No Budget Film School with Indie Producer Mark Stolaroff

Can you imagine crafting remarkable stories through the lens of a low-budget camera and yet producing visually stunning effects that hold the audience spellbound? Our guest, Mark Stolaroff, a seasoned indie producer and founder of No Budget Film School, is a maestro at this. The magic of his DIY filmmaking journey, from Texas college days to his stint with Next Wave Films where he worked with a young Christopher Nolan, is something that will inspire both seasoned filmmakers and aspirants.

Mark's expertise at leveraging visual effects (VFX) on a budget to tell compelling narratives is awe-inspiring. He reveals how he employed cost-effective techniques to create marvelous VFX for his film 'DriverX', and the importance of actor-screen interaction. Mark is candid about the hurdles of working with big companies and shares his enlightening experience with the film 'Devil's Whisper'. Plus, he gives an insider’s view on how to save money on VFX shots.

Mark's journey doesn’t end here. He shares his enriching experience of creating effects-heavy film 'Family Ornaments' on a shoestring budget and working with big VFX companies. Get ready to soak up his wisdom on prioritizing shots, enhancing VFX shots with practical effects, and understanding the technical aspects of the VFX process. Mark's narrative is loaded with tips on how to maximize limited resources when learning about VFX and filmmaking. Join us for this captivating conversation and you'll walk away with insightful guidance to take your own filmmaking journey to new heights.

No Budget Film School with Indie Producer Mark Stolaroff

[Paul DeNigris]: 0:00

No budget? No problem. You can still use VFX to tell your stories, If you’re smart about it. Mark Stolaroff, Founder of No Budget Film school, Spills his secrets on this episode of VFX for Indies Hi, and welcome to this episode of VFX for Indies, the podcast about the intersection of visual effects and independent filmmaking. I'm your host, Paul DeNigris, visual effects artist, filmmaker, and CEO of boutique VFX shop, Foxtrot X-Ray. Joining with me today is Mark Stolaroff, a prolific indie producer who is more than comfortable with using visual effects and with whom I have collaborated a number of times. Mark is also the founder of something called No Budget Film School, which I will let him tell you all about in a few moments. So welcome to the podcast, Mark.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 1:08

Hey, thank you for having me. Really happy to be here.

[Paul DeNigris]: 1:12

Thanks for being part of this. And I know you have a ton of wisdom on this topic to share with our audience. So before we dive into visual effects and your experience with it, why don't you just tell us who you are and what you've done and give us kind of like the elevator pitch career highlights of Mark Stolaroff

[Mark Stolaroff]: 1:28

Okay, well, I'm at a disadvantage because I'm old and my career is long and it needs to be a bigger elevator than maybe some of your younger guests. So

[Paul DeNigris]: 1:37

It's a tall building.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 1:38

yeah, so we'll need to see if I can make this short. So I'm from Texas. I went to college in the mid-80s and was interested in film, but that was so long ago, there wasn't like a path for... for people who were interested in film and who lived in Texas. I mean, it was like, you know, do you want to be Spielberg? And you're like, well, how can I be Spielberg? There wasn't an independent filmmaking movement at the time, really, that started in the early 90s, that kind of thing. So I was a business major at the University of Texas, but I snuck, they did have a really good film, undergraduate film program that I snuck into and was, you know, I guess kind of like a double major, made films on film on 16 millimeter and edited with a razor blade on reversal 16 millimeter. And realized I really do love this and I wanted to direct and make movies. But again, there wasn't really a pathway. So when I left Texas, I was in investment banking for two years as investment banking analyst in New York. And then I came back to Houston after that program was over and just as random as you could be, I started a theater with an old friend of mine that I grew up with, a live theater and did that for five years and produced live theater, what I would call DIY, low budget theater. I didn't know anything about theater really. And we had our own space and it was really a great time. But all that time I really wanted to do film. And for some reason this idea of like DIY, do it yourself, filmmaking was always my passion for whatever reason it was in college. And it was as we were doing this theater, and I grew up on like Saturday Night Live, and there's just something about that kind of, let's go do a show and let's don't raise money and do all that kind of stuff, was always in my things, in my back, and just as part of my composition. So eventually in 1994, I left Houston, I went to Los Angeles to become a director of no-budget films, and I say no-budget now, because at that point in 94, That movement had started with Slackers and Clerks and El Mariachi. There was a model now for making films with very little money. And I remember I saw Clerks in the beginning of 94 at the Houston Film Festival, World Fest. And I went, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make Clerks. And I had $30,000 saved up, something like that anyway, which is what they spent. And I thought I'm gonna go to LA and I'm gonna make a movie. And so I came out to LA, I worked at Corman starting out, a friend of mine was running the studio at Corman. He was in my fraternity back at Texas. And so I started as a PA and I worked my way up to like eventually like, you know, in the AD department as, you know, second AD, first AD, not really first AD on a big Corman movie, but started doing that kind of work. And I wasn't really making my own films. I was kind of realizing how hard it was to kind of do that. And then in 1997, as I was kind of trying to figure out what I really wanted to be doing, there was a company created called Next Wave Films that a gentleman named Peter Broderick created. It was announced at South by Southwest that year. And IFC Films was financing this company. And I read about it and I thought, oh my God, this is what I want to do. I want to work for this guy. Cause it was the whole mission of this company was to look at all the, no budget films that were being made at the time and pick the best ones and then give them finishing funds and provide other support to bring these films out into the world. And I thought, this is, you know, even though I wanted to make those films, you know, I have a kind of a producer mindset, I guess. And I thought, I just want to be involved with this. And so I sent Peter my resume and he hired me and it was off to the races. So for six years, I worked at this company called Next Wave Films. We got involved in some really terrific films by some filmmakers that maybe you've heard of. There was a guy named Chris, what was his last name? Nolan, Chris Nolan that we got involved with on his film Following. We gave finishing funds to that film and I worked with Chris for several years on that movie. Joe Carnahan was a filmmaker we got involved with, may have heard of. Amir Bar-Lev, who's a documentary filmmaker, who's very prolific. We ended up getting involved in like 13 films. We produced three films from the beginning, took seven films to Sundance, five films to Toronto. All those films, most of those films, almost all of them got theatrical release. And I did that from 1997 to 2002. It was a great experience, it was a great job. I couldn't ask for something better in the world of independent film because I was getting a paycheck and also working with really exciting filmmakers who were kind of willing their movies into existence, like David Gordon Green and people like that at the time. I mean, I knew all those people, whether we got involved with their films or not. And then Next Wave closed, and when it closed, I became an independent producer. And the only kind of producing I knew how to do really was no-budget filmmaking. And so I set off to kind of make my own no-budget films as a producer. I did five movies with a gentleman named Henry Barrial. We started shooting our first one in 2004, which is a film called True Love. And the last film we did together was called DriverX, which I'll definitely talk about. And in that timeframe, starting in 2005, I created No Budget Film School, which was just an opportunity for me to teach what I had learned about no budget filmmaking, both from the work that I was doing as a producer at that time, but also probably mainly the experience I had at Next Wave Films where, you know, I saw such, I mean, I saw probably 4,000 movies that were submitted to us. And then when you look at 4,000 movies and you pick very few of them, you know, it trains your mind and like, what's important here, you know? It's often the things that you don't think about. It's not production value. It's not shooting on 35 millimeter. It's not the things that some people think it is. And there's a lot of lessons you get from, you know, speaking to all those filmmakers over the years, working closely with some really talented ones. And so I turned that into a two day class, weekend workshop that I taught for many years in person. I started kind of getting... it got harder to do as my filmmaking stuff got more, got busier. So, and then COVID hit. When COVID hit, then there wasn't anything to do. So I started teaching online classes and doing several different webinar series. Had this thing called No Budget Confidential where I interviewed, much like you're doing with me, I interviewed filmmakers and we talked about, usually just one movie and broke that movie down. I did several of those. I have this thing called the Guest Expert Series. I have something called No Budget Film Club. But anyway, I was doing a lot of that with COVID and then when COVID kind of let up and I haven't really done that in a bit, in about a year, I haven't done one of those because I've been busy with kind of the movies I'm working on right now. And I should also mention I'm in North Carolina right now. I live in Los Angeles, but I've been spending a lot of the last year here in North Carolina helping take care of my 93 year old mother. So, the value of the benefit of having a flexible job like being a film producer. So I go back to LA when I need to, and I work remotely here in North Carolina now a lot. So that's my story. That was most of the time we have.

[Paul DeNigris]: 9:42

Like I said, it was a tall building, long elevator ride, but you're a good man, Mark, taking care of your mom. You know, you're a good son. So that's very sweet.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 9:51

Thank you.

[Paul DeNigris]: 9:53

A friend of mine, I think was turned down by Next Wave Films. Let's see, his name was Paul... DeNigris.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 10:03

Oh no, really? That guy, he was terrible! Which film did you submit to us? Did we talk about this?

[Paul DeNigris]: 10:10

I don't even, I kid, I don't even remember if I submitted, but the name certainly seems familiar and I probably did because I was a no budget filmmaker at that time. I made a feature film called The Falls. Original title was American Falls, got renamed The Falls.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 10:28

It's weird how certain titles, I mean, I have no memory anymore, but no budget, I mean, titles that were people that submitted films to us, I remember a lot of them. I mean, maybe I won't remember the film, but I'll remember the title or something, maybe one aspect of the film. I mean, there were a lot of people that we could have done David Gordon Green's George Washington. We were really close to doing that, but we didn't. We didn't do Justin Lin's Good Luck Tomorrow, which was kind of a mistake. Pi would have been our first film which we did decide to do, Darren Aronofsky's film. And then just through a series of things that the deal fell through. Blair Witch Project, same thing. We were negotiating to do that film and then that kind of fell through. So, you know, we had some close calls in there, but again, you know, got involved with a lot of really great films and, you know, really, it was a really fun experience doing all that. I should also mention...

[Paul DeNigris]: 11:24

It was a wild time. It was a wild time in independent film.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 11:27

Yeah exactly, a really exciting time. I should also mention the last film that I produced, which was, which, you know, the films I do with Henry were in the like $120,000 to $150,000 range. We'll talk about that with DriverX. But even though I teach, you know, making a film for $5,000 or $10,000, whatever money you have, in my last feature that I produced, I'm working on several movies that I'm not necessarily the producer on. I do a lot of work that's kind of producer work that I don't necessarily get the credit for because I was hired as something else and then you know, like oh I can I can help you with this. But the last film that I was a full producer on was a film called The Last Days of Capitalism which we finished right before COVID. We actually premiered literally the week that COVID shut everything down at Cinequest and they shut the film festival down after one screening But that film was more of a true no budget, it was a $50,000 movie I did with a filmmaker named Adam Mirvis, who's a, I would call him a Hollywood screenwriter. He wrote 21 Bridges and he wrote National Champions and he's written some other scripts that haven't been made into movies yet that are gonna be big movies. And he and I are working right now on a new film that we hope to do for anywhere between 150 and 300,000, depending on what of interest we can get from investors. If we don't get interest from investors, we'll just do it ourselves like we did the last one. But he's a WGA writer, so we're basically sitting on our hands. And then the SAG Strike has kind of obviously put a kibosh on that too.

[Paul DeNigris]: 13:08

So tell me about your relationship to visual effects and kind of how you have become a producer that's really comfortable with visual effects. And as you say, there's a lot of times where you come to me and you say, I'm working on this film, I'm not working as producer, but they need VFX and you bring us on. And I think it's because of your comfort level with VFX as a whole, as a process that you're able to guide a lot of filmmakers that you work with.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 13:35

Well it’s because you guys are great also, and really great to work with, affordable and do great work and just easy to work with. And I know what I'm getting and all that kind of stuff. So, and I have worked with other vendors for different reasons, and that's not always the case with other vendors. But yeah, I think that I came to it in a way that I think a lot of maybe... filmmakers, I mean, there's, if you have a lot of money, then maybe doing VFX isn't necessarily all that hard, probably, because someone will give you a bid, it'll be expensive and you say, okay, and you write the check and they do the work. And I never, I've never made movies like that, that where he had all that money. And so I just thought VFX were, you know, they weren't for me because they were expensive. And, and I wasn't really doing those kinds of movies, you know, and now what I've learned is that, you know, several things. One is that you use VFX for all movies, dramas, you know, little movies, whatever. They don't have to be, you know, action films or horror films or supernatural films to have VFX these days. The cost of VFX has come down. A lot of what you can do yourself, you know, has been made easier. And so really VFX are for everyone, no matter the budget. And the more you kind of know what you can do, the better, like, you know, oh, set extensions. I didn't know I could do this, or I can erase signs, or just simple things that the more you kind of know what's available, the more you'll use them. And the more you know how to use them, which is something I'm still learning how to do, the less expensive they'll be, the better the result will be because you're not making mistakes when you're shooting. So I'll just start that, kind of really answering that question with my first experience. doing no budget, doing VFX, my first real experience. I mean, I guess we had, I did a film called Pig several years ago that we had a couple of shots, but they, I mean, I don't really call them VFX shots. They were just these weird shots we hired someone to do for us. But when I made this film called Driver X, which was about an Uber driver, it was technically, he was working for a company called DriverX and not Uber, but he was essentially an Uber driver. We knew going into that movie, we were gonna have some VFX because we had an app that was like this fake Uber company app that we were gonna see on the phone. I mean, that was the main thing we thought we were gonna be doing VFX for. And we had to figure out like, well, what is this gonna be? We had to create the app, first of all, the overlay, the user interface, this fake Uber user interface. And then we had to composite it on the phone. And it was in a lot of shots. And we knew that going in. And I'll just say that the end cost of DriverX when it was all said and done was $136,000. But when I started shooting it, I literally had no money. I just put it on credit cards. I didn't know what the cost of the movie was gonna be. I budgeted for something like $100,000. And when I budgeted it, I had zero money budgeted for VFX, even though we knew we were gonna do it. It was just like, well, we're gonna... shoot this movie and then we're gonna figure that out later and I'll find someone who'll do it for free for me and you know, whatever, that's always kind of the mentality with a lot of these movies. And so we started shooting it. We didn't talk to any, I didn't know you yet. I don't think, I'm trying to remember when I first, I met you, I think at the Phoenix Film Festival, but I don't remember if it was with DriverX. It might've been when I, when, cause I think you were, you introduced the movie, right? And you knew some people that I know. Is that the first time we met? It might've been.

[Paul DeNigris]: 18:03

Yes, I believe you're right. I believe I did. I did introduce the screening of DriverX at Phoenix Film Festival. And that was after our mutual friend, Paul Osborne, had introduced us. And then I yeah, we didn't know each other when you were in post on Driver X. But then we worked together on another project. And then when DriverX was about to go to distribution, you came to me with a couple of things, a couple of minor...

[Mark Stolaroff]: 18:27

I had a shot or two, right, that the QC picked up, right yeah, so if I had known you when I was in 2015 when we were shooting DriverX, I would have called you up and I would have said, hey, we're about to shoot this film and I don't know how we're gonna, we don't have this interface yet. How do we, what's the best way to do this phone thing? We didn't, we didn't talk, I didn't, I talked to a couple of people and I didn't get like the real advice, oh, you know, put markers on the phone or whatever that advice would have been. So we made that job really hard. And an easy thing would have been to build the interface first and actually have it playing on the phone, not have to do the compositing. But we just rushed into making the movie for a variety of reasons. And it was all like fix it in post kind of a thing. And sometimes that's just the way it works. And so it turns out on DriverX, I had 45 shots. Most of them were these phone shots, but then there were other things. We had some texts on the screen, kind of fun text on the screen stuff. We had some, we had a little bit of removal. We had a dolly shot that needed to be stabilized. And so I didn't know how I was gonna do all of that. So it took about a year, it took a couple of years to shoot DriverX, just the nature of the beast, not having the money. And my lead actor was a Patrick Fabian was on Better Call Saul, and we had to work around his schedule. And so we shot it over periods. And in the middle of shooting Driver X, I got another gig as a producer. I was more of a hired gun, which I usually am not. I'm usually putting the movie together and financing it myself and all that kind of stuff. But I did this film called Devil's Whisper, which was about a half a million dollar horror film that had like CGI, you know, character and all kinds of visual effects. In fact, I think that film had like about 150 shots. And, you know, so this was really my introduction while we were in post on, on DriverX, I was, you know, given money and, and people that knew what they were doing around me to make a bigger movie. And we had a VFX supervisor on the set because we had to deal with a CGI character that hadn't, you know, been invented yet. And we had all kinds of practical effects and visual effects on that movie and the editor of that movie was very experienced and well-versed in this. He was assistant editor on big Hollywood movies. And so, you know, when it came time to do the visual effects, he had, he put together, he was the kind of visual effects producer, I guess you would say, and he put together this big spreadsheet with, you know, all the different things you would have on the spreadsheet. And he had a visual effects guy back in Germany. He was from Germany. He had this young kid who did all of our work for barely, you know, anything, who was pretty great. I mean, you know, again, create this kind of CGI characters. And so when I started really digging into the work on DriverX, I just went and looked at his spreadsheet and like, oh, this is how you do it. And I kind of did that myself. I created a spreadsheet, I put together a reel like we had done. This was all new to me, you know, like, oh, the reel is gonna be, you know, I'm gonna put all those shots without, you know, without the visual effects, I'm gonna give them a number and the number is gonna be on the spreadsheet. And here's the, you know, here's the, you know, frame to frame, each shot on this reel and I can show it to people and get, you know, they can, you know, they can, they know what we're doing now. I mean, there's all these like things that I didn't know how to do. And so the funny story that's about how we did the visual effects on DriverX is that I had called a few people, I'd gotten a bid. I think one bid was like $40,000. Someone else gave me a bid that was like $10,000. And I had literally zero money, I couldn't do $10,000. And so we were trying to figure it out. Somebody who'd taken my class said, I can do this for you. And I'm like, for free. And I'm like, oh really? And you just go, okay. And so he started creating the app for me for free. And we worked really closely together on this app and how it would do it and what it would look like. And then once we started building each of these pages some very, the metadata for the phone, like what time of the day it was and how much battery charging, all this kind of stuff where we're like, because it was these closeup shots and it was like very particular and what part of town were we in and all this stuff. And so we still didn't really know how we were gonna composite it. I think I got a bid maybe to do compositing for like five or $6,000 from somebody who was presented to me as like, this is the guy who's really good at doing very inexpensive shots or whatever. And then, At that same moment, my lead actor, Patrick Fabian, was at like a diner and someone came up to him and said, hey, you're in Better Call Saul. And he's like, oh yeah. And he goes, oh, my wife loves that show. And it would be cool if we could get a picture together or whatever. And so he took the picture and he goes, so what do you do? And he goes, oh, I do visual effects. So he's like, oh really? And he gets his card and I connect up with him. And we said, listen, we're finishing this movie. We have all these shots. We don't know how we're going to do them. And he's like, listen, my wife's such a big fan. I think Patrick's great. I'll do them for free if we can take him to dinner or something like that. And we're like, sign us up. So he did all these composite shots. Some of them were really hard because we just gave him shit. I mean, really bad, like, difficult stuff and it took a long time because he also worked at a big company. In fact, he did a bid. He had to present us with a bid from that company so we would pass on the bid and that bid was like incredibly expensive. And then he did these shots for us and I ended up paying them both a little bit of money just because I had, you know, just as a thank you. But they both did it for free and, you know, we ended up with all these shots on DriverX. And the funny thing is I think I shot and finished Devil's Whisper before we finished DriverX, even though we started shooting Driver X before. That's just, again, the nature of making money, making a movie when you don't have all the money. And so at that point with Devil's Whisper and DriverX, I had kind of been thrown into the water, into the deep end a little bit, and learned a little bit. And then I did this show, Millennial Mafia, which you mentioned, which was a much bigger budget, like a million and a half dollar budget. It was a, it was a, it was a, we were doing it for E One. It was a, it was a TV series that we shot as like a feature because it was 10, 10 minute episodes. And so we just shot it as one, you know, kind of hour and a half, whatever movie. And I wasn't, I think when I was, initially involved, I was just as a production accountant. And then I became the post-production supervisor, which I do a lot of now. I do that combo all the time now. I do production accounting, DIT, and then I'm post-production supervisor. That's my weird skillset I guess, outside of producing. So I worked with my really good friend, Liam Finn on that film, who was my line producer on Devil's Whisper. And I've known him for a million years, but we'd never worked together until Devil's Whisper. And then he hired me to be the production accountant and then eventually the post-production supervisor. But on that film, we'd already made the deal on who was going to do all our post, which was this one company we were doing, we were editing there and they were doing all the VFX shots. And there were probably, uh, 130 or a hundred or so shots in that show. that we knew from the beginning and a lot of them were just dumb. I mean, you know a lot of like texting and iPad screens and you're like, we can't we just do the texting live, you know, like we do what we were to say I mean just shoot the text, just shoot it, you know I don't... stuff like that is expensive and hard to get to look right and no reason to do it. So I don't... my advice for anything on a computer screen or iPad or you know I found is just do it live if you can do it. I mean it just saves... It's easy and just takes a little bit of extra time, you know, maybe, you know, prepping to have it figured out. But we have a lot of....

[Paul DeNigris]: 27:51

to that point, we do quite a bit of work on phone and computer screen shots where the actors are actually interacting with something on the screen. And then we replace it because, you know, glare or focus, or they decided to change the word or maybe, you know, something was uh, there's a typo in the graphic or the producer, the director decides they don't like the color scheme, whatever, but it helps so much to have them actually, you know, hitting their thumbs on the right part of the screen. You’d be surprised how many actors, how many actors they have iPhones in their pocket and they forget how to use an iPhone when you hand them one that's blank.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 28:28

Right, exactly. Or we didn't have an iPhone. Everybody on the set has an iPhone. Somebody can put their iPhone up. But I mean, that's a good point. So if I were to ask you, so even if I knew I was gonna replace some of it or whatever, having them do as much of it practically as possible helps you. Is that the,

[Paul DeNigris]: 28:45

Oh yeah.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 28:45

So yeah, so we had all these different kinds of shots. We had like, blood. There was a scene where there was a big fight. There was a blood splatter and a blood pool. There was a scene where they cut up a body. In a comic way, it was funny, this show was funny, and there was like stuff there. We had all these different kinds of shots, but the thing that we didn't count on going in was we had shot in two locations with graffiti. One of them was a location that we had rented this location, signed the deal, the guy that owned it had done the graffiti himself. He hired artists or whatever to do the graffiti because that's the kind of look, rented it as a location that had graffiti, it was like supposed to be like a kind of a dangerous place or something. And we didn't think we were gonna have to worry about that graffiti. And then the other location, it was just in the background, just people who were tagging in the background, it wasn't like an artist or whatever. And then there was this lawsuit in New York or something that happened like right after we shot where someone got some kind of a suit because their graffiti was in a movie or something, I don't know. And the circumstances were probably a lot different than our circumstances, but it basically scared the shit out of the legal department at E One. And they were like, well, you guys have to remove that graffiti, because they couldn't get a, on the building that they hired the artist, they couldn't, that artist disappeared or something, they couldn't get any kind of a release for the graffiti. And we were like, okay, you're gonna have to remove all the graffiti. I mean, this is like everything you see is graffiti. And we're like, how the fuck are we gonna do that? And so I went back to Yoshi, the guy who'd done the stuff for me on DriverX, and he did this, he completely turned into like 3D, you know, just like removed everything and then built it all back up and then hired somebody to do the graffiti, whatever. It was insane what he ended up doing. And then that was, I think the first time I'd actually worked with you, there were maybe some other shots, but we hired you to do the graffiti removal on the other scene. Which were several shots.

[Paul DeNigris]: 30:57

Mm-hmm.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 30:58

And when I started seeing like your work and how much it costs, I was like, God, I wish I could have used you for this whole movie. Because it was just, the company that we ended up doing most of these shots with was just so expensive and not as easy to work with. But again, we'd already made that deal before we went into the production. So then after that, I think is when, it's like, okay, well, you're my go-to guy, when I'm doing, you know, visual effects and you did, let's see, what did I do after that? Well, I contacted you for Last Days of Capitalism because I thought we might do some visual effects, but we ended up, we were able to do the things practically. So I don't think we had any visual effects on that movie.

[Paul DeNigris]: 31:46

I'm still bitter about that.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 31:47

Yeah, well, you know, we had that, we had a safe, we had to create a... a floor safe and this hotel we were shooting in had marble floors. And I'm in Las Vegas and I'm driving to Home Depot's and getting marble matching, trying to match the marble. And I am not crafty at all. And I built this contraption with this marble and a piece of some wood, some hinges to make it look like we were opening up a floor safe. And we thought we would have to clean that up or whatever. And it like just the way we shot it or whatever, it looked pretty real, it worked out. So we just faked it. But then, you know, doing this film that I just finished, it's about to come out, and I know you've spoken to the director, so you probably talked a lot with him about the visual effects on this movie, but I did this film called Kill Her... Dark Sky Films is releasing it. And this was a low budget, more money than I had to make DriverX, but not very much money at all. I don't think we're talking about the budget, but it was not a lot of money. And we had money budgeted for VFX, but it was based on, it was just the way I usually do a budget where you go, how about this number? You know, it wasn't based on, oh, we did an estimate and we figured out how many shots we're going to have and it should cost this. We're just like, we have about this much money. Can we get this done? So on that one, the director, he's done visual effects. He does a lot of music videos, and it's just something he likes to do. And so there were shots that, and the good news about that, there were shots that he knew exactly how to do that he'd perform himself. And then there were shots where he was like, I don't think I can probably pull this off, but he knew how to shoot those things so that they could be done relatively easy or whatever. I mean, you're always gonna have something that you, you know, that's not kind of optimal in terms of, you know, you're handing it over to the VFX company, like, sorry, we just couldn't give you something better than this, and then, you know, you guys do your magic. But on that film, we had like 80 to 100 shots. Robyn did maybe 20 shots, and you did like 70 shots or something, or 80 shots, I don't remember. But you know. Um, similar thing where, um, I'm putting together the spreadsheet for this, um, putting together a reel, um, uh, maybe the big difference is I had money to do the VFX pulls that my post house, a post house called Different by Design, who I always work with on everything, did the VFX pulls, but on these other movies, like on DriverX, certainly we did our own VFX pulls. I mean, whether we did it right or not, I guess we did. Um, but that's, you know, It's not impossible to do that, but it's something that we just had to do ourselves. But in the last couple of movies I've done, we've had the money for, well, we thought we had the money and then the VFX pulls end up being way more expensive than you, than, you know, cause you have more VFX shots usually than you kind of budget initially, but, but on this one, they did it. So they, they uploaded those, those plates to you guys. You guys, you know, went at it, we, we worked out a, a deal where like, you know, like, uh, you know, this is what we have, can you do it? We think we can do it. We organized the shots by priority because we knew we probably couldn't get them all done by you and some of them I felt like if we didn't do the shot at all, it wouldn't be the end of the world. The director thought, well, it'll be nice because I can kind of see this and like, no one's gonna see that or maybe he would give it a shot. But there were high priority shots that he knew he couldn't do, that, that those were the first ones you guys tackled. And it turned out that you guys pretty much did pretty much every shot on that list. There were a couple that we just decided that no one's gonna notice this. There was some removal that would have been hard. And I never noticed it. We screened the film in festivals and no one ever sees this thing that we were gonna maybe remove. And then I think Robyn maybe did a shot or two that he thought he could do. But you did pretty much all the other shots. And there were a variety of shots. There was blood splatter. there was removal, there was that great shot where the guy gets shot in his down jacket and it was a little bit of blood splatter, but the feathers came off the down jacket, which I really liked. We didn't even tell you to do that, and I really liked that one. But there was a variety of things, and if you're making a horror film like this one, you're probably gonna be doing visual effects. You'll have practical effects. We had practical blood work, and... Some of that you just enhanced, you know,

[Paul DeNigris]: 36:22

Mm-hmm.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 36:23

and some of it we didn't have any blood, you know, practical blood work at all. We just added, we tried to be subtle, you know, somewhat subtle with some of it. It wasn't a real heavy duty blood, you know, movie or whatever, But a good example of just, you know, and once you're, once you've got your set, you commit to like, well, we're gonna have visual effects. Then you start looking around and like, oh, it'd be nice if we could fix this and fix that. There was a... there was a stabilization shot we gave you guys that it was a dolly shot that just had a little bit of a bump in it that would have been nice to not have the bump. And you're like, oh, we can do that for this little bit of money. And so you fix things like that if now. I think on any budget level is start out at the beginning, thinking about, look at your script and what you're gonna have to spend money on and start thinking about like, can I do this with visual effects that will be cheaper than doing it practically? Whether that's, again, like killing, and stabbing or punching or bruises or whatever, or if it's a location, modifying the background of the location or something like that. Always, the film that I'm hoping to shoot soon, it's set in... it's a drama, it's set in Silver Lake, and we have a house that we wanna use that's not in Silver Lake, but if you look out the window, it kinda looks like Silver Lake, but we wanna have a shot where we see the lake, you know? And I'll be calling you about that when we start to figure out exactly what the shots are, because we'll probably do a green screen, and we'll have to figure out if we can make this work, but we'll put something behind the window, and whatever the best way to do that, and light that, and have this like... shot of Silver Lake outside the window that we want to look real. We'll be contacting you and talking to you about the best way to do that. And then there's some other, there's some shots with some seagulls that we will probably, some of it will use stock footage and some of it will probably have to just, it might be just completely CGI, kind of seagull work or whatever, subtle stuff. But so you'll get that call. But again, this is one of those things where, you know, as we're planning it, we sit down and we'll really start to think about what are these, these are the VFX shots, let's do a budget on those before we start, you know, before we start making this movie and do it right. I'll just say the last film that I, that I've just, just delivered, I mean I delivered Kill Her probably three weeks ago, just finished delivering that film to the distributor, but this one, I just, we just delivered like a couple of weeks ago, which was a film called Family Ornaments, which my partner, Liam Finn, actually wrote. And he produced, he's usually a line producer, but on this one, he wrote it and produced it for Tubi. It's a made for Tubi Christmas movie. And we knew an executive at Tubi that was actually an executive on that Millennial Mafia movie. I mean, he's since kind of moved on, but he knew him and we pitched him this movie. where it was like a high concept movie where, you know, it's family, it's Christmas and the family buys this Christmas ornament that you make a wish to. And they, without getting into the kind of details of the story, these Christmas ornaments come to life and they attack the family. In kind of a fun, like Jumanji, Gremlin's kind of a way. And so the director of the movie is a visual effects supervisor for a big company called or it's kind of called Mammal, they do visual effects for big studio films. You know, when you see like a big Marvel movie and you see all the, at the end, there's like six or seven different companies that do different aspects of it. Mammal, sometimes you'll see their name and that's the kind of visual effects that they normally do. And Greg, the owner of Mammal, is like a lot of people, they come out to California and you want to be a director and then you get caught up in something else that you're good at. And this may be your story, Paul. You know, it's like, I really came out here to direct, but I'm good at this and now I make a living doing this and I never ended up going back to directing. And so Liam knew Greg and gave him that opportunity, like, hey, do you want to direct a movie and do all the visual effects for this movie? And, you know, do them for a good price. We won't have a lot of money to give you for the visual effects. So that movie has... can't remember now, 400 or 500 shots? It had a lot more shots than we thought. Because that's what happens. And when you're working with a visual effects person, you just have a lot more shots. And...

[Paul DeNigris]: 41:19

Yep. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Right. So when you're a VFX person in the director's chair, you're like, yeah, that's a VFX shot.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 41:28

Yeah, we'll do this later. We'll do this, you know, so, and we had an editor on that one, Frank, who he was a visual effects producer on Ted Lasso. And so he really, I mean, it was a really good, for no money, for really having very little money, because that movie, it was more money than again, like Kill Her, but not the kind of money you would have to do the, we have all these CGI characters. I mean, this is, I don't know, it would be like millions of dollars and it was not millions of dollars. if we had paid full price. But on that one, I'll just say this as a kind of lesson learned from, I would say a real movie, like a real VFX movie. From the beginning, like this is gonna be VFX, this will be a huge part of this movie. The things that caught us off guard were, and these are people, experienced people, is the number of shots. So when we're budgeting the VFX pulls, we came in way under because there were just so many more shots that I had to do pulls for. And then the amount of time it took, it took a lot more time. So I would always just, if you're budgeting for this and you have a lot of shots and you know you're gonna have like a post house do your pulls, you know, you need to budget more than you think, probably for that. Then the amount of time it took, I mean, Greg has his way of doing it and vendors and this and that, outside vendors and whatever, doing a lot of the work himself, but it took a lot more time to get these shots done. And again, these aren't simple composite shots. These are creating characters, and you're editing while you're creating those characters. And so it's kind of going back and forth. You can't really lock your picture until you've gotten a certain amount of the way there with the character work that you're creating so that you can go, okay, this is what that character is doing. Okay, now we can lock this shot. We know, and even then, we had to pull the lock once or twice, which makes it hard to get everything else done. I mean, you can't do your sound, you can't really start doing color correction, things like this, when your picture’s unlocked. So time was another issue. And then it's just more in the conform. Shots are coming in. They're not coming all at one time. And when you can do your conform all in one sitting, you know, or over, you know, several days, but in one sitting, the conform, if you're having, you know, a post house do your conform, that'll be less expensive. But when you're doing, you know, stuff here and there over a period of time, it just costs more to do the conform. You're just gonna add, you know, add a lot of hours to that. And you, and you know, we had a deadline and we started getting the situation where it's this countdown. We still have 10 shots that we're waiting on, and we're coloring around those shots and then we're getting a few shots in, conforming those and then maybe we're doing a little bit of color on that just so that as they come in, we're coloring as we go. That stuff, again, you can do it that way but it's a little bit more expensive. But I'm really proud of the movie. I mean, it'll be coming out on Tubi November 23rd. For those of you who like, you know, it's not a Hallmark Christmas movie. It's definitely not that kind of a movie, but, and I'm not saying it's, you know, for a lot of your viewers or followers, but you know, if you want to get in that Christmas spirit, but in a more deranged kind of a way, you might enjoy the movie. So there's some really, there's some really great effects. I mean, we talked to you about doing some things on that as well that we ended up not needing to do, but, but Greg, you know, Greg did a good job on these, creating these characters and stuff, so.

[Paul DeNigris]: 45:23

as I would expect, Mammal would, for sure. They do great work.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 45:27

But you guys, I've never asked you to do CGI. You guys do, you've done that kind of work, right, on stuff?

[Paul DeNigris]: 45:33

Yeah, we've done that. We're doing more of it. Okay, but your experience on this movie, remind me of the name again?

[Mark Stolaroff]: 45:40

The Family Ornament or no Family Ornaments.

[Paul DeNigris]: 45:42

Family Ornaments, okay. So bigger budget than you're used to working with, but still some of the same themes, right? Everything's more costly, everything takes longer, right? There's always things that surprise you, things that you didn't budget for. There's a few technical terms that you've used a couple of times in this episode. And I wanna make sure that for our less technically minded audience members that we address what those are. So you've used the term...

[Mark Stolaroff]: 46:11

I got them right, because I'm not that great at this stuff.

[Paul DeNigris]: 46:13

No, you definitely have. You've mentioned VFX pulls and you've mentioned the conform. So why don't we just really, really quickly, you know, for, for filmmakers who maybe are completely new to this, or maybe are just, they’re DIY people who have never had to think about how do we pass information back and forth between different vendors, different departments, if we can just address those terms.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 46:39

Yeah, and I'll just say this. Let's start from a way of doing it when you just have no money. So it's pretty simple to think. Normally when you shoot, and this isn't always the case, and I recommend if you're really working with no money to not do it this way, but normally, you're shooting on a, let's say you're shooting a 4K, I mean, I'm often shooting just ProRes, which I prefer to shoot. And in fact, the last several things I've done. Got one more movie in the hopper that we will be, I've already contacted you a little early on that one. There's, we've changed the movie so much, I don't know. A lot of those shots are gone now, but there's another movie that I'm finishing. All the last three movies we essentially shot like ProRes 422HQ, like camera original. But often, people like, I'm shooting 8K raw, and whatever, and you're shooting these huge files, and then you're editing with a proxy. So you're converting, you're shooting this 4K or 8K, you know, raw and you can't, you know, you don't want to edit that. So you're creating an HD, you know, let's say ProRes proxy media that you're editing with. And if you're editing on an Avid, which is what I've been doing the last two or three shows, which doesn't always, it's a little sometimes tricky with the conform part of it, at least when you're conforming in Resolve can be tricky. You know, you're doing all this proxy work and you're coming up with your edit and you know that you've got an edit decision list and this proxy but you have to go back to the original camera original footage and apply that edit decision list back to that camera original so you're going to give basically these instructions, you know. You could do that yourself I guess but you know I'm working with this company called Different by Design and I'm handing them the you know the turn... I'm turning over these instructions, the AAF and the decision list, and I'm giving them all the original media, and they're going through however they do it, and they're a little black box of Resolve and whatever, and they're basically taking all those, they're taking all that footage and editing it. When you do VFX...

[Paul DeNigris]: 48:49

Right, so they're rebuilding the timeline in 8K or whatever your original media was

[Mark Stolaroff]: 48:54

Right. In Resolve, at least at that company in Resolve. So, but you have these visual effects shots. So the visual effects shots you're gonna often do in your camera original. And so before you can even get to putting those shots in, you have to go back to that camera original and pull those shots and give them to the VFX company who's then gonna do them, likely they're gonna be doing them, keeping them in 8K, maybe not, but you know. And then they're gonna have to send them back. So you guys are in Arizona, we're in Los Angeles, that's an upload to a, you know, in both these last movies, well certainly with Kill Her, you know, this was fortunately not a huge files, these were 4K, again, I think 422, I think we convinced them, yeah, it wasn't even, it wasn't that, these files aren't huge, but they're, you know, they're fairly big files, they get uploaded to a, to the cloud, you guys pull them down, you do the work, you upload them back up to the cloud, they pull them down and they cut them back, they cut em in the movie. What

[Paul DeNigris]: 49:59

Which is what we call the conform, right? When they’re cutting stuff back into the movie is what we call the conform. So I just want, and I don't wanna go too much deeper down the technical rabbit hole, but I do want the audience to take note. Mark is an exception among producers, okay? Many, many producers that I interact with don't have necessarily have the mastery of all these technical terms like Mark does, okay? A lot of producers, they are more on the creative or the money side, and they rely on other people for technical, which is fine. That's why technical people like me are in the business, because we provide that service. But Mark's an exception because he is coming from the no-budget DIY world. He's had to learn a lot of this stuff. And that's kind of what makes Mark an ideal client because the more technical stuff that he understands and the more technical stuff he takes care of on his end means we can just get right to creative work. Okay, I'm not having to do a lot of that technical stuff. The files are coming to me ready to be worked on, right? Some clients they need a little more assistance and that you know sort of eats into the creative time and budget A lot of times when we have clients who need more of that technical assistance, it just, it increases the amount of time that we have to spend, it increases the cost for them. So it's a good lesson to indie producers, indie directors. Learn the technical side of things because it really, really will benefit you in the long run in your ability to communicate with your technical crew.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 51:47

I'll just say this.

[Paul DeNigris]: 51:48

It doesn't mean you need to know every bell and whistle, every button on the camera. It doesn't mean you need to know every step of the VFX process, but the more you understand, the more well-versed you are, the more you can facilitate that for the vendors that you're hiring, the more streamlined and the more economical it can be throughout the process.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 52:08

I'll just say this, I'm not a super technical person. This is not impossible stuff to learn. It's much easier to learn when you have no money and you just have to do it, which is how, you know, and I don't know that much. I mean, I've worked with people, I'm lucky enough to work with editors most of the time who are really good at this stuff. So like Frank on Family Ornaments, this job, I mean, I wasn't the VFX producer on this one because Frank, you know, knew how to do it and it was... really the nomenclature and the amount of like stuff that he was doing, it was over my head. I mean, if I had to learn it because if I needed to, I would have been able to do it. And I could kind of figure it out because I've done it a little bit on these other movies, but that was a really difficult job. And Frank handled that. On Kill Her, also working with an editor who does assistant editing on bigger movies who really knew how to do all this stuff and could help organize it. And what I was able to do, because Chris, the editor of that movie, I can't let him, I try to do as much as I can, take as much off of his plate. So he's just editing and he's not getting paid very much. So the more I understand these shots and what we're trying to do with these shots, the more I can be as, even though I'm not a producer on Kill Her, technically I was providing that kind of perspective as a producer of, I don't think we need to do this, cause I knew every shot. And in fact, on that one, even though he was doing, you know, like the spreadsheets and stuff, I think I took that over at some point. But anyway, I did the reel. I went in and put that reel together. So I knew those shots really well. And I mean, I know Final Cut Pro a little bit, you know? And so I could, you know, create a reel and I can look at every single shot and go, do we really need to do this? Cause they were telling me like, we need to do this, we need to do this, we need to do this. And some of them were like, I don't think we need to do. So I think I took that. That's what it was. I created that reel and I created that spreadsheet and I was the one making those priorities like I don't think this is a three. If we don't have the money, we can't get to this, let's don't do this. And so I think that's really helpful when you don't have money to be able to know that process and not just have other people tell you we have to do this or you have to have some understanding so that you're, so as a, if you're a producer who's having, who's in charge of money, you're making good decisions. But I'll say this one other little thing Something we did on DriverX as much as we could, but we couldn't completely do it. But the other thing you can do to save money with this stuff is if you can edit in, with your camera original, and you can really, if you're shooting 4K, ProRes, 422, HQ, you could edit that in Premiere, or you can edit a proxy and then go back to your, go back and do the kind of conform pretty easily. I'm not a Premiere editor, so I may be wrong on this, but. you should be able to go back and create a QuickTime with the 4K ProRes. And if you can cut those shots, if you can do those pulls yourself, which it's not impossible to, you know, the editing system helps you do that, you can do those pulls and you can get those shots and you can cut them in yourself. If you can do that and then you're cutting those shots in and then you're sending your post house a single QuickTime with all the repositions, all the things that editors do that aren't visual effects, which is now just like every editor's doing repositions and speed changes and split edits and all kinds of stuff. Every editor's like doing all this stuff now. Some of those end up, sometimes those things become visual effects shots because they're, the Avid or whatever is it, can't be reproduced. But if you can do all of that in your Premiere timeline or Final Cut Pro, and then just send that to your post house, then the conform is done. That's the conform. Essentially, you can do that conform yourself and then you're not spending all that money. And then what they'll do is they'll do what's called a notch conform, where they take that single QuickTime that has all that stuff baked into it, not the color, the color isn't baked in, but all the repositions and those effect shots have all been cut in and baked in. and they'll just, they'll put it in Resolve, Resolve will cut it up into the shots, and then you can do your color correction in Resolve, and no conform, and we did a lot of that with DriverX because we didn't have the money, but then we still had to wait on shots, so it was a little bit of like, some of that was baked in, all the repositions and all that stuff were baked in, it was really the VFX shots that came, some of them that came later, that we had to cut in and do, you know, and then pay money to do the conform, but if you really don't have any money, you can do this stuff yourself. If you're not shooting raw and all this kind of stuff. I mean, I just, I never see the need for it. I mean, people, I'm sure there's gonna be somebody who'll tell me differently, but I've made a lot of movies. I've watched them on huge screens, in the biggest theaters, with audiences, and in 2K, in HD, essentially,

[Paul DeNigris]: 57:16

Mm-hmm.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 57:17

even though we shot in 4K. And they look pretty good to me. No one's complaining. So I'm not a big believer in, unless there's a real reason for a particular project or something, shooting with RAW or whatever. So.

[Paul DeNigris]: 57:35

Right, well, a lot of times independent filmmakers become very enamored of the gear and the number of pixels, and they spend their money on that, rather than spending it elsewhere, you know, creatively that can that can help them. It ultimately comes down to story, right? All of these things are tools to help us tell the story. And, you know, just hearing you talk about how much of the technical side of things you've incorporated into your workflow. It reminds me of a quote from Robert Rodriguez, who again is contemporary with the filmmakers that you mentioned earlier, like Kevin Smith and Darren Aronofsky. He said, “If you're just creative, you will always rely on technical people to help you execute your vision. But if you're creative and technical, you're unstoppable.” And I think every independent filmmaker needs to have that balance of creative and technical. Again, you don't have to master everything. You don't have to know every single thing there is to know about every technical aspect. But a little knowledge goes a long way in terms of your ability to communicate with your team. Because ultimately, that's what you're doing as an independent filmmaker, director, right? A director's job is to communicate, communicate your intent with your team, communicate your vision to the audience. It's to communicate your goals in terms of the narrative with your actors, with your writer... It's all about communication. And so you're literally working with one hand behind your back. If you don't have an understanding of at least a modicum of the tech stuff.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 59:08

Yeah, and I speak for all the old people, because if you're young, you're learning this stuff in high school and you're a whiz at all this stuff, but if you're an old person like me, you can learn it. And again, you don't have to know everything. There just shouldn't be big mysteries. There shouldn't be these black boxes. You avoid as many black boxes where you just go, I don't know what that is. And there's still a few black boxes for me, but I try to, and again, being forced into having to learn it is probably the best way to do it You don't have any other alternative, but to do it yourself or learn it yourself, that's usually a good way. And that's how I've learned a lot. I mean, I didn't know any editing system until DriverX. I didn't know how to, I mean, I knew iMovie, but I had to learn Final Cut Pro because we were editing in Final Cut Pro and there was stuff that had to be done and we couldn't pay people to do it and I learned Final Cut Pro. And now I know Final Cut Pro and I'm not a good editor, but it's helpful and I've used it to do like delivery stuff, like, you know, that's another area where, you know, if you can, you know, you can save money by just, you know, doing certain delivery things yourself, you know, if you can, if you know how to do some of that stuff, I mean, I've learned how to do a few of those things. I'd prefer not to, and I would prefer to pay somebody to do it, do it right. So, but yeah, I just, it's not impossible. And there's a lot of YouTube videos that'll help you along the way or what, or ripple training or whatever it is that can help you along the way learn that stuff.

[Paul DeNigris]: 1:00:38

YouTube can be the best film school in the world, right? If you know how to search and you know where to look and you watch reputable people who share their knowledge. You and I did not have YouTube growing up and coming up in the film industry. We had to teach ourselves and learn on the job and learn from our coworkers and our friends and all of that. And you know, the next generation of independent filmmakers, they have no excuse for not learning a lot of this tech stuff and being able to really, tackle it in a DIY way, but also knowing the limitations of their ability and knowing when to call in a colorist, knowing when to call in a sound person, knowing when to call in a cinematographer, knowing when to call in a visual effects person. You almost don't even, you don't know what you don't know, right? So learning a little bit about all of these different trades can really, really help you as an independent filmmaker.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 1:01:33

Yeah, I mean, you know, another thing I just always recommend when I'm teaching my classes for filmmakers is to make shorts. Don't spend a lot of money on shorts, but like think of shorts is just like your film school and, you know, shoot with whatever camera you have and whatever, whatever. But if you know you're, you're wanting to do a feature that has like visual effects in it, go... go make something with whatever camera and that applies some of those, some of those same kind of visual effects with your friends or whatever, that maybe no one needs to even see, but you know, you could put a little bit more into it, but don't spend a lot of money on it. But use it as kind of a way to practice as a proof of concept, proof of talent or whatever. And there's nothing, it's so easy to do that now with whatever, with an iPhone or whatever even, but I'm sure you've got some kind of a camera, and you can kind of practice these kind of techniques or whatever, you know, if someone like Paul's told you, well, this is kind of what how we would do that shot, you know, I mean, like out there, these shots on Kill Her that, you know, they're standard, like, this is how you do that kind of a shot, you know, we're running over someone's head, you know, there's a way to do that. Everybody kind of knows how to do that. Everybody that knows how to do it knows how to do that. It's not like we invented some new type of visual effect shot. I don't know how to do that. But Robyn and his editor and his DP, they've done that stuff before because they've worked together on music videos. So they knew how to set that shot up and do it right. And Robyn can kind of do that visual effect himself. And I mean, that's something that if I were a filmmaker, I would love to just play around. Because I don't know how to do some of those shots. I mean, I didn't pay attention enough. I was doing accounting or whatever on that movie. And I would love to and look at the shots and stuff and see, oh, we did this, and here's where the visual effects shot came in and just play with that myself. If I was gonna do that for real for myself as a director or whatever, I would love to just goof around and it'd be fun to do that. And if you know a little bit about a little editing software, you can do a lot of that stuff yourself. So to some degree.

[Paul DeNigris]: 1:03:44

Well, that's a great place to put a pin in this conversation. Thanks so much for your time and your expertise and your wisdom, Mark. I'm sure that the audience will really appreciate everything that you've shared today.

[Mark Stolaroff]: 1:03:55

Thank you, Paul. It's been my pleasure to be here.

[Paul DeNigris]: 1:03:58

Great, if people want to follow you on social media or reach out to you with a project maybe, how can they find you?

[Mark Stolaroff]: 1:04:07

Um, I've become terrible on social media now. Like I barely ever on it. Um, I mean, my handle on Twitter or whatever it's called now is Stolaroff, uh,@Stolaroff. I think it's at @Stolaroff, um, on, uh, Facebook as well. Um, uh, nobudgetfilmschool.com is my, is the website, but that, that like, I, that's kind of a dead website now. I mean, it's still up there. Um, but I haven't. I can't even really edit it anymore. I've been wanting to redo that website for a thousand years and I just haven't been able to do it. But, you know, if you do happen to bump into, you know, go on No Budget Film School and you subscribe, there is, you know, if I start doing these webinars again, they're all, almost all of them are free. I was really proud of the stuff I was doing during COVID. And I'm hoping to do some of those again when I get back to LA on a kind of full-time basis. And... And then my website, MarkStolaroff.com, has my contact information and stuff that I've done and some of the writing I've done over the years. I used to do a lot of writing. So a little bits on that website and some of it's on No Budget Film School.

[Paul DeNigris]: 1:05:21

Great. I'll include those in the show notes. And I encourage people to follow Mark and follow his career. He's got lots of cool stuff coming up. And I'm sure you'll hear more about projects that we collaborate on this show in the future. Thanks so much for watching and or listening. If you are watching the show on YouTube, please like, subscribe, leave us a comment, let us know what you liked, ask questions, give me feedback, tell me what you'd like to see on a future episode. I definitely want to hear from you. If you're listening on iTunes or Spotify or some other podcast aggregator, a follow, a star rating, and a review will go a long way towards helping us reach our audience. And if there's an independent filmmaker in your life who needs to hear this stuff, please send them the show. I think they'll benefit a lot from what my guest here, Mark, has shared. On behalf of everyone at Foxtrot X-Ray, I'm Paul DeNigris, and I thank you for your time and for watching the show. See you next time.