Social media has enabled interactions and collaborative projects unlike any platform ever before.

Today, YouTube are taking it to a whole new level with the project they call “Life in a Day”.

Life in a day is a global experiment to create a huge user-generated feature film, shot in a single day, by everyone in the world.

You have 24 hours to shoot footage of your everyday life. All the best submissions will be turned into a film produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.

Whatever they end up creating will premiere at the Sundance Film Festivalin January 2011.

Also, if your footage makes the film, you will be credited as a co-director. If that wasn’t cool enough, you could also possibly be one of 20 contributors brought to Sundance to celebrate with Kevin Macdonald. A great way to kick off that film making career!!

Here’s the official video all about the project:

Enter here …  “Life In A Day” Youtube page for the guidelines and steps to submit your video.

Now, go get filming.

Let’s start with looks first.

Like it or not, when people go to watch a movie, they like looking at people who look the part. Notice I didn’t say, look good. There are plenty of character actors out there who are less than handsome to say the least. However, they look the part. So, you want to look for people who, right off the bat, look the part. This will actually make up a lot for any lack of acting ability.

Then we have personality.

There are a lot of people out there who really can’t act all that great, but they have tons of personality. Maybe it’s in the way they smile, or the way they laugh or tell a joke. Maybe they’re great with one liners. Maybe they’re just naturally great talkers and interesting to listen to even when they’re just being themselves.

Ever watch some actors on talk shows? They’re not acting and yet they are so interesting to listen to speak. And then there are some who bore you to tears. You want to look for somebody with that personality where you can listen to them talk for hours.

You’ll know it as soon as you spot them.

When first starting out, you’re not going to have your pick of the best. However, by concentrating on finding somebody who looks the part and somebody who has a great personality, you can make up for a lot of acting flaws.

See you soon with more.

Here’s a film shot and edited entirely with an iPhone 4 shows just how powerful Apple’s new iDevice can be, especially in the hands of a pro. At the same time, however, we think that it might inspire many an aspiring filmmaker.

The name of this short film is Apple of My Eye, and it was directed by a guy called Michael Koerbel (with the help of talented friends and family) and some pretty nifty model trains.

Hope it inspires you guys to have a go too and the biggest lesson here is to never blame your equipment!

Thing is, most beginning filmmakers don’t have the experience or the skills to pull something like this off and they end up with a disaster.

So, what you want to do, when first starting out, is make the film shorter than you actually want to make it. Leave the audience wanting more…even a sequel. In fact, you might want to leave the ending of the movie open ended so that it lends itself to a sequel. You can never give the audience too little, but you can give them too much.

What you should do is map out your whole movie ahead of time with storyboards.

For example, let’s take this murder mystery.

1. Murder is committed.
2. Police arrive on scene.
3. Investigation begins.
4. Suspects are questioned.
5. Clues begin to surface.
6. Hint of who murderer is surfaces.
7. Final clue reveals murderer.
8. Murderer is hunted and caught.

It’s basic, but you get the idea. Then, after you have your storyboard designed, you fill in the pieces as sparsely as possible. Don’t drag things out.

If you find your storyboard is pages long, then your movie is probably way too long to begin with. Storyboards should be relatively short and simple.

Think Hitchcock.

For more ideas, check out this Film Making Course…

You can breathe the air for free but that’s about it. Point is, it costs some money to make a movie.

Now, having said that, we live in some great times. Technology has made it so that we can make movies for under $200. Digital movie cameras today are very cheap and the software, even cheaper. In fact, some of the software you can get for free.

Point is, you don’t want to start making your movie without a budget. You need to sit down and figure out what you need and how much it’s going to cost. See, here is what’s going to happen if you don’t do this. What follows is a very simplified example but I am sure it will get the point across.

Let’s say you want to make your first movie and don’t give any consideration to budget or cost. You run out and buy the cheapest digital video camera that you can find and start shooting your movie. Great…now what?

Well, you later find out that because you bought a cheap camera, it doesn’t have certain features that allow easy downloading to PC. So you have to buy some kind of accessory to do this. You later find out that the movie format is only compatible with certain kinds of software that is VERY expensive.

Do you see where I am going with this?

By trying to take the cheap, quick, and easy way out, you can end up spending more money than you would have spent if you planned everything out in advance. That way, you would have gotten a video camera that is compatible with all kinds of software, even free software, and without the need for other accessories.

There is an old saying… haste makes waste.

That’s especially true with making movies.

For more ideas, check out this Film Making Course…

Let me ask you a question. Let’s say you went to a person’s house and he started telling you about his trip to the supermarket. He started it something like this.

“I went to my local ShopRite to buy some food. First, I went down the produce lane and got some bananas and oranges. Then I went to the bread aisle and picked up a loaf of whole wheat.”

And this went on and on and on through his entire shopping experience. Wouldn’t you be bored to tears? Would you even want to hear about his whole shopping experience? If you went to a movie and the movie itself was JUST like this, wouldn’t you get up and walk out?

Okay, let’s take the same premise, going shopping, but add a little twist to it that makes the story worth telling. What if the person started his story like this.

“Did I ever tell you about the time when I went to the supermarket to buy a loaf a bread and came home a multi millionaire?”

Do you not think that you’d be intrigued enough to at least want to find out how this person goes to the store to by bread and comes home a multi millionaire? I know I’d want to hear every last detail, especially if they are nice and juicy.

Okay, so right there, we have a story worth telling. That doesn’t mean we can’t screw up the telling of the story itself, but at least we have something to start with that has a lot of potential.

You MUST have something to tell that is going to get people interested or there is no point in telling it.

At the very least, please check out his site and see what he has to offer. Yes, I do get compensated if you purchase this course from me, but

For more ideas, check out this Film Making Course…

No Budget Film Making is just that… for people who are dead broke or close to it. I’m not talking about trying to make a film the likes of George Lucas. I’m talking about just trying to make an amateur production without going broke in the process. Today…nothing is cheap.

Well, this course is a must have for anybody who is looking to do the near impossible in an incredibly competitive industry. So let’s get to exactly what comes with No Budget Film Making.

First of all, one of the best things about this product is that it comes with free software for making your own films. You won’t have to shell out hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for post production expenses. The software alone makes this product worth the price. But it doesn’t end there.

The author of the book, learned his craft from film school…something in which he admits was overpriced and didn’t do the job it should have. So he took that training to the next level and is practically giving it away in this course. I’m sure the film school he went to isn’t happy about that.

In this course you’ll get the following:

• Advice from actual working professionals in the business.
• Essential movie making forms and contracts.
• A guide on how to break into Hollywood as a screenwriter.
• And everything that the author learned in film school.

So you understand what you’re actually getting here, a low end film school (the bottom of the barrel) costs about $8,000.

I won’t even go into what the elite schools cost.

In short, this product is beyond a steal. I’m not saying it’s going to turn you into a David Lynch (you need to supply some talent) but it WILL give you all the fundamentals that YOU will need to take your talent as far as it will go.

At the very least, please check out his site and see what he has to offer. Yes, I do get compensated if you purchase this course from me, but that compensation goes towards allowing me to review products that are really worth getting.