I’ve just come out of an epic meeting that lasted five hours. All about harnessing the possibilities of the internet for marketing, raising financing, finding cast and crew, preproduction, production, post-production and distribution of films – in essence it was all about getting a strategy together for hopefully what will turn out to be my next three feature films!

Up until three months ago, I had never heard of crowd-sourcing or brand entertainment or web 2.0 or any other buzz words that are being bandied about at the moment. I was still stuck in the “old school” of film-making – you make a film, you give it to a sales agent, they take it to one of the film markets, a distributor comes along and buys it and you get given some money and then you go on to make your next film.

But it didn’t work like that for Credo – even though we had a sales agent who took it to market and sure enough, distributors came along and bought it. But the “you get given some money and then you go on to make your next film….” part. Well, as I’m learning, I don’t think film-making works like that anymore, as least not as an indie film-maker. The finance world has changed and the financing models have changed, the budgets we had for our films just aren’t viable anymore.

Welcome to the new school of indie film-making, where there are no rules, where things move on so quickly that you’re running to keep up but where you are in charge of your own destiny. And I love it.