Indie Filmmaking Masterclass In this full, complete tutorial series, now we can learn all the basics of indie film directing, step-by-step, from framing, lighting, color grading, scriptwriting... to post-production. Now, everyone can become a professional indie filmmaker!

Full Interview

Filmmakers are Christian Lee and Jason Chan
Full name of the documentary is "Filmmaking Masterclass: The Making of Jimami Tofu."

1. How and why did you become documentary filmmakers?
Primarily we're fictional filmmakers but we felt we had to share about the making of our first narrative feature since, at the time, it was still quite unheard of to use DSLRs to run and gun a film. It has since become commonplace but at the time there was little respect for what we were doing. However, we simply didn't have the budget and then we got used to it. We lit the entire film with a bunch of LED lights that fit in a backpack and no one believed us. There were a lot of frowns and disrespect on our set when we started but we won over a lot of the crew eventually. The series on filmmaking was simply to help inspire others to stop talking about filmmaking and just get making. We did a lot of very indie things like mix the entire soundtrack in a concrete bedroom but when we ended up in real cinemas it sounded great.

2. What makes a good documentary?
I think a good documentary always should discover something that at first the filmmakers are not aware of. If the directors and producers go into the documentary already knowing what they want the audience to feel then it usually comes across as didactic. If they discover something during the process of making it then the film will organically become a more riveting story I feel.

3. Why did you make “Indie Filmmaking Masterclass” and what were the key challenges you faced making the series?
Once again it was to help inspire others to follow us. We had been stuck ourselves for many years talking about making films rather than just making them and when we finally trudged up that monumental hill of creating a script, putting the hundreds of pieces together to actually get on set and shoot and edit and finally exhibit the film you realize that many of the parts are quite doable by anyone. So we wanted to impart that as quickly as we could. One of the key challenges in making the series was not having enough behind the scenes footage from our film set. Next time I think we'll have a 360 camera live on set and roll during takes and afterwards. One thing we discovered while making it was really our love for hacking things - getting by with very little but coming out with results that are satisfying.

4. What’s next for you?
During our distribution leg of our film we discovered we didn't always like the audio in some theaters. Some speakers were broken or had been turned off for years or simply the mix wasn't balanced for a 200 seater vs a 400 seater theater. That's when we came up with the idea for our current startup, Cinewave. We created a system to sync audio on mobile phones with the video from one laptop allowing us to have a cinema experience anywhere and deliver the perfect audio to everyone's phones in sync with the picture. It's since been used for more than outdoor cinema like: Vivid Sydney (light projections), drone shows, fireworks festivals etc. So we've become exhibitors of sorts and that's a really interesting journey.