How to Find a Film Crew for a Documentary

By Kevin Lindenmuth
Kevin Lindenmuth

Kevin Lindenmuth has worked in the film/video business for more than 20 years. He received his B.A. in film/video production from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1987. Most of his professional life was spent working in New York City in all the major aspects of video production. Kevin is an independent movie maker who helped pioneer SOV movie making in the early 90’s and paved the way for their acceptance to mega-chain video stores with his well-received vampire movie Addicted To Murder (1995). He has produced 18 genre movies (12 now available on DVD) and five documentaries (broadcast on PBS). He is the author of two books on independent filmmaking, both published by McFarland Books Publishers (1998 and 2001) and was interviewed in the book "The Independent Filmmakers Guide to Writing a Business Plan for Investors" (by Gabriel Campisi, 2004). Occasionally, his articles can be seen in Fangoria magazine.

www.lindenmuth.com

Professional advice on filming your own documentary! Learn about finding a film crew and how to produce a documentary film in this free video.

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Another important thing is crew. Who is going to help you with this product? I'm kind of like a one man band. So, you know, I do the audio. I'll do the camera; I'll do the lights just because I know how to do all this. It's just easier for me to, you know, operate this way, and then I'll have somebody, you know, asking the questions like an interviewer asking the people questions. So you know it would be like two of us, but, you know, if you don't know the camera. If you're unfamiliar with it or uncomfortable and don't have experience find somebody who is and you can, you know, find people usually at colleges in their video classes, public access, you know, if you have a public access place find people through there, but find people, you know, who can do what you need, you know, to be done. Same thing with audio. If you're unfamiliar with audio and how to record, find an audio person. If you need help, you know, lugging equipment and stuff find somebody to do that, and again students are a really good resource, you know, put ads out on the internet and just add people, but the most important thing is when you have people working your project with you, is make sure they're like minded. Make sure you're all on the same level, that you're not going to have conflicts, you know, if you meet somebody who might be really good with the camera but is really difficult to deal with, it's probably not worth it. So you really just have to make sure you're all on the same level and all as enthusiastic, and remember the more people you have the more problems you might have, you know, like the more people you have working on a production the slower it is. One of the reasons why I tend to do everything myself is it's just faster and really expedites shooting of the documentary. So you've got to take into consideration, you know, with the more crew and the more potential problems, the more time, the more scheduling. So it all kind of goes hand in hand just depending on what you need for your production.