The most important thing to remember when making your first short: finish the damn thing!
It's not enough to be able to conceive the story and know you can take it all the way to being finished. There's a psychological barrier that is crossed when you see it through to the end. You know you can do it.

We've all heard this at one time or another.

• You have a great idea for a movie--a story many people can not only relate to, something they would actually enjoy seeing played out on screen.

• After all these years of working at it, you have developed the required technical prowess—writing, direction, camerawork, editing—to execute your personal vision: a feature film.

The changing shape and destiny of film can be daunting. Despite the naysayers, you believe in the strength of what you're doing and the story you're telling.

• You finally have (or have access to) all the technology you need.

How do you build and maintain your motivation to start, slave away, and eventually finish your movie?
If you have finished one (or five or twenty) films, how did you make it happen?

[constructive comments only please]

Hi, Craig.

We've never finished a feature, although we are about to!
Here is our current "masterpiece," the bar for us to beat:

The Ministry of the Stove on Vimeo

Shorts are great (especially doc shorts) because you can just knock them off with a strong concept, and don't have to spend a year fundraising.

Regarding our self-produced feature doc that is almost finished, all I can say is "when it clicks, it clicks." It's almost as if it's taken all this time just to gain the confidence to execute the concept we had in mind to begin with (picking up a few tricks on the way, of course).

More specifically, I felt a huge breakthrough when we finally identified, contacted, and made arrangements with a few key people who bring their own skills to the table. Collaboration can be a double-edged sword, but if you have firm leadership and clear boundaries in place by the time you open the doors, it can only be a good thing. Once you have some other professionals on-board, it really lights a fire for you to do your part to get the thing finished.

That said, there's really no substitute for discipline. You can wait for inspiration to strike, but discipline gets the job done in the end. It comes from within. If you really have everything that you listed, then all you need is some good collaborators, enough cash to keep them with you, and discipline.

How do you build and maintain your motivation to start, slave away, and eventually finish your movie? If you have finished one (or five or twenty) films, how did you make it happen?


It's like anything, you have to be totally focused on doing the next step, rather looking at the grand view. You may be lucky in doing it in less than a year, but it could be years with a feature film. However, you do need to ensure that you're maintaining the quality you want and you're not being blind to any weaknesses in the project, this the reflective part.

In the end you need to be passionate about the subject, that's also what's going to sell it to others..