Dear Reader,
whether you are a new visitor and just found this gem, or have been frequenting filmmaking.net since the mid-1990s, it’ll become clear very quickly that this website has been around for a long time.
We at Prodigium inherited the great work of Benjamin Craig, a British filmmaker and publisher, and are now stepping into his footsteps. Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Tobias Deml, a filmmaker from Austria and have been living and working in the US for the better part of 2 decades. I was lucky enough to have supportive parents that allowed me to take a significant risk with my life and pursue this career, starting with film school at Santa Monica College, and later at UC Berkeley. I had absolutely zero aspirations to go to school for my profession – I’m a self-taught CGI artist since I’m a teenager – but as life happened, I went back to school and wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. My film school was very theoretical and historical, exactly what I needed as someone who was constantly on set and tinkering with technology. If it wasn’t for film school, I would have never learned about these cool things like Sergei Eisenstein’s theories, the Kuleshov effect, Hitchcock’s editing tricks and a lot of the granular life details about the giants whose shoulders we all stand on.
The years at SMC and Cal were unforgettable, much because of the people I met and the life lessons I could learn and sharpen my analytical skills. That education comes in handy on a near-daily basis. Unlike many other film schools, both SMC and Berkeley were extremely diverse in terms of majors they offered – film was just a small part in a huge ocean of careers people pursued – and that was exactly what I needed. Others might enjoy a wholly different experience, a film school that’s all about production and 24/7 immersion in the industry. That’s cool too, to each their own!
Filmmaking.net offers one of the largest film school repositories in the world, and I’m proud to steward its ongoing mission to make it easier to search for, evaluate and decide on film schools for students anywhere on the globe.
I’m also a software nut, and the film industry has long suffered the fate of being a cherished industry in terms of glitz and glamour, but entirely forgotten by the brilliance of software developers. Over the last 10 years, many small startups and technologists have entered our industry, and most of them have really good intentions – doing away with annoying or inefficient tasks and allowing filmmakers to focus on what matters: human creativity, the bonds between a tightly knit cast and crew, and the joys of working in one of the world’s most unpredictable and wild jobs. I had the honor of taking on the modernization of Casper, the legendary 2013 Excel call sheet template that had tons of automations, and turn it to level 11 with G-Casper, which is a cloud-based Google Sheets version with 30 added features. And we’re now working on the secret successor of G-Casper as I’m writing this.
All that to say, Filmmaking.net is also the home of one of the world’s most complete filmmaking software lists. Be it phone apps for being on the go, desktop software to spin up in the production trailer, or application suites for post-production and beyond, we list it all – ready for filmmakers to discover something that makes their life a bit less stressful.
Oh, and did I mention that we also have one of the longest-running event database for filmmakers ever? We have a bit of catching up to do.
I’ll finish with this: One of the best things that ever happened to me was that I discovered an online forum at the age of 13 back in Austria – I was trying to learn a 3D software called Terragen, and had nobody in my personal life who was interested in it – but voila, there was hundreds and thousands of other Terragen fans online that I could learn from, debate with, and sharpen each other’s skills through constructive criticism. And one of the oldest filmmaking forums in the world is the one here, on filmmaking.net. It was built on such an old system that we needed multiple weeks of hacks to modernize it and rescue it from technical oblivion – and now it’s in a new format, a new look, and ready for the next 20 years.
I’m proud of what we built for this relaunch; Filmmaking.net is all yours to enjoy. Thanks for visiting us!
Toby
