Do indie films really take six years to make?

As a rule of thumb, that's a pretty fair assessment. It takes years to produce your own content. At the same time, I've found that so much of that time is spent on waffling and learning curve, that the actual productive work time is much, much smaller.

I'm as guilty as anyone, and the thing it took me the longest to figure out is the need to write to my strengths. What resources do I have access to, and what kind of story can I tell on that scale? What film would I want to see that I can make really really great with the relationships and tools I have today?

Then, the question becomes how I can put those tools ot the best use, and allow the story, my collaborators, and my resources to express themselves fully. In short, how can I get a great movie in front of a great audience?

Personally, I wound up getting into the industry through film finance. Coming from the theater, it was more through an oddball quirk of fate than by design, but I saw that opportunity for what it was. Still, it took me years to figure out how to use it properly.

During that time, I helped build a film studio, so now I have resources there. I helped establish a small platform output deal, so I can get my hands on a handful of screens and use them to go wider - if people show up. If you've never distributed an indie film, anyone who has will tell you that's a mighty big "if" to bank on.

So, I dived into social media for the answers. Now, the strides and innovations I'm making in that arena in have made me a leader in my film community, and I finally have the trust to start pulling my own films and other media projects together. At the same time, I know how to use the system. With the production value I can provide, at the price point at which I'm producing, I can reasonably make my investors a good return on investment even if things go awry.

Getting to this point has taken well over half a decade. At the same time, it was only a year and a half ago or so that I came to the realization that I already knew which story to tell, and how to get it told. If I could just find a way to build an audience, everything else would fall into place. Now, it looks likely that my film will be financed by the end of February, and we'll be shooting in the late spring. Of course, I'm prepared for plenty of contingencies.

Before last year, I was basically farting around. It's a necessary part of the process - I was learning how my tools worked, and how to apply them. Come to think of it, plenty of filmmakers never leave the farting stage. Some just get plain old lucky, and get a movie made right there in the fart cloud.

If you can find a way to take your assets seriously and use all your seeming liabilities as extra strength, you can speed that process along.