Author name: Kent Lamm

This week I want to talk a little bit about one of the most important — yet most tedious and boring — parts of making a film: planning your schedule for your shoot. Your schedule is probably the single most important document on any shoot day. It aligns the team, sets expectations, and it’s the only thing that lets you know if you’re actually going to finish your film or not. So here’s how to make a good one without killing yourself in the process. I always keep my…

I’ve been hooked lately on a podcast called Founders, which dives into the lives of history’s most successful entrepreneurs. Listening to it, reminded me that filmmakers are entrepreneurs in disguise. Every time we make a film, we’re essentially starting a new business – often, quite literally. For example, with a proper feature film you have to create a new LLC for it. But even short films, although they aren’t commercial projects usually, still require rallying resources,…

I’m writing this newsletter from Incheon Airport in Seoul, Korea – stopping over for a few hours en route to mainland China. Not a trip I thought I’d be taking anytime soon, but Hollyland was kind enough to invite me and some other creators you may recognize out for a week of fun and learning at their annual WeConnect event, in celebration of the company’s 7th birthday. Having never been to Asia, I couldn’t resist. 👆 Ok that’s as far as I got writing in the airport,…

Here’s the truth about filmmaking: no matter how much you think you’ve got it under control, the details pile up until you’re drowning. Props, costumes, locations, schedules, casting notes, shot lists, references… it’s enough to make your head spin. For The Lost Fortune of Oliver Brody, I needed something that could corral all of that chaos in one place. That’s where Milanote came in. Milanote is like a giant digital corkboard where you can dump every idea or reference…

Sometimes filmmaking tips are a little too ambiguous and big-picture to easily apply to your work. So this week, here’s 5 straight-forward tactics from my bag of tricks that you can add to your toolkit today. This issue of Friday Film Notes is sponsored by: Audiio Finding the right music for your edit used to take hours… Now it takes seconds. I’ve been loving Audiio’s extensive library of high-quality music & SFX, and with their LinkMatch & Hans AI tools, it’s never…

My feature film, Bad is Bad, made for just $6,000, is still the most successful thing I’ve ever made in terms of profitability and reach. It made back 10x its budget and has been viewed at least 10 million times across different platforms. To this day, I’m convinced the main reason for its success is simple: we reverse-engineered the whole thing. This issue of Friday Film Notes is sponsored by: FilmConvert Nitrate Crave that dreamy celluloid look? FilmConvert Nitrate…

If you haven’t heard – I opened the doors to Wrapped in 30 Days again, and have marked it down to 50% off for a couple of weeks. This is the lowest price I’ve ever offered it publicly, and I hope this makes it more accessible to more aspiring filmmakers, and helps them avoid the many painful learning experiences I’ve had in my filmmaking life. But if you still can’t join, I figured I’d use this week’s newsletter to share some of the most difficult lessons I learned,…

So often it feels like films either have a big budget… or they suck. But that’s just not true. You can make great films with no money and still find an audience. I’ve done it myself multiple times. Let me give you two quick examples. $200 Film > $2,000 Film? Back in 2015, when I was making monthly short films for my YouTube channel, the one that found the biggest audience cost me the least. It was called The Neighbor. We shot it in my apartment, in one day, with just a…

In the long process of producing my recent short film, I learned a LOT I want to share with you all. So, this month’s issues of Friday Film Notes will be covering the different challenges of producing films today. Let’s start with the obvious elephant in the room – financing – because if we had infinite money, none of the other producing issues would even matter! This issue of Friday Film Notes is sponsored by: Audiio Finding the right music for your edit used to take…

First off, apologies for the radio silence last week – you’ll see why later in this issue. Last Tuesday night, over a year after my writing partner and I first had a meeting about turning Oliver Brody into a short (and 11 years after the character first was put on paper)… …we successfully wrapped The Lost Fortune of Oliver Brody 🥲 Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the 2nd phase of shooting to share what went right, what went wrong, and some of the things people never…