3 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Making Movies

Yo, yo Darious Britt here.

I’ve been doing this film thing for 10 years now. Wow. It sounds crazy when I say it out loud—time flies. Hopped onto my first film set back in 2009 literally didn’t know anything. I was just a PA on a student film.

Fast forward 10 years later:

Went to film school.
Worked on over 40 short films.
Produced 8 of my own shorts films.
Countless micro films.
Produced two feature films.
Toured the festival circuit three times.
Started a YouTube channel.

And here we are.

Thinking back on everything. There are a few things I wish I had known from go. I could have saved my self a lotta time and grief.

Here are 3 things I wish I knew before I started making movies:

1. Mindset Is Everything!

Your mindset is everything. How you view your abilities. How you view your potential influences your behavior and ultimately your success. I had the wrong mindset starting out. Lemme show you the math on that:

I planned on my first feature film being a major critical and financial success. I imagined having that Cinderella story just like everyone else. Get into Sundance, make a big sale. Be the next big voice in Hollywood. I wanted to prove that I had what it takes to be a success. That didn’t quite happen for me.

It doesn’t happen that way for 99% of filmmakers. Alfred Hitchcock didn’t have massive success until much later in his career. He’d already made like ten movies before he hit his stride. It’s not fair to put that kind of pressure on your first movie, especially since you still have so much to learn.

I was approaching this all wrong. I had a fixed mindset. The fixed mindset says that: your intelligence, creativity, skills, and abilities are all predetermined. You’re either born with raw talent or your not. Your qualities are carved in stone. You can’t change it. If you’re successful, it proves that you have talent, if you’re not successful, it proves you don’t. It’s an all or nothing way of looking at it. Will I succeed or fail, win, or lose. It’s very binary.

I was stuck in the fixed mindset for years, trying to make everything perfect, trying to prove how good I am. But then I realized something.

All of the filmmakers I looked up to had a passion for learning the craft of filmmaking. These guys weren’t good because they were naturally gifted. They were good because they put their 10,000 hours in. They were successful because they loved learning, Not because they were trying to be successful. They had a growth mindset.

The growth mindset says, whatever qualities and talents you have they’re just the starting point in your development. You can cultivate new skills and abilities through practice and experience. Anyone can be anything through training and education. It’s about improving and unlocking your true potential over time.

Having a fixed mindset creates a hunger for approval; having a growth mindset creates a hunger for learning.

Ahhhhhh. I get it. If I want to be successful, I can’t chase success; I have to chase self-improvement. Then success will find me. I have to be hungry for learning. Hungry for new skills. Hungry for knowledge. I have to put in the 10,000 hours. That’s the ticket to the chocolate factory.

I switched to a growth mindset. I stopped doing projects to prove myself and started doing more projects to improve myself.

My goal became to learn as much as I can as fast as I can and enjoy the process of learning. I shot more microfilms bc you can rack up more experience a lot faster shooting really small projects.

When I made that switch, I learned more in one year than I had in the past three. And I had a lot more fun.

Had I known this a lot sooner, I could have shot so much more.

2. The Real Goal

If you’re a writer-director, the goal is to come up with a cool premise that attracts a lot of money and attention, Pitch investors or industry contacts if you have then. Get money, make the move, blow up. This is the classical way of thinking when it comes to film. 2 problems with that.

1. This places the emphasis on having a great idea, a super clever twist, a crazy premise, etc. It perpetuates this idea that you are one clever idea away from success. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Ideas are a dime a dozen everybody has ideas. You can wake up tomorrow with a cool idea. Ideas mean nothing without a solid script. Ideas mean nothing without a writer who can turn it into a great screenplay. Ideas mean nothing without a director who can tell the story in a compelling way.

Ideas mean nothing without execution.

There’s this invisible thing between your good idea and a good movie, and that thing is craftsmanship. I say invisible because if done well, people don’t even know it’s there. All you see is the finished product. You have no clue how much expertise went into it.

Tarantino, Fincher, Hitchcock, Spielberg, Denis Villeneuve. They don’t just have good ideas. They have skills. They have craftsmanship.

If you are starting out, your goal should be to hone your craft. All the cool ideas can wait. You don’t have to have a catchy high concept premise to make a good film.

With craft, you can take a simple story and tell it in an exceptional way. Your execution is what will set you apart from everything that has come before you. Then when you get the occasional cool idea you can knock it out of the park.

Here’s the good news You can build your craft on small, cheap, inexpensive projects. You can build your craft shooting micro films. It’s just about collecting those 10,000 hours. Put in the work. Study other films.

2. The second problem with that line of thinking. It’s kinda hard to convince financiers to give you money with no track record. They wanna see that you know what you’re doing first. Again, making movies is about more than just having cool ideas. There’s a craft behind it.

You’ll probably have to self finance your first few projects. You’re looking at small budgets here. If you know your craft, you can shoot it so well that nobody would know your budget was handshakes and hotdogs.

If you learn how to make ¢10 look like a dollar. You’ll never go out of business.

You don’t build a film career by just having “cool ideas.” You build a career by knowing your craft. The cool ideas and big budgets are just the cherry on the top. If you can really wrap your head around this concept, then you will focus on the right things, and you will have more success.

Don’t chase money. Chase craftsmanship.

If you become an amazing craftsman, you can make amazing films for next to nothing. If you’re a good craftsman, money has a way of finding you.

If you haven’t gotten the message yet here’s the layman’s version:

Finding money and or cool ideas are not your ticket to the chocolate factory, honing your skills are.

Embrace your limitations. If you don’t have money embrace it. At the end of the day, those things aren’t what’s important. It’s your skill, your craft, your execution.

Cool ideas and money those things come and go. You have no control over that, but hard skills don’t. Every skill you earn stays with you.

Everyone has cool ideas. You can wake up tomorrow and have a cool idea. Your mom could wake up tomorrow and have a cool idea. That doesn’t mean anything. Not everyone can wake up with a new skill. Not everyone can wake up with 10,000 hours of experience. Do you want to base your success off of something that can happen to anyone, or do you want to go out and cultivate something for yourself that not many have?

It’s okay to be passionate. It’s okay to want to do big ambitious projects. just make sure you always put learning your craft first.

You have to temper your passion with practically.

3. Embrace Failure

One thing is for certain. You will fail. You will fail a lot. You will make lots of mistakes.

You can’t avoid failure by just watching more tutorials and whatnot. Doesn’t work that way, Bruh-bruh. It’s not gonna happen.

The trick is to make inexpensive failures. Inexpensive in terms of time and money. You wanna burn through all your big mistakes on small cheap projects, like micro films. This way you have a safe little sandbox to play and fall on your face while nobody is watching.

For example, you just got a new camera, shoot some b-roll with it. Shoot a small scene with a couple of friends. Shoot a vlog, fumble through the settings. Do camera tests. Odds are you’re gonna run into a few problems. That’s the point. Now is the time to figure all this stuff out. Not on set.

The more mistakes you make the better. It means you’re doing something. If you’re not failing you’re not trying.

There’s nothing you can do at this level that’s going to hurt you. You can’t ruin your career.

What can you practice by yourself to expedite your learning? Could you be shooting 1000 photos at the park working on your composition? There’s always something you could be doing to improve yourself? Ways to burn through mistakes on your own time.

Fail fast, fail often. fail forward.

Thank you for reading. Keep those cameras rolling and rack up your 10K and learn something new every day.

-DBritt out

Trouble STAYING productive? Productivity hacks

How to Stay Productive- Head on Laptop image

So how do you stay productive? Or are we actually talking about procrastination?

In case you live under a rock, procrastination is the act of delaying or postponing a task or set of tasks.

Whether you’re procrastinating or whether you’ve just got a lot going on in your life and you can’t seem to get your affairs in order, the question is:

How do we combat those forces that prevent us from following through with what we set out to do?

So Darious, why are we talking about this?… Well behind the scenes boys & girls underneath all this deeper Darious nice there’s a huge battle I’ve been waging for years against myself on how to get more s*** done!

I feel like I have a lot of goals and a lot of things I want to do with this channel and with my film career and with my business. It’s hard to find the time to do everything. If I’m being transparent, sometimes it’s hard to find the motivation, given the mountain of work I’m looking at.

Everything seems to take longer than planned, and everything takes more work than I thought. And just yeah.

I’ve tried many things. I’ve read many things. Some tactics work, some tactics don’t. I know a lot of you are grappling with the same issue because I see it in the comments.

“Yo D4 put me on some game. I got know, how do you stay productive?”

Let me hop on a soapbox with you, Fam. Let’s have a heart to heart.

If you feel like you’re a procrastinator, I can say with confidence that 90% of the time, it’s not because you’re lazy. So let’s start there.

Productivity Hack #1 Batching Tasks

Task batching is when you group a list of similar tasks together and do them in one block of time. This is also known as time blocking.

Each time you switch between tasks, there’s a lag in your brain where you have to refocus on the new task. Guess what happens when you go through that lag? You get resistance distractions. It’s harder to get back in the groove.

An example of batching would be instead of writing one YouTube video write two or three. Once you’re in that headspace and you’ve got the mojo all worked up to write, it’s easier to keep writing.

It’s the same thing with shooting YouTube videos. Say it takes you an hour to set up everything for a shoot. Well, it’s easier to shoot two or three together back to back, Then to spend an hour setting up just to shoot one. Depending on the types of videos, you should, of course.

Finding ways to batch your tasks together will make a big difference in productivity.

One of the things I’ve been doing lately is just having a thumbnail day where all I do for an entire day is shoot thumbnails for videos I’m working on and videos know I have coming up. Once I’m in that groove of shooting thumbnails, it’s easier to just stay there and get a whole bunch of them done at once.

Productivity Hack #2 Go For The Low

When we look at our list of to-dos, we have a habit of looking at it as a big giant forest. The reality is it’s not a big giant forest. It’s just a bunch of little trees.

Break your tasks up into smaller manageable chunks or steps and then go after the easiest step first. Pick the lowest hanging fruit first or “go for the low.”

It’s a good way to trick yourself into working If you’re feeling unmotivated.

For example, I have a shoot tomorrow morning. It’s just an assistant and me maybe, but I’m doing all the heavy lifting, and I’m already tired after a long day. It’s 9:00 at night.

I’ve got:

Batteries to charge
Shotlist to make
Planning and reviewing the script,
I’ve got to check all the media and format the cards.
Clean lenses
Check my GoPro bags
Fire up my camera rig one last time to make sure I’m not going to have any surprises on set.

*Amazon links are affiliate links*

How do I trick myself into getting all that done when it’s the last thing I feel like doing?

I go for the low-hanging fruit; what’s the easiest thing I can do, and I do that first. Put the batteries on a charger. Okay, just start moving.

What’s the next easiest thing to do? Do that.

Then the next easiest thing, do that keep putting one foot in front of the other, and before you know it, you’re there.

Little by little, a little becomes a lot.

I apply this same philosophy to writing scripts. If I feel like I just don’t have the writer juice in me today, I might just write dialogue and start there. Or I might just write a list of scene descriptions back to back, of scenes where I think things will take place but no dialogue no action. Go for the low hanging fruit.

Whatever comes easiest, do that first. Nibble your way into the task

Productivity Hack #3 Reduce Inefficiency

Aside from life emergencies and other mandatory obligations, your biggest enemy keeping you from productivity is inefficiency.

Inefficiency creates resistance, wastes time, and drains motivation.

If it takes you ten steps to do a task that you could have gotten done in three, that’s called being inefficient. If you’re already feeling demotivated, It’s easier to push yourself to do something that only takes three steps, as opposed to something that takes 10.

Complexity is the enemy of execution.

Your 10-step process is more complicated than it needs to be. The more complicated things are, the less likely we are to do it.
Here’s the rub though, you don’t know that your ten-step process could be done in three steps.

Part of your job is to find ways to simplify your process: to trim the fat.

For example, when I set up wide shots for my YouTube videos, it used to take me about 45 minutes to an hour and a half to set up. I know it’s ridiculous, but if you want quality, you’ve got to do it right.

There would be days when I need to shoot a video, and I can’t bring myself to do it knowing it’s going to take an hour just to set everything up I’m tired I’ve been I’ve already been working other gigs all day.

My subscribers are just going to have to wait; there’s only 24 in a day, Fam.

Over time, I kept looking for ways to streamline the process. Now it only takes 20 minutes.

Just recently, I purchased a boom arm specifically for this table. Before this, it was saying back in my stand, this alone shaves probably 60 seconds to a minute and a half off of my setup time, and my space is less cluttered with stands. That’s one less stand that I need to move out of the way when I’m moving other things around.

All these little incy, wincy, tiny things add up to a lot of time saved.
Now it’s a little easier to find the motivation on those days where I’m just not quite feeling the mojo, you feel me?

Because now I can tell myself, setups only going to take 20 minutes just do The easiest thing first keep moving as opposed to setups going to take possibly an hour to an hour and a half.

A good system shortens the road to the goal.

If you keep looking for ways to refine and simplify your processes for doing things, you will have less resistance to doing them.

Complexity is the enemy of execution. That’s why we have to simplify. It’s our job to find ways to streamline what we do so that we can keep doing it.

I hope this was helpful. At the end of the day, we’re all in the same battle—the war ourselves.

The hardest enemy to conquer is the one you see in the mirror.

Get in the comment box and let me know what’s been working for you.

These are things that I do, but if you have a system that gets you results, please share I’d love to hear it.
Make everyday count.

Keep hustling

-D Britt out.

What To Do When Film Projects Fall Apart

So what do we do when projects fall through?

When you spend all that time and energy on something, and it kind of goes up in smoke right in front of you. What do we do?

Do we just roll over and play dead?

I was working on a short film called Stay Pretty. You guys know about it. I posted on Instagram and talked about it on the channel.

I started this project in September of last year. Yes, this was just another short film, but I was pushing myself into new areas and pushing myself out of my comfort zone with this one. This is the first short film where I was working with an editor and a legit composer.

Anyways fast forward and the Coronavirus pumped the brakes on all of that.

And now the whole thing is kind of a mess. Everybody took a hit. I mean look at the studios, they took a major blow.

I’m sure some of you are in the same position with your projects.

It sucks.

It’s not just that you don’t get to do this cool thing that you wanted to share with the world, but it’s the:

The time
The energy
The effort
The money
The opportunity cost.

You could have done other things with all that time you spent working on this project that ultimately might not be happening.

That said here we are now what? What do you do from here, where do we go?

Pocket Projects

The first thing is pocket projects. I’m a firm believer in always having a project in your back pocket, maybe even a few.

Back pocket projects are those ideas that don’t require as many resources to pull off as your ambitious projects.

If your main project has a budget of $1,000, then your back pocket idea might cost $200, and use fewer actors… you get the idea. This way, if your main project tanks, you just move on to one of those ideas in your back pocket and keep the momentum going.

You see the same thing in the professional film space. Why do you think producers have so many projects and development? There are so many times when you think a project is a go, and it’s going to take off, and then it just fizzles. The only way to insulate yourself from that risk is to spread out the risk to have more things going more irons in the fire.

If five of those projects never go anywhere, but one makes it through, then boom that’s progress.

Focus On Progress

There are no guarantees in this game we play, boys and girls: Success, failure, fame, projects getting projects greenlit, securing financing. We don’t always have as much control over these things as we would like.

But here’s the good news. You will always learn more from your failures than you will your successes.

Knowledge stacks. It’s like interest in a bank account. The more you learn, the more you’re able to learn. Eventually, you reach a tipping point where success is inevitable. You know too much not to be successful.

Rather than dwell on what didn’t work and what didn’t happen,

Shift your focus on what you learned from the experience, what you can take with you into the next project.

You did not come out of this experience empty-handed, You actually learned something. You probably learned a lot of things.

Take a moment and list out what you learned. If you do this I think you’ll find you’ll feel more empowered by the experience rather than defeated.

Success is nothing but a series of small wins.

Some of those wins come from failure. Most people fail their way into success.

As they say, the master has failed more times than the beginner even tried. I take heart in that.

Walk While You Think

Last but not least, keep your head up. Sometimes it’s hard to do, but here’s a trick. It’s called walking while you think.

You have more perseverance than you realize.

Perseverance is the hard work you do after you’re exhausted from the hard work you’ve already done.

Nobody feels like they have what it takes 100 % of the time. You show me someone that confident, and I’ll show you a narcissist or a liar. Doubt is apart of the game. It’s a natural part of this journey we call filmmaking. It’s hard. It’s challenging.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of quitting both YouTube and filmmaking. Those thoughts will always cross your mind at some point, but then you just keep going. You press on, and you push past it. You figure it out.

Honestly, Fam. Sometimes you just don’t fucking know. You second guess yourself. You overthink things, and the only way to combat that is to follow your feet. Walk while you think. Take all the time you need to doubt yourself. Just make sure you’re walking while you do it.

For example, say your last project fell through. You don’t think you have what it takes? That’s fine. While you’re doubting yourself, just work on the next film. Walk while you think. Just keep moving.

You’re not alone in this. This will not be the most disappointing thing to happen to you, I promise.

There are lots of peaks and valleys on your journey. There will be lots of disappointments. It’s all a part of failing your way to success.

As for me, I don’t know what will happen with Stay Pretty. Hopefully, I can finish it. We’ll see. I’ve got a few back-pocket ideas under my belt, if not.

Meanwhile, I’ve already started writing my list of what I’ve learned.

Get in the comments and tell me how this pandemic has affected your projects I’ll be reading them. I can’t answer all of them, but I do read all of them.

Make every day count, rack up the 10K, and keep hustling.

-D Britt out

How To Write A Short Film: Part 5 – 1 Minute Films

Most people have a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of making a one minute short film. While it is extremely challenging to tell a stroy in one minute, it is very possible. Here are tips for writing a script for you Micro films. We cover the Mentos model of storytelling and breakdown 4 examples from commercials.

Examples used
Fresh Paint Mentos commercial

Mall Mentos Commercial

Sling Shot Baby Commercial

Dog Collar Doritos Commercial

Continue reading “How To Write A Short Film: Part 5 – 1 Minute Films”

How To Write A Short Film: Part 4 – Punchline Films

What is a punchline film? Tips for writing your short film script. We cover joke structure for short films and breakdown the film “I’ll wait for the next one”.

Shorts referenced
I’ll wait for the next one short film

Horribly slow murder by extremely inefficient weapon

cannon ball ice dude – jump into frozen pool

How To Write A Short Film: part 3 – Story vs Plot

What’s the difference between story and plot? We cover the differences, and why you should know them. We breakdown “Porcelain Unicorn”

Short film referenced
Porcelain Unicorn short

Tips and Advice for Young Aspiring Filmmakers

I’ve gotten a lot of requests for this video. There aren’t many tips videos geared towards the youth. At this level the biggest priority should be learning the basic elements of story. Resources are usually a big issue at this level but your understanding of story and learned and honed at any level. We cover this and much more.

Video mentioned
principals of drama

My first short film

How to Brainstorm Ideas for a short film

Everyone has their own methods for brainstorming ideas but there are a few methods and techniques for brainstorming that are well worth exploring. One of the most effective methods is to establish a routine. As they say “inspiration tends to catch you while you’re working”. We cover this technique and more in the discussion.

Why Filmmakers Should Study Bad Movies

Storytelling is a muscle and just like any other muscle it must be worked. Breaking down other films is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to work that storytelling muscle.

If you’re new to filmmaking and screenwriting, you should breakdown as many movies as you can. Every film is a text book. Even the “bad” ones.

Continue reading “Why Filmmakers Should Study Bad Movies”