BMB Survival Guide – 3 – Enjoy your freedom

Read this in: Italiano

Money is yours, the equipment loaned. Friends work for free. There is not even the shadow of an executive producer or a lender to impose anything. Why then try to repeat what someone with more money and experience has already made years ago with success? The spirit of emulation is not a sin in itself, but it does not make much sense to waste time and energy on something that already exists. Redoing already seen films not only shows that the director has no ideas, it even puts him in a position to deal with things often bigger than him.
Bluntly: trying to create a pseudo The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Pulp Fiction leads inevitably to make an already seen film… but worse.

The scenario is different for the parodies, which can be original and funny (though there are so many now on Youtube that have become a boring genre). The same is true even for simple sequences or scenes or shots: the line between citation and plagiarism is obvious but subtle. Our advice is to avoid the following subjects, unless your idea is not strong enough to radically renew them:

  • A serial killer kills one or more persons in various gruesome ways.
  • An unsuspecting person is actually a murderess.
  • A gangster ends up in a story larger than him.
  • Any story involving vampires.

    In addition, there are two types of scene that statistically appear to be loved by many directors:

    a) a character who wakes up;
    b) a person sitting on the toilet.

    We do not know why, a lot of films submitted in previous editions of BMB contained at least one of these two situations, often even both (the protagonist wakes up and goes to the toilet). There is nothing wrong with that, but if you want to be original do not include in your film scenes in which one wakes up or is on the toilet: they do it all.

    The beauty of doing an  (almost) zero budget film is being able to vent your perverse fantasy, something you could not propose to a real producer: at BMB we saw a farmer who collects decommissioned UFOs, assassin excrements and mattresses, a Jesus in zombie version and even a grilled eggplant dealer. No one forces us a genre or style: you can roll what you want, how you want. Why limit yourself?

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where genius makes up for the lack of means

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