and — critically — a clear grant of rights to use their likeness and performance in the finished film and any promotional material. Without that last part, you can end up with a finished film you’re not actually allowed to distribute.

A crew contract cares less about likeness and more about scope of work, equipment responsibility, and ownership of anything they create. If your DOP is bringing their own kit, say so and say who’s liable if it’s damaged. If your composer is writing an original score, the contract needs to specify who owns the copyright afterwards — by default, this can get murky, and “we’ll sort it out later” is how indie films end up unable to license their own soundtrack.

If you’re working with anyone under a union banner, it’s worth knowing the landscape. Equity covers performers, BECTU covers the wider crew and broadcasting side, and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain covers scriptwriters. You don’t have to be a union production to benefit from knowing their guidance on pay rates and working practices, even as a benchmark for what’s reasonable.

Funding, Crowdfunding and the Legal Small Print

I’ve covered UK indie film funding properly in a separate guide, so I won’t repeat all of it here — but it’s worth flagging where funding and legal paperwork overlap, because they overlap more than people expect.

If you’re running a crowdfunding campaign, transparency isn’t just good manners, it’s a legal expectation: be accurate about what backers are actually funding and deliver on whatever rewards you promised, because unfulfilled crowdfunding rewards can and do end up as consumer disputes. If you’re paying cast or crew on deferred terms — “you’ll get paid once the film sells” — put the deferral in writing with clear conditions for when and how that payment triggers. A verbal “you’ll get paid eventually” is not a contract, and it’s not something anyone can enforce.

Insurance: The Bit That Actually Lets You Film

Insurance sits slightly apart from the rest of this because in practice, it’s often the gatekeeper: most UK locations and councils won’t grant filming permission without proof of public liability insurance in hand, so it needs sorting in early pre-production rather than as an afterthought.

Public liability insurance covers injury or property damage caused during your shoot — the classic scenario being a light stand going through someone’s window, or a member of the public tripping over a cable. Beyond that, most productions also want equipment insurance in case anything you’ve hired or borrowed is damaged or stolen, and if you’re paying cast or crew, employer’s liability insurance is a legal requirement in the UK the moment you have anyone working for you in an employment-like relationship, even briefly.

Short-term production insurance policies exist specifically for indie and student productions and are usually far cheaper than people assume for a single shoot or short run. It’s worth getting quotes before you lock your shoot dates, not after, since some insurers want notice.

Release Forms: Your Get-Out-Of-Lawsuit Card

Here’s a fact that surprises most first-time filmmakers: you don’t legally need permission to film identifiable members of the public in the UK, because there’s no general expectation of privacy in a public space. But that’s the floor, not the ceiling — and if you’re publishing footage commercially, especially with someone as the clear focus of a shot, a signed model release form is standard practice, not paranoia.

If you’re filming for a business purpose and collecting footage of identifiable people, you may well count as a “data controller” under GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, which brings its own obligations around consent, transparency, and what happens if someone later asks you to take their face out of your film. Getting a signature at the time saves an enormous amount of grief later.

Location releases are the other half of this. If you want to film on someone’s property — private or council-owned — you need explicit permission from whoever actually has the authority to give it. That sounds obvious until you’re standing in a leased shop unit and the person saying yes turns out to be a sub-tenant with no legal standing to authorise anything. A proper release should nail down the exact site (postal address, not “that café near the station”), the dates and times you need access including set-up and breakdown, what you’re allowed to do while you’re there, and whether you’re changing anything about the space that needs restoring afterwards.

Health and Safety: The Risk Assessment You Can’t Skip

This is the one that gets treated as pure box-ticking right up until something goes wrong, at which point it becomes the single most important document on the production. If you have anyone working for you — paid, deferred, or favour-based — you have a duty of care towards them, and a written risk assessment covering your locations, equipment, and any specialist activity (stunts, weapons, animals, working at height, night shoots) is the standard way of showing you’ve actually thought about it rather than just hoping for the best.

It doesn’t need to be complicated. For most low-budget shoots it’s a page or two: what could go wrong, how likely it is, what you’re doing to reduce the risk, and who’s responsible for checking it on the day. If anything involving explosives, armourers, or specialist stunt work is on your shoot, the relevant practitioners should hold recognised qualifications through the Joint Industry Grading Scheme, and the police need to be informed in advance if weapons of any kind — including replicas — are being used.

Film Permits in the UK: When “Just Turning Up” Isn’t an Option

Small-crew filming on public land like streets and parks generally doesn’t need a permit in the UK. It gets complicated fast, though, the moment your shoot blocks a pavement, uses large equipment or artificial lighting, involves drones, or lands somewhere with its own filming policy — which increasingly includes major cities and busy public spaces. The rule of thumb: if your shoot could plausibly annoy a council officer, ring the council first. Bring your public liability insurance documents when you ask — most councils will want to see them before granting permission.

Drones are their own small nightmare of bureaucracy, governed by the Civil Aviation Authority rather than your local council, and flying one over residential rooftops without the right permissions is a good way to turn a low-budget short into an unplanned legal case study.

Errors and Omissions Insurance: The One Nobody Thinks About Until Distribution

This is the insurance that catches indie filmmakers out precisely because it’s not needed until later — and by then, half your paperwork trail is scattered across old email threads and someone’s WhatsApp. Errors and omissions (E&O) insurance covers legal claims arising from your finished film: defamation, copyright infringement, unauthorised use of someone’s likeness, that sort of thing. Distributors and streaming platforms increasingly won’t touch a film without it, because they want that risk covered before they’ll agree to release it.

The practical takeaway is this: every release form, every music clearance, every location agreement you signed during production is exactly what an E&O insurer — and later, a distributor’s legal team — will want to see. Keep a single folder, physical or digital, with every signed document from day one. Future you, trying to close a distribution deal eighteen months after wrap, will be very grateful.

The Bits People Forget

A handful of smaller things trip up more indie productions than you’d expect:

  • Child performers need to be licensed through the local education authority in the area where you’re filming, and the licence dictates working hours and safeguarding requirements. This one’s non-negotiable and worth sorting weeks in advance, not the night before your shoot day.
  • Weapons on set — including replicas and non-functioning props — require you to inform the police beforehand, even on private land.
  • Music and copyrighted material caught in shot or used on the soundtrack needs clearing. A song playing on a car radio in the background of your scene is still someone’s copyrighted work.
  • Defamation applies even to fictional characters if they’re recognisably based on a real, living person. “Based on a true story” is doing a lot of legal heavy lifting in your opening titles for a reason.

None Of This Is a Substitute for an Actual Solicitor

I’ll say the obvious bit plainly: I’m a filmmaker, not a lawyer, and this post is the “know what to ask about” guide, not the “here’s your legally binding advice” guide. For anything with real money, real risk, or a location owner who seems litigious, get a solicitor who actually knows UK media law to look over your paperwork. Organisations like the British Film Commission also publish up-to-date regulatory guidance worth bookmarking. It costs less than you think, and considerably less than the alternative.

What I can tell you from experience is that the productions which sail through smoothly are almost always the ones where someone sat down before day one and got the boring bits sorted. Treat your contracts and releases as part of the craft, not an obstacle to it, and the actual filmmaking gets to be a lot more fun.

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So You Want to Fund an Indie Film: Here’s What Nobody Tells You

There is a particular kind of madness that afflicts filmmakers. Not the creative kind — that one’s useful, even necessary — but the financial kind. The kind that has you staring at a spreadsheet at two in the morning, wondering whether you can convince your aunt to part with her savings in exchange for an executive producer credit and a thank-you in twelve-point font. The kind that makes crowdfunding platforms look like lifelines and your own credit card look like a perfectly reasonable production budget. If you are reading this, you are probably afflicted. Welcome. Sit down. Let’s talk money.




Why Indie Film Funding Is Its Own Particular Beast

Traditional industries have banks. Tech startups have venture capital. Indie filmmakers have optimism, a hard drive full of reference clips, and — if they’re lucky — a distant relative who once said they thought movies were “interesting.” The gap between having a script you believe in and actually getting it made is not merely a financial one; it is a fundamental one. You are asking people to invest in something intangible, something that doesn’t exist yet, something that might lose money, and — this is the truly audacious part — you are asking them to trust you to make it. That takes a particular kind of pitch, a particular kind of persistence, and, frankly, a particular kind of nerve.

The good news is that people have done it. The better news is that some of them have done it spectacularly. The news you didn’t ask for is that most of them had a plan — and the ones who didn’t have a plan mostly have a cautionary tale instead.

Know What You’re Asking For Before You Ask Anyone

The single most common mistake early-career filmmakers make is approaching funding before they have any real sense of what they need the money for. Not “to make the film” — that is not an answer, that is a sentence. Funders, whether they are grant panels, crowdfunding backers, or private investors, want to know how their contribution translates into something tangible. A location. A day of shooting. Post-production sound. Catering for a crew of eight for three days in a field in Shropshire (this one will cost more than you think).

Before you approach a single person with a cheque book, build a proper budget breakdown. Know your above-the-line costs — talent, writer, director — and your below-the-line costs — crew, equipment, locations, insurance, catering, transport. Know your post-production budget and your contingency (which should be no less than ten per cent, and will almost certainly not be enough). Know the difference between what you need and what would be nice. The moment a funder asks “where does the money go?” and you hesitate, the conversation is already over.

The Crowdfunding Chapter (The One Where Everyone Thinks It’s Easy)

Crowdfunding has democratised indie film financing in ways that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago, and it has also produced more failed campaigns than any other single approach, which tells you something important about democracy. Platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have enabled genuinely remarkable projects to find their audiences before a frame was ever shot — but they have also taught an entire generation of filmmakers the hard way that “if you build it, they will come” is a line from a film, not a funding strategy.

The case study that defined crowdfunding for independent film is the Veronica Mars Movie. In 2013, creator Rob Thomas and star Kristen Bell launched a Kickstarter campaign to revive the cancelled television series as a feature film. They hit their $2 million target in less than eleven hours. They ultimately raised over $5.7 million from nearly 92,000 backers. The lesson most people took from this was “crowdfunding works.” The lesson they should have taken was “crowdfunding works when you have an existing, passionate, and sizeable fanbase who have been waiting years for exactly this thing.” Rob Thomas did not build his audience during the campaign. He had built it over three seasons of television. The campaign was the harvest, not the planting.

A more instructive example for first-time filmmakers is Blue Ruin (2013), directed by Jeremy Saulnier. Saulnier raised $37,000 on Kickstarter — a modest sum by any measure — to complete a film that went on to win the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes and earn widespread critical acclaim. His campaign worked not because of a pre-existing audience but because of a clear creative vision, transparent communication about what the money would do, and compelling early footage that made backers believe in what they were funding. He also clearly communicated what the project was. He didn’t promise the world. He promised a specific film, made in a specific way, by someone who demonstrably knew what they were doing.

If you are planning a crowdfunding campaign, the practical tips are these: set a realistic target (the all-or-nothing model means an overambitious goal just means you get nothing), build your audience before you launch (not during), offer meaningful rewards that don’t bankrupt you to fulfil (physical merchandise costs more to produce and ship than you will believe until you have done it once), and communicate obsessively throughout the campaign. Update your backers. Thank them publicly. Make them feel like co-conspirators rather than ATMs.

Grants: The Money That Doesn’t Want Anything Back (Mostly)

In the United Kingdom, the landscape of film grants is considerably more navigable than many filmmakers assume — which is to say, it is still quite difficult, but it is not a secret. The BFI Film Fund is the obvious starting point, offering development and production funding for projects with a demonstrable cultural footprint and a clear sense of their audience. Screen Scotland, Creative Wales, and Northern Ireland Screen operate equivalent bodies for projects with a strong regional identity and attachment. For short films — which remain the most viable entry point for emerging filmmakers — the BFI’s short film programmes, as well as schemes run by organisations like Film London and regional screen agencies, represent a realistic first rung.

The critical thing to understand about grant funding is that it is not simply a matter of having a good script. Grant panels fund filmmakers as much as they fund films. They want to see evidence that you understand the work, understand your audience, and have the team to deliver. Your director’s statement, your producer’s track record, your casting approach, your distribution strategy — these matter. A film with a mediocre script and an exceptional team will get further in grant applications than an exceptional script with no supporting evidence that anyone involved has made anything before. This is frustrating if you are at the beginning of your career, but it is not insurmountable. Build the track record with short films. Enter festivals. Win things, or at least submit things. The grant panel wants to fund someone who is going somewhere, not someone who intends to go somewhere.

One piece of advice that is less commonly given: read the rejection letters carefully. If a funding body takes the trouble to tell you why your application was unsuccessful, that is free development notes from people who have read thousands of applications. Use them.

Private Investment: The Art of the Room

Private film investment — sometimes called “soft money,” sometimes called “the conversation you have to have over dinner” — operates on a completely different logic to grants and crowdfunding. Where grants want cultural value and crowdfunding wants community, private investors want some combination of return, prestige, and the profound thrill of being able to tell people at parties that they’re in the film business. This is not cynicism; it is useful information. Understanding what your investor actually wants from the experience is the first step to giving it to them.

The SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) and EIS (Enterprise Investment Scheme) are the UK government’s gift to independent film producers — tax relief mechanisms that allow private investors to offset a significant portion of their investment against their income tax liability, reducing their effective risk considerably. An investor putting £50,000 into an SEIS-eligible production can claim back up to fifty per cent of that in income tax relief, which means their actual exposure is £25,000 before the film has earned a penny. This does not make the investment risk-free, and you should never imply that it does, but it makes the conversation considerably more interesting for a certain class of high-net-worth individual. If your production company is not set up to receive SEIS or EIS investment, fix that before you approach anyone.

The pitch itself is a skill that can be learned, and the most important thing to learn is this: lead with the story, not the business. Investors who are coming to independent film for purely financial reasons have better options. The ones who say yes are doing so at least partly because the project has moved them, excited them, or made them feel that they are part of something. Show them who the film is for. Show them the world. Let them feel the thing before you show them the spreadsheet. Then show them the spreadsheet.

Co-Productions, Partnerships, and the Creative Deals You Haven’t Thought Of

Not all film funding comes in the form of cash, and it is worth spending time thinking creatively about what resources you actually need rather than what money you need to buy those resources. Equipment can be borrowed, deferred, or bartered. Locations can be negotiated in exchange for credit, coverage, or a share of proceeds that will probably never materialise but cost nothing to offer. Post-production facilities sometimes offer discounted rates to emerging filmmakers in exchange for the association. Crew members at the beginning of their own careers may work at reduced rates for the right project.

International co-productions are a more formal version of the same logic. If your story has a genuine connection to another country — a location, a cast member, a thematic relevance — then a formal co-production arrangement with a production company in that territory can unlock their national funding schemes as well as your own. The Eurimages fund exists specifically to support European co-productions. The Creative Europe MEDIA programme offers development funding for projects with genuine cross-border potential. These are not easy routes, but they are real ones, and they are particularly worth exploring if your story has any international dimension at all.

The Big No-Nos (Or: How to Guarantee That Nobody Gives You Any Money, Ever)

We arrive, inevitably, at the cautionary portion of proceedings. The following are not theoretical errors. They are things that actual filmmakers have done, are doing right now, and will continue to do despite all available evidence.

Approaching investors without any development material. A logline and a dream is not a pitch package. At a minimum, you need a script or a treatment, a director’s vision document, a provisional budget, and some sense of who will be watching this film and how. Arriving at a meeting without these things does not communicate passion. It communicates unpreparedness, which communicates risk, which communicates the end of the meeting.

Promising returns you cannot guarantee. Independent film is a high-risk investment. The overwhelming majority of independent films do not return their production budget from theatrical release alone. You must be honest about this. Promising investors a specific return is not only misleading — in some circumstances, depending on how the investment is structured, it can be legally problematic. Speak to a film finance solicitor before you make any commitments. Yes, this costs money. No, it costs less than the alternative.

Launching a crowdfunding campaign with no audience and no plan. The campaign page going live is not the beginning of your marketing. It should be somewhere around the middle. If you have not spent weeks building awareness, identifying your community, and lining up early backers before the campaign launches, the algorithm will bury you and you will spend thirty days watching your total inch upward by single digits while sending increasingly desperate emails to people who went to school with you.

Spending development funding on production. This sounds obvious until it happens to you. Development money is for developing the project — writing, research, attachments, legal costs. If you spend it on a shoot day because you got excited, you have made the classic error of starting before you are ready, and you will either run out of money mid-production (catastrophic) or produce something you cannot finish (also catastrophic, but with the added grief of having footage you can’t use).

Failing to involve a producer early enough. Directors make films. Producers make films possible. If you are a writer-director working alone, you need a producer — someone whose specific job is to think about money, logistics, and the thousand practical considerations that creative people tend to find less interesting than the creative considerations. The best producer-director relationships in independent film are partnerships of genuine equals, and the best time to establish that relationship is before the funding conversations begin, not after.

Giving away too much too early. Equity investment comes with strings. Give away a significant share of your film too early, before you have established its value through grants, attachments, or festival interest, and you may find yourself with very little left to offer — or very little control over the project — by the time the serious money arrives. Understand what you are trading and what it is worth. Again: film finance solicitor. Worth every penny.

The Bit Where We Talk About Mindset (Bear With Me)

There is a version of this article that ends with a list of links — funding bodies, platforms, schemes — and that version would be useful, in the way that a map of a mountain is useful. But the thing about funding an independent film is that the obstacles are not primarily informational. The information is out there. The grants exist. The platforms exist. The investors exist. The obstacle, more often than not, is the sustained, cheerful, relentless willingness to keep making the case for your project in the face of rejection, silence, and the occasional well-meaning suggestion that you might want to consider a more stable career.

The filmmakers who get their films made are not always the ones with the best scripts or the most original ideas. They are, disproportionately, the ones who refuse to take no as a permanent answer. They are the ones who take the rejection letter, find the useful note in it, and use it to make the next application stronger. They are the ones who treat every conversation as a potential relationship rather than a transaction. They are the ones who understand that funding is not something that happens to your film — it is something you build, brick by brick, conversation by conversation, over a period of time that will test your patience and your conviction in roughly equal measure.

The money is out there. The film is in you. The gap between those two facts is bridgeable. It just requires a plan, a pitch, and the kind of persistence that would probably be considered unreasonable in any other industry.

Welcome to filmmaking.

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Character in Filmmaking: The Engine Behind Every Great Story

There is a moment, if you spend enough time writing screenplays, when a character stops being yours. You’ve named them, given them a backstory, decided what they want and why they can’t have it — and then, somewhere between draft two and draft four, they start making decisions you didn’t plan for. They say something you didn’t write. They go somewhere you didn’t intend. And the strange, slightly unnerving truth is that this is not a problem. This is the whole point.

I’ve experienced it myself. A character I was developing for an original project — someone I’d thought of as relatively minor, a supporting presence to carry a scene or two — quietly refused to stay minor. They had opinions about everything. They pushed back against the plot I’d constructed around them. At some point I stopped trying to control them and started following them instead. The script got better almost immediately. I wish I could claim I knew that would happen. I did not.

Character in filmmaking is not a component of storytelling. It is storytelling. Everything else — structure, pacing, cinematography, score — exists in service of the people on screen. Get the character wrong, and you can have the most technically accomplished film in the world and still lose your audience somewhere around the twenty-minute mark. Get the character right, and people will forgive you an enormous amount.




Plot Is Just What Happens to Them

There’s a temptation, particularly when you’re starting out, to think of story in terms of events. Something happens, then something else happens, then there’s a twist, then it resolves. This is not a story. This is a sequence of events. A story is what those events mean to someone — and that someone has to be a person we care about, or none of it lands.

Consider The Shawshank Redemption. On paper, the plot is: man goes to prison, spends twenty years there, escapes. You could describe it in a sentence and it sounds almost mundane. What makes it one of the most beloved films ever made is not the escape — it’s Andy Dufresne, and Red, and the specific texture of their friendship, and what hope costs when the world has made very clear it has no interest in rewarding it. The escape is satisfying because we’ve spent two hours understanding exactly what it means to these two particular people. Strip out the character, and you’ve got a prison documentary with a mildly implausible ending.

Field of Dreams — one of my all-time favourite films, and yes, I will defend that choice vigorously and without apology — is a film about a man who builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield because a disembodied voice told him to. By every rational measure, this is absurd. And yet it works, devastatingly, because Ray Kinsella is drawn with such specificity and such emotional truth that you never once question why he does it. His relationship with his father, his sense of having missed something irretrievable, his willingness to follow an impossible instruction on the off-chance it leads somewhere meaningful — these are not plot mechanics. These are the film. The baseball is almost incidental.

The Engine Beneath Everything

Francis Ford Coppola understood this instinctively, and The Godfather is perhaps the most instructive example of character in filmmaking working at the highest possible level. The film is, technically, about organised crime and family succession and the moral compromises required to survive in a particular world. But what you actually watch — what you feel — is Michael Corleone becoming someone he didn’t intend to become. That transformation is the engine. The mob politics are just the road it drives on.

What’s remarkable about Michael is that Coppola and Mario Puzo never ask you to approve of him. They ask you to understand him. There’s a difference, and it’s a crucial one. The best characters in film are not necessarily good people. They are coherent people — people whose choices follow a legible internal logic, even when that logic leads somewhere dark. You may not agree with what Michael does. You will never be confused about why he does it.

The Coen Brothers take this even further with No Country for Old Men. Anton Chigurh is not a character who invites understanding in any conventional sense. He is, by most measures, a monster. And yet he has an internal consistency — a philosophy, even, however warped — that makes him more unsettling than any amount of cartoonish villainy could manage. He operates by rules. They are not your rules. But they are his, and he never breaks them. That coherence is what makes him frightening. You always know exactly what he’ll do next. You just can’t stop him.

The Audience Doesn’t Watch Films — They Follow People

This is the thing that took me the longest to properly internalise as a filmmaker: audiences do not engage with stories in the abstract. They engage with people. The moment they find someone on screen they can follow — someone whose interiority they can access, whose desires and fears feel recognisable even when the circumstances are completely foreign — they are in. And once they’re in, they will go almost anywhere with you.

This is why science fiction and fantasy can work despite their total departure from everyday reality. It’s why a film set in a medieval Italian village or a dystopian future or a 1940s jazz club can feel intimate and immediate. The world doesn’t need to be yours. The people do. Or at least — the emotional truth of the people does.

It’s also why no amount of production value will save a film with hollow characters. I’ve sat in screenings of technically beautiful films — gorgeous cinematography, immaculate design, a score that would make you weep on its own — and felt absolutely nothing, because there was no one on screen I could find my way into. The camera was watching people. I was not.

Giving Them Room to Breathe

The practical upshot of all this, for anyone actually making films rather than just writing enthusiastically about them, is that character in filmmaking requires space. Characters need room to exist before they need to do things. They need texture — the small details that tell you who someone is without announcing it. The way they respond when plans change. The things they notice. What they find funny. What they can’t quite bring themselves to say.

The mistake is treating character as information to be delivered rather than a person to be discovered — both by the audience and, frankly, by you. The character who took over my script did so because I’d written enough of them that they had their own momentum. I’d done enough of the work that they could, in some sense, continue without me. That’s the goal, I think. Not control, but comprehension. You need to know them well enough that they can surprise you — and well enough that when they do, it feels inevitable.

It’s genuinely difficult work. It requires you to inhabit a perspective that isn’t yours, to sustain that inhabitation across dozens of drafts, and to resist the temptation to make your characters convenient rather than true. When the plot needs someone to make a bad decision, the character has to make that character’s bad decision, arrived at through that character’s specific logic — not whatever bad decision happens to serve the next scene.

Worth Every Difficult Minute

The reason to do any of this, despite all of the above, is simple: when it works, there is nothing like it. When you watch Michael Corleone’s face at the end of The Godfather as the door closes, or when Ray Kinsella finally gets to have the catch he’s been building toward for the whole film, or when Andy Dufresne stands in the rain with his arms out — you are not watching plot resolution. You are watching a person, fully understood, arriving at a moment that only means what it means because of everything that came before it. That’s character in filmmaking at its best. That’s the whole thing, really.

The gear doesn’t do that. The locations don’t do that. The colour grade doesn’t do that.

The people do that. They always do.

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7 Essential Cinematography Tips I Wish I’d Known Before Picking Up a Camera

Cinematography tips are the kind of thing nobody gives you before they hand you a camera. Which means most of us learn the hard way: by picking one up for the first time, thinking yes, I understand this, I have watched films before, how hard can it actually be — and then finding out, in fairly short order, that it is quite hard. Harder than it looks. Harder than any amount of Netflix consumption will have prepared you for. Because watching films and making films are related in roughly the same way that watching someone parallel park and actually parallel parking are related — you think you’ve absorbed the principles, and then suddenly you’re in the real world and everything is at the wrong angle and someone is honking.

1. The Rule of Thirds Is Called a Rule For a Reason

Every cinematography guide starts here, which means every beginner reads it, nods knowingly, and then promptly ignores it the moment they start shooting. I know this because I did exactly that. For approximately two years, I framed everything dead centre like I was taking passport photos, and then I’d watch the footage back and wonder why it looked oddly flat, oddly static, oddly like the shot was just waiting for someone to do something interesting in it.




The rule of thirds is simple: divide your frame into a three-by-three grid, and put your subject at one of the intersecting points rather than plonked in the middle like a trophy on a shelf. Your brain — and more importantly, everyone else’s brain — finds this more naturally pleasing to look at. There’s space for the eye to move. The frame breathes.

Put your subject dead centre for long enough and your audience will feel it even if they can’t say why. Like a dinner that’s slightly underseasoned — they won’t complain, but they won’t rave either.

2. Light Is Doing More Work Than You Think

Here is the thing about light that took me an embarrassingly long time to internalise: it’s not just there to make the image bright enough to see. It’s doing the storytelling. The direction it comes from, the quality of it, whether it’s hard and sharp or soft and diffused — all of that is character work. All of that is tone.

Harsh overhead light makes people look guilty and tired. Soft light from the side makes them look interesting and slightly haunted, which is good for drama and not ideal for corporate testimonials. Golden hour — the hour after sunrise and before sunset — makes everything look like a film regardless of budget, which is why every cinematographer on earth turns into a slightly manic person when it arrives and it’s already twenty minutes gone.

The single biggest upgrade I made to my footage was learning to stop fighting available light and start working with it. Move your subject relative to the light source. See what happens when the light comes from behind them. See what it does to the edge of a face, the texture of a wall, the shape of a shadow. You don’t need a van full of equipment if you understand what light is already doing.

3. Your Camera Moves Should Mean Something

I went through a phase — and I suspect most people do — of moving the camera constantly, under the impression that movement meant energy. It does not. Movement means emphasis. Movement means: something is changing, or something important is happening, or we are following something the audience needs to follow.

A slow push in towards a character’s face means we’re getting closer to something — a revelation, an emotion, a decision. A pull back means distance, loss, isolation. A handheld shot that wobbles slightly means presence, immediacy, the feeling of being in the room. All of these are a language, and like any language, using the words in the wrong order just produces noise.

The shot that moves for no reason is the cinematic equivalent of someone who gestures too much when they talk. You stop listening to what they’re saying because you’re distracted by their hands.

If you find yourself asking “should I move the camera here?” — ask yourself what the move would mean, first. If the answer is “nothing in particular, it just looks more interesting,” try the static shot. You might be surprised.

4. Shoot More Than You Think You Need (And Then More Than That)

This one is about protecting Future You, who is going to be sitting in an edit suite wanting to strangle Past You for not getting a cutaway.

Coverage is everything. Get your main shot, yes — but also get the close-up of the hands, the wide shot of the location, the reaction on someone’s face, the thing in the corner that might mean nothing and might mean everything. Edit in the camera if you have to, but give yourself options. A film made in the edit is only as good as the options you walked away from the shoot with.

I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been cutting something together, hit a join that doesn’t quite work, looked at my footage, and found that the one shot that would fix it is the one shot I didn’t think to get. Future You is not grateful. Future You is sat in the dark eating biscuits and wondering why Past You was in such a hurry.

5. Colour Is a Conversation You’re Having Without Words

The colour of your image — not just in post, but in how you light and what you put in front of the lens — is communicating mood before a single line of dialogue lands. Cold blues and greys say one thing. Warm ambers and greens say another. Desaturated palettes feel like memory or dread. Vibrant, punchy colours feel like energy and life and possibly a soft drink advertisement.

This doesn’t mean you need to spend three weeks in colour grade making everything look like a prestige drama. It means knowing, before you shoot, what you want the image to feel like — and making choices that get you there.

Ask yourself: if this film were a room, what colour would the walls be? That’s not a pretentious question. That’s the actual job.

6. The Best Equipment Is the Equipment You Actually Understand

I have seen gorgeous footage shot on a phone. I have seen footage shot on a camera worth more than a reasonably-priced car that looked like nothing. Equipment is not the variable. Understanding is the variable.

Know how your camera handles light. Know where it struggles and where it shines. Know how to expose correctly — not just what the settings mean technically, but what they look like in practice, in your actual shooting conditions, at the times of day you’re actually shooting. Every camera has a character. Learn yours before you go chasing someone else’s.

The camera you have, understood properly, will beat the camera you want, operated blindly, every single time.

7. For The Love of Everything, Get Off Auto

Let’s talk about the cardinal sin. The one that cinematographers whisper about in hushed, slightly haunted tones. The one that has cost people time, money, and quantities of stress that probably ought to be measured in clinical units.

Leaving your camera on Auto.

I understand the appeal. Auto feels safe. Auto feels like the camera is helping. Auto is the camera saying: don’t worry, I’ve got this, go and be creative, I’ll handle the technical bits. And then Auto quietly, cheerfully, and with absolutely no malice whatsoever, ruins your shot.

Because here’s what Auto is actually doing: it’s making decisions based on what it thinks is happening, which is not the same thing as what is actually happening, and definitely not the same thing as what you want to happen. Auto sees a bright window behind your subject and decides to expose for the window, leaving your subject as a silhouette. Auto decides, mid-sentence, that the light has changed slightly and bumps the exposure up — while you’re recording. Auto hunts for focus like a dog that’s caught a scent, locking onto the background, then your subject, then the background again, while you watch helplessly from behind the viewfinder.

The F-stop — your aperture — is not just a technical setting. It controls depth of field. It controls how much of your frame is sharp and how much melts away into beautiful soft blur. Leave that on Auto and you’re not making a creative decision, you’re accepting whatever decision the camera makes on your behalf, which is the photographic equivalent of asking someone else to order for you at a restaurant and then having to eat it anyway.

Manual focus, yes, is harder. Yes, it requires practice. Yes, there will be shots where you pull focus slightly too early and spend the rest of your life thinking about it. But at least those are your decisions. At least you are the author of what’s in the frame. The camera on Auto is not your collaborator. It’s a very confident intern who means well and has no idea what the film is supposed to feel like.

Take control of your settings before you start rolling. Learn what they do. Make the choices. The stress of getting it wrong manually is, I promise you, considerably less than the stress of watching perfectly good footage become unusable because the camera decided something on your behalf at exactly the wrong moment.

These Cinematography Tips Are a Starting Point, Not a Finish Line

So that’s what I’ve got. Seven things I wish someone had stapled to my forehead at the start, instead of leaving me to discover them the long way, which mostly involved a lot of footage I will never show anyone and a recurring sense of puzzled disappointment at the gap between what I’d pictured and what I’d actually captured.

The gap closes. It closes slowly and it closes imperfectly and it never quite closes all the way, which is probably why this is worth doing in the first place.

What’s the cinematography lesson you had to learn the hard way? Drop it in the comments — bonus points if there’s a specific shot you’re still quietly furious about.

Further Reading

Gary makes films, mostly on purpose, with varying degrees of success and a significant amount of post-shoot biscuits.

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7 Proven Ways to Find Filmmaking Ideas (That Actually Stick)

Every filmmaker gets asked the same question eventually. Sometimes it comes from a curious friend, sometimes from a nervous newcomer at a workshop, and sometimes — if you’re honest — you ask it of yourself at two in the morning when the cursor is blinking and the page is empty.

Where do the ideas come from?

The truthful answer is: everywhere. And nowhere in particular. But that’s not especially helpful, so let’s dig a little deeper.

Start With What Moves You

The most reliable source of a good idea isn’t a clever concept or a marketable premise. It’s an emotional response to something that already exists. A film you saw. A song you can’t get out of your head. A TV show you watched twenty years ago that still sits with you.




One of my own projects in development, Two For The Road, started exactly there. Growing up, I was captivated by Tim Grundy and his cameraman — known simply as The Eye — in their Discovery Home & Leisure series Two’s Country. There was something magical about their dynamic: warm, funny, genuinely informative without ever feeling like it was trying to teach you anything. Tim was one of the greatest TV and radio presenters this country ever produced, and I wanted to do something that honoured that legacy. The idea for Two For The Road was born not from a gap in the market, but from love — for a show, for a style, for a man whose work deserved a tip of the hat.

That’s as good a reason to make something as any.

Chase a Feeling, Not Just a Story

Here’s something film schools don’t always tell you: you don’t have to start with a story. Sometimes you start with a feeling — a mood, an aesthetic, an atmosphere — and build the story around it afterwards.

Love and Other Lost Causes came from exactly that. I used to run a film festival in Folkestone, and one short film I screened stopped me in my tracks. Not necessarily because of the story, but because of how it felt — the grade, the texture, the emotional temperature of it. I knew immediately that I wanted to capture something of that feeling in my own work, even if the story I told was entirely different.

The actual plot of Love and Other Lost Causes came later — a two in the morning brainstorming session, as it happens (there’s something about that particular hour that loosens the creative mind). But the seed of it was purely sensory. If a piece of work makes you feel something, ask yourself why. Then ask whether you can make something that makes someone else feel the same way.

Let Other Art Forms In

Film doesn’t exist in isolation. The best filmmakers are readers, music lovers, theatre-goers, gallery wanderers. Ideas cross borders all the time, and some of the most interesting projects begin somewhere other than a screenplay.

My project Mr Midnight began with a Garth Brooks song. If you know the track, you’ll understand immediately why it sparked something. If you don’t, I’d suggest looking it up. What I took from it wasn’t the literal narrative but the emotional world it suggested — and from there, with my own creative licence, I’ve been building a story largely set inside a small local radio station. The first draft is in progress. The song remains on the playlist.

Music, in particular, is a gift to filmmakers. A great song can hand you a tone, a character, a world, or a theme in three and a half minutes. Don’t ignore it.

Practical Tips for Finding Your Idea

If you’re stuck, here are a few starting points worth trying:

Write down five things that have genuinely moved you in the last year — films, songs, books, overheard conversations, places, memories. Don’t filter. Just list them. Then look for the thread that connects them. That thread is probably something you care about deeply, and something you care about deeply is worth making something about.

Ask yourself what you haven’t seen. Not in a commercial sense — not “what’s missing from the marketplace” — but personally. What story do you wish existed? What character do you never see represented? What place, what moment, what feeling has never quite been captured on screen in a way that felt true to you?

Don’t wait for the perfect idea. Start with the good-enough idea and let it become something better in the writing and the development. Love and Other Lost Causes was a 2am brainstorm. Mr Midnight started as a feeling about a song. Two For The Road started as gratitude. None of them arrived fully formed.

The Idea Is Just the Beginning

Finding the idea is only the first step, of course. There’s the writing, the rewriting, the pre-production, the endless logistics of actually getting something made. Two For The Road is ready to shoot — we’re just locking in the dates. Love and Other Lost Causes is written and moving into pre-production. Mr Midnight is still taking shape on the page.

Each one started somewhere different. Each one started with a feeling that refused to go away.

That’s the real test of an idea worth pursuing: not whether it sounds good in a pitch, but whether it’s still there in the morning.

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New Music Video: The Cloud Guru – Sunshade Smile

The Cloud Guru is an indie singer/songwriter from Ashford, Kent. Sunshade Smile is his latest single.

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I Shot the Sheriff – a Western film project

Three years ago I had an idea. It was a great idea. Although it remained just an idea. It’s no longer an idea. Shall I just get straight to the point? I’m writing a movie, a big movie, a western movie. It will cost a lot of money to make. Am I ready for it? Hell yes!

The idea behind the film was from a song I’ve loved for a long time, it’s also one of my wife’s favourite songs from my favourite singer. Garth Brooks. The song, ‘In Lonesome Dove’, is based on a Texas sheriff who is killed by a gang of outlaws and his son grows up to become the new lawman in town and gets his revenge. That’s it in a nutshell. But turning a three minute song into a 100 minute western movie isn’t the easiest of tasks. A task I’m very much loving though. I’m currently around 20 pages into the movie, I’ve shown a few people what I’ve done so far and they all seem to love it. Now is that genuine love for the script or are they just paying me lip service? Only time will tell.

Another of the several movies I’m involved in, ‘The Screaming Woods‘, goes back into production very soon. We’ve shot around 45 minutes of the movie already with the rest being shot in the next couple of months. A found footage style paranormal movie. We’re hoping it will be quite a scary movie and it will be starring yours truly, one of the biggest acting gigs I’ve ever done. Apart from masturbating in a movie that ended up on Amazon Prime – but we don’t talk about that one!

Add The History Guys TV series to the mix and it’s a very busy year.

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Making Television History in the New Year

2020 mark’s my 23rd year as a filmmaker. In this time I have been involved in dozens of film, television, commercial and other projects. Admittedly I don’t have a great deal to show for it but hopefully 2020 is the year this all changes. Read more

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Throwback to 2004

Back in 2004 I was on the management committee of a television production company called Turning Point Productions. We produced a TV series called “In Focus” which promoted disability awareness. Read more

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