Being unemployed in "Brooklyn Unemployed"

After sitting through the rough cut of "Brooklyn Unemployed," as a test before the actual test screenings, I was thinking about where to possibly start with the influences blog post for the film. It's tricky because this film came about from a need to work and also kind of as a reaction. Every script I tried to get produced the money would fall through at some point, or we'd have half the budget but couldn't get the rest and it just never lined up perfectly. I started reading a lot about no-budget filmmaking at the nofilmschool blog and thought a no-budget film could be something I could get into. Plus if all else failed at least I'd be honing my craft or getting some experience.

So I took a small investment left over from one of my failed projects (with the consent of the investor of course) and bought as much equipment as I could. Then came the hard part, actually shooting something!

I decided to do a series of three shorts and tie them into a feature that would explore three different NY experiences from three different characters points of view. We shot the first one which is the short I talked about in an earlier post, "Follow the Woman." The next was about an unemployed comic artist who can't get any work done on his comic. I wanted to cast my long time friend Tommy Busch who really is a cartoonist as well as a general jack of all arts. Once we started shooting we just kept on going, and the project morphed into this feature made with the aid of many unemployed or underemployed filmmakers just wanting to work on stuff.

We worked from an outline as opposed to a script which really freed us up from being locked into any one idea or specific dialogue. Coming from film school and learning a structured method of filmmaking this felt quite liberating in a way. We ended up shooting a couple days a week over three months including a hiatus after hurricane Sandy postponed a trip to Texas to shoot the last act of the film (for another blog post).

Stay tuned for a lot more postings about the film as we have test screenings coming up soon and are getting ready to shoot a post production fundraising campaign. Gorilla, no budget filmmakers, lets do this!

     Anna Nordeen and Tommy Busch in "Brooklyn Unemployed"